Sandra Tsing Loh concluded her Atlantic article, “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” (via getmesomethingtoread):
Avoid marriage—or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love.
I believe this—and the whole article—is meant to be taken at face value, though a niggling voice at the back of my head warns that my irony receptors may be broken. And even if it’s serious, I would take the article with the same weight we take hung-over moralizing about the evils of alcohol. Vows to never drink again are easier to take seriously when you’re not visibly suffering from the previous night’s excess.
On the other hand, I’m hardly in a position do judge. I have never been married for twenty years. I’m not old enough. In that sense, I’m still the wet-behind-the-ears idealist. I would like to think that the next sixteen (or sixty) years of my marriage will be as wonderful as the first four years—but I’m no oracle. Maybe something happens to you when you turn forty. Or maybe twenty years is different from four in the same way that a marathon is different than a 5k. Ask again in a few decades. I’ll let you know how things are going. We’ll see if everything is as awesome then as it is now.
But even recognizing that a lot can happen in twenty years, three things strike me.
Firstly, twenty years. That’s not a number to simply dismiss. Were they a good twenty years? Clearly they didn’t end well—but however you cut it, that’s a long time. If a car’s engine dies after twenty years, we might say the engine ultimately failed—but we wouldn’t call the car a failure. If Google goes bankrupt on it’s 20th anniversary in 2016, we would hardly call it a failed company or say that its founders simply wasted their time. In the same way, a marriage that “fails” after twenty years is not necessarily a failure. Sure, I’d rather it lasted thirty, fifty, or (in my grandparents case) over seventy years. And we can certainly do better than 20 years. But let’s not pretend that nothing that ends is worth beginning. Did you have something more important to do with your life?
Secondly, the article seems to assume that when a culture of individualism and a culture of marriage conflict, individualism should win out. A successful marriage frequently meens sublimating your desires and expectations to the needs of the person you’re married to. If you need to put it in cost-benefit terms, the value of a successful marriage is far greater than the immediate fulfillment of frivolous desire. If you can put the person you love before yourself, this isn’t a particularly arduous requirement. Is it ridiculously cheesy to say that somebody else’s joy is worth going on a date you weren’t sure you would enjoy? Perhaps—but welcome to being in love. The marriage is not about you (singular), it is about you (plural).
Thirdly, what is there to be afraid of? Sure, marriages end. People make mistakes, get addicted to things, get hit on the head and become totally different people, or just die. Love demands everything. Marriage asks for your entire life. What is there to be afraid of? Sure, it’s all you’ve got—but if all you’ve got is a life where you have to hold love at arms length for fear of what will happen, what are you really giving up?
