Committed

by Elizabeth Gilbert

MARRIAGE IS A FRIENDSHIP RECOGNIZED BY THE POLICE. —Robert Louis Stevenson

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famous prayer of the fourteenth-century mystic Juliana of Norwich (“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”),

Prayer

destiny had intervened and was demanding marriage from me, and I’d learned enough from life’s experiences to understand that destiny’s interventions can sometimes be read as invitations for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn’t take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity.

Destinys invitations

A MAN CAN BE HAPPY WITH ANY WOMAN AS LONG AS HE DOES NOT LOVE HER. —Oscar Wilde

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In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more intensely personal, after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are. So if you ask any typical modern Western woman how she met her husband, when she met her husband, and why she fell in love with her husband, you can be plenty sure that you will be told a complete, complex, and deeply personal narrative which that woman has not only spun carefully around the entire experience, but which she has memorized, internalized, and scrutinized for clues as to her own selfhood. Moreover, she will more than likely share this story with you quite openly—even if you are a perfect stranger. In fact, I have found over the years that the question “How did you meet your husband?” is one of the best conversational icebreakers ever invented. In my experience, it doesn’t even matter whether that woman’s marriage has been happy or a disaster: It will still be relayed to you as a vitally important story about her emotional being—perhaps even the most vitally important story about her emotional being. Whoever that modern Western woman is, I can promise you that her story will concern two people—herself and her spouse—who, like ch...

Ceremony

I did not see a group of women sitting around weaving overexamined myths and cautionary tales about their marriages. The reason I found this so notable was that I have watched women all over the world weave overexamined myths and cautionary tales about their marriages, in all sorts of mixed company, and at the slightest provocation. But the Hmong ladies did not seem remotely interested in doing that. Nor did I see these Hmong women crafting the character of “the husband” into either the hero or the villain in some vast, complex, and epic Story of the Emotional Self. I’m not saying that these women don’t love their husbands, or that they never had loved them, or that they never could. That would be a ridiculous thing to infer, because people everywhere love each other and always have. Romantic love is a universal human experience. Evidence of passion exists in all corners of this world. All human cultures have love songs and love charms and love prayers. People’s hearts get broken across every possible social, religious, gender, age, and cultural boundary.

Weaving over-examined myths & cautionary tales

“Plant an expectation; reap a disappointment.”

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By contrast, I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love? I, for one, had always been taught by my culture that marriage ought to be a fertile greenhouse in which romantic love can abundantly flourish.

Pursuit of profound, soaring happiness

I’m not willing—or probably even able—to relinquish my life of individualistic yearnings, all of which are the birthright of my modernity. Like most human beings, once I’ve been shown the options, I will always opt for more choices for my life: expressive choices, individualistic choices, inscrutable and indefensible and sometimes risky choices, perhaps . . . but they will all be mine.

Individualistic yearnings

Compulsive comparing, of course, only leads to debilitating cases of what Nietzsche called Lebensneid, or “life envy”: the certainty that somebody else is much luckier than you, and that if only you had her body, her husband, her children, her job, everything would be easy and wonderful and happy. (A therapist friend of mine defines this problem simply as “the condition by which all of my single patients secretly long to be married, and all of my married patients secretly long to be single.”) With certainty so difficult to achieve, everyone’s decisions become an indictment of everyone else’s decisions, and because there is no universal model anymore for what makes “a good man” or “a good woman,” one must almost earn a personal merit badge in emotional orientation and navigation in order to find one’s way through life anymore. All these choices and all this longing can create a weird kind of haunting in our lives—as though the ghosts of all our other, unchosen, possibilities linger forever in a shadow world around us, continuously asking, “Are you certain this is what you really wanted?” And nowhere does that question risk haunting us more than in our marriages, precisely because the emotional stakes of that most intensely personal choice have become so huge.

Compulsive comparing leads to debilitating “life envy” (lebensneid)

I cannot quite bring myself to make an official motto out of “Ask for less!” Nor can I imagine advising a young woman on the eve of her marriage to lower her expectations in life in order to be happy. Such thinking runs contrary to every modern teaching I’ve ever absorbed. Also, I’ve seen this tactic backfire. I had a friend from college who deliberately narrowed down her life’s options, as though to vaccinate herself against overly ambitious expectations. She skipped a career and ignored the lure of travel to instead move back home and marry her high school sweetheart. With unwavering confidence, she announced that she would become “only” a wife and mother. The simplicity of this arrangement felt utterly safe to her—certainly compared to the convulsions of indecision that so many of her more ambitious peers (myself included) were suffering. But when her husband left her twelve years later for a younger woman, my friend’s rage and sense of betrayal were as ferocious as anything I’ve ever seen. She virtually imploded with resentment—not so much against her husband, but against the universe, which she perceived to have broken a sacred contract with her. “I asked for so little!” she kept saying, as though her diminished demands alone should have protected her against any disappointments. But I think she was mistaken; she had actually asked for a lot. She had dared to ask for happiness, and she had dared to expect that happiness out of her marriage. You can’t possibly ask for ...

Ask for less

I, too, ask for an awful lot. Of course I do. It’s the emblem of our times. I have been allowed to expect great things in life. I have been permitted to expect far more out of the experience of love and living than most other women in history were ever permitted to ask. When it comes to questions of intimacy, I want many things from my man, and I want them all simultaneously. It reminds me of a story my sister once told me, about an Englishwoman who visited the United States in the winter of 1919 and who, scandalized, reported back home in a letter that there were people in this curious country of America who actually lived with the expectation that every part of their bodies should be warm at the same time!

Ask for a lot

Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.

All expectations and hopes pinned to a single relationship

The legacy of coverture lingered in Western civilization for many more centuries than it ought to have, clinging to life in the margins of dusty old law books, and always linked to conservative assumptions about the proper role of a wife. It wasn’t until the year 1975, for instance, that the married women of Connecticut—including my own mother—were legally allowed to take out loans or open checking accounts without the written permission of their husbands. It wasn’t until 1984 that the state of New York overturned an ugly legal notion called “the marital rape exemption,” which had previously permitted a man to do anything he liked sexually to his wife, no matter how violent or coercive, since her body belonged to him—since, in effect, she was him. There’s one particular example of coverture’s legacy which—given my circumstances—touches me most of all. The fact is, I was lucky that the United States government was even considering allowing me to marry Felipe without forcing me to renounce my own nationality in the process. In 1907, a law was passed by the United States Congress stating that any natural-born American woman who married a foreign-born man would have to surrender her American citizenship upon her marriage and automatically become a citizen of her husband’s nation—whether she wanted to or not. Though the courts conceded that this was unpleasant, they maintained for many years that it was necessary. As the Supreme Court ruled on the matter, if you were to permit ...

Coverture

One of my personal hero-couples of the marital freedom movement were a pair named Lillian Harman and Edwin Walker, of the great state of Kansas circa 1887. Lillian was a suffragette and the daughter of a noted anarchist; Edwin was a progressive journalist and feminist sympathizer. They were made for each other. When they fell in love and decided to seal their relationship, they visited neither minister nor judge, but entered instead into what they called an “autonomistic marriage.” They created their own wedding vows, speaking during the ceremony about the absolute privacy of their union, and swearing that Edwin would not dominate his wife in any way, nor would she take his name. Moreover, Lillian refused to swear eternal loyalty to Edwin, but stated firmly that she would “make no promises that it may become impossible or immoral for me to fulfill, but retain the right to act always as my conscience and best judgment shall dictate.” It goes without saying that Lillian and Edwin were arrested for this flouting of convention—and on their wedding night, no less. (What is it about arresting people in their beds that always signals a new era in marriage history?) The pair were charged with failure to respect license and ceremony, with one judge stating that “the union between E.C. Walker and Lillian Harman is no marriage, and they deserve all the punishment which has been inflicted upon them.” But the toothpaste was already out of the tube. Because what Lillian and Edwin wanted...

Ceremony

Everywhere, in every single society, all across the world, all across time, whenever a conservative culture of arranged marriage is replaced by an expressive culture of people choosing their own partners based on love, divorce rates will immediately begin to skyrocket. You can set your clock to it. (It’s happening in India right now, for instance, even as we speak.)

Why do I need this man at all? I need him only because I happen to adore him, because his company brings me gladness and comfort, and because, as a friend’s grandfather once put it, “Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.”

Ceremony

BE OF LOVE (A LITTLE)/ MORE CAREFUL/ THAN OF EVERYTHING —e.e. cummings

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The Buddha taught that all human suffering is rooted in desire. Don’t we all know this to be true? Any of us who have ever desired something and then didn’t get it (or, worse, got it and subsequently lost it) know full well the suffering of which the Buddha spoke. Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause you a lacerating injury. All you know is that you must obtain the object of your desire by any means necessary, and then never be parted. All you can think about is your beloved. Lost in such primal urgency, you no longer completely own yourself. You have become an indentured servant to your own yearnings.

Desire and suffering

Much like the early Christian fathers, the Buddha taught that only the celibate and the solitary can find enlightenment. Therefore, traditional Buddhism has always been somewhat suspicious of marriage. The Buddhist path is a journey of nonattachment, and marriage is an estate that brings an intrinsic sense of attachment to spouse, children, and home. The journey to enlightenment begins by walking away from all that. There does exist a role for married people in traditional Buddhist culture, but it’s more of a supporting role than anything else. The Buddha referred to married people as “householders.” He even gave clear instructions as to how one should be a good householder: Be nice to your spouse, be honest, be faithful, give alms to the poor, buy some insurance against fire and flood . . . I’m dead serious: The Buddha literally advised married couples to buy property insurance. Not quite as exciting a path as parting the veil of illusion and standing on the shimmering threshold of untarnished perfection, now is it? But as far as the Buddha was concerned, enlightenment was simply not available to householders. In this way, again, he resembled the early Christian fathers, who believed that spousal attachment was nothing but an obstacle to heaven—which does lead one to start pondering exactly what these enlightened beings had against couplehood anyhow. Why all the hostility toward romantic and sexual union, or even toward steadfast marriage? Why all the resistance to love? ...

Aristophanes myth of 8limbed two headed humans, perfect union leading to complacency in worship and angry gods

Anybody going through a difficult time emotionally—due to the death of a family member, perhaps, or the loss of a job—is also susceptible to unstable love. The sick and the wounded and the frightened are famously vulnerable to sudden love, too—which helps explain why so many battle-torn soldiers marry their nurses. Spouses with relationships in crisis are also prime candidates for infatuation with a new lover, as I can personally attest from the mad commotion that surrounded the end of my own first marriage—when I had the good, solid judgment to go out in the world and fall quite insanely in love with another man at the very same moment as I was leaving my husband. My great unhappiness and my shredded sense of self made me ripe for the plucking of infatuation, and boy, did I get plucked. In my situation (and from what I know now, it is a tediously common textbook example), my new love interest seemed to have a giant EXIT sign hanging over his head—and I dived right through that exit, using the love affair as an excuse to escape my collapsing marriage, then claiming with an almost hysterical certainty that this person was everything I truly needed in life. Shocking how that didn’t work out. The problem with infatuation, of course, is that it’s a mirage, a trick of the eye—indeed, a trick of the endocrine system. Infatuation is not quite the same thing as love; it’s more like love’s shady second cousin who’s always borrowing money and can’t hold down a job. When you become i...

Real, sane, mature love—the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school—is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect. And the word “respect,” from the Latin respicere (“to gaze at”), suggests that you can actually see the person who is standing next to you, something you absolutely cannot do from within the swirling mists of romantic delusion. Reality exits the stage the moment that infatuation enters, and we might soon find ourselves doing all sorts of crazy things that we would never have considered doing in a sane state.

Respect-respicere to gaze at

When the dust has settled years later, we might ask ourselves, “What was I thinking?” and the answer is usually: You weren’t. Psychologists call that state of deluded madness “narcissistic love.” I call it “my twenties.” Listen, I want to make it clear here that I am not intrinsically against passion. Mercy, no! The single most exhilarating sensations I have ever experienced in my life happened when I was consumed by romantic obsession. That kind of love makes you feel superheroic, mythical, beyond human, immortal. You radiate life; you need no sleep; your beloved fills your lungs like oxygen. As painfully as those experiences may have turned out in the end (and they always did end in pain for me), I would hate to see someone go through an entire lifetime never knowing what it feels like to morph euphorically into another person’s being.

Narcissistic love

Falling in love at first sight became a particular specialty of mine in my late teens and early twenties; I could do it upwards of four times a year. There were occasions when I made myself so sick over romance that I lost whole chunks of my life to it. I would vanish into abandon at the beginning of the encounter but soon enough find myself sobbing and barfing at the end of it. Along the way I would lose so much sleep and so much sanity that parts of the whole process start to look, in retrospect, like an alcoholic blackout. Except without the alcohol.

I did not invite Wisdom or Prudence to my wedding. (In my defense, nor were they guests of the groom.) I was a careless girl back then, in every possible way. I once read a newspaper article about a man who caused thousands of acres of forest to burn down because he drove all day through a national park with his muffler dragging, causing explosive sparks to leap into the dry underbrush and set a new small fire every few hundred feet. Other motorists along the way kept honking and waving and trying to alert the driver’s attention to the damage he was causing, but the guy was happily listening to his radio and didn’t notice the catastrophe he had set in motion behind him. That was me in my youth.

The Quaker teacher Parker Palmer once said of his own life that depression was a friend sent to save him from the exaggerated elevations of false euphoria that he’d been manufacturing forever. Depression pushed him back down to earth, Palmer said, back down to a level where it might finally be safe for him to walk and stand in reality. I, too, needed to be hauled down to the real after years spent artificially hoisting myself aloft with one thoughtless passion after another. I’ve come to see my season of depression, too, as having been essential—if also grim and sorrowful. I used that time alone to study myself, to truthfully answer painful questions, and—with the help of a patient therapist—to work out the origins of my most destructive behaviors. I traveled (and veered away from handsome Spanish men in bus terminals). I diligently pursued healthier forms of joy. I spent a lot of time alone. I’d never been alone before, but I mapped my way through it. I learned how to pray, atoning as best I could for the burned wasteland behind me. Most of all, though, I practiced the novel art of self-comfort, resisting all fleeting romantic and sexual temptations with this newly adult question: “Will this choice be beneficial to anybody in the long term?” In short: I grew up.

Quaker teacher on depression and euphoria

Immanuel Kant believed that we humans, because we are so emotionally complex, go through two puberties in life. The first puberty is when our bodies become mature enough for sex; the second puberty is when our minds become mature enough for sex. The two events can be separated by many, many years, though I do wonder if perhaps our emotional maturity comes to us only through the experiences and lessons of our youthful romantic failures. To ask a twenty-year-old girl to somehow automatically know things about life that most forty-year-old women needed decades to understand is expecting an awful lot of wisdom from a very young person. Maybe we must all go through the anguish and errors of a first puberty, in other words, before any of us can ascend into the second one?

Immanuel Kant and two “puberties” one of body and one of mind

So, yes, my love affair with Felipe had a wonderful element of romance to it, which I will always cherish. But it was not an infatuation, and here’s how I can tell: because I did not demand that he become my Great Emancipator or my Source of All Life, nor did I immediately vanish into that man’s chest cavity like a twisted, unrecognizable, parasitical homunculus. During our long period of courtship, I remained intact within my own personality, and I allowed myself to meet Felipe for who he was. In each other’s eyes, we may very well have seemed beautiful and perfect and heroic beyond measure, but I never lost sight of our actual realities:

We were two nice enough people, bearing the wounds of some very average massive personal disappointments, and we were looking for something that might simply be possible in each other—a certain kindness, a certain attentiveness, a certain shared yearning to trust and be trusted.

To this day, I refuse to burden Felipe with the tremendous responsibility of somehow completing me. By this point in my life I have figured out that he cannot complete me, even if he wanted to. I’ve faced enough of my own incompletions to recognize that they belong solely to me. Having learned this essential truth, I can actually tell now where I end and where somebody else begins. That may sound like an embarrassingly simple trick, but I do need to make clear that it took me over three and a half decades to get to this point—to learn the limitations of sane human intimacy, as nicely defined by C. S. Lewis, when he wrote of his wife, “We both knew this: I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine.” One plus one, in other words, is sometimes supposed to equal two.

how do I know for certain that I will never again become infatuated with anybody else? How trustworthy is my heart? How solid is Felipe’s loyalty to me? How do I know without doubt that outside desires won’t tempt us apart? These were the questions that I started asking myself as soon as I realized that Felipe and I were—as my sister calls us—“lifers.” To be honest, I was less worried about his loyalties than I was about my own. Felipe has a far simpler history in love than I do. He is a hopeless monogamist who chooses somebody and then relaxes easily into fidelity, and that’s pretty much it. He’s faithful in every regard. Once he has a favorite restaurant, he’s happy to eat there every night, never craving variety. If he enjoys a movie, he’ll contentedly watch it hundreds of times. If he likes an item of clothing, you will see him wearing it for years. The first time I ever bought him a pair of shoes, he said quite sweetly, “Oh, that’s lovely of you, darling—but I already have a pair of shoes.”

There’s a theory within evolutionary scholarship these days suggesting that there are two sorts of men in this world: those who are meant to father children, and those who are meant to raise children. The former are promiscuous; the latter are constant. This is the famous “Dads or Cads” theory. In evolutionary circles this is not considered a moral judgment call, but rather something that can actually be broken down to the level of DNA. Apparently, there is this critical little chemical variation in the male of the species called the “vasopressin receptor gene.” Men who have the vasopressin receptor gene tend to be trustworthy and reliable sexual partners, sticking with one spouse for decades, raising children and running stable households. (Let’s call such guys “Harry Trumans.”) Men who lack the vasopressin receptor gene, on the other hand, are prone to dalliance and disloyalty, always needing to seek sexual variety elsewhere. (Let’s call such men “John F. Kennedys.”)

Some men evolved to father children vs others evolved for raising children

nothing is wrong with a married person launching a friendship outside of matrimony—so long as the “walls and windows” of the relationship remain in the correct places. It was Glass’s theory that every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world—that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets of your marriage. What often happens, though, during so-called harmless friendships, is that you begin sharing intimacies with your new friend that belong hidden within your marriage. You reveal secrets about yourself—your deepest yearnings and frustrations—and it feels good to be so exposed. You throw open a window where there really ought to be a solid, weight-bearing wall, and soon you find yourself spilling your secret heart with this new person. Not wanting your spouse to feel jealous, you keep the details of your new friendship hidden. In so doing, you have now created a problem: You have just built a wall between you and your spouse where there really ought to be free circulation of air and light. The entire architecture of your matrimonial intimacy has therefore been rearranged. Every old wall is now a giant picture window; every old window is now boarded up like a crack house. You have just established the perfect blueprint for infidelity without even noticing. So by the time your...

Though the human heart may indeed be shot through with bottomless desire, and while the world may well be full of alluring creatures and other delicious options, it seems one truly can make clear-eyed choices that limit and manage the risk of infatuation. And if you’re worried about future “trouble” in your marriage, it’s good to understand that trouble is not necessarily something that always “just happens”; trouble is often cultured unthinkingly in careless little petri dishes we have left scattered all over town.

While drafting a prenup might not sound like a particularly romantic way to spend the months leading up to one’s marriage, I must ask you to believe me when I say that we shared some truly tender moments during these conversations—especially those moments when we would find ourselves arguing on behalf of the other person’s best interests. That said, there were also times when this process turned uncomfortable and tense. There was a real limit to how long we could discuss the subject at all, before we would need to take a break from it, change the subject, or even spend a few hours apart. Interestingly, a couple of years later, as Felipe and I were drafting our wills together, we encountered this exact same problem—an exhaustion of the heart that kept driving us away from the table. It’s dreary work, planning for the worst. And in both cases, with both the wills and the prenup, I lost track of how many times we each uttered the phrase “God forbid.” We stayed with the task, though, and got our prenuptial agreement written under terms that made each of us happy. Or maybe “happy” isn’t exactly the right word to use when you’re conceptualizing an emergency exit strategy for a love story that is still only at its beginning. Imagining the failure of love is a grim job, but we did it anyhow. We did it because marriage is not just a private love story but also a social and economic contract of the strictest order; if it weren’t, there wouldn’t be thousands of municipal, state, and ...

New research shows that some couples manage to dodge serious conflict for decades without any serious blowback. Such couples make an art form out of something called “mutually accommodating behavior”—delicately and studiously folding themselves inside out and backwards in order to avoid discord. This system, by the way, works only when both people have accommodating personalities. Needless to say, it is not a healthy marriage when one spouse is meekly compliant and the other is a domineering monster or an unrepentant harridan. But mutual meekness can make for a successful partnering strategy, if it’s what both people want. Conflict-averse couples prefer to let their grievances dissolve rather than fight over every point. From a spiritual standpoint, this idea appeals to me immensely. The Buddha taught that most problems—if only you give them enough time and space—will eventually wear themselves out. Then again, I’d been in relationships in the past where our troubles were never going to wear themselves out, not in five consecutive lifetimes, so what did I know about it?

Mutually accommodating behaviour

William Jordan wrote a small, lovely book called Divorce Among the Gulls, in which he explained that even among seagulls—a species of bird that allegedly mates for life—there exists a 25 percent “divorce rate.” Which is to say that one-quarter of all seagull couples fail in their first relationships—failing to the point that they must separate due to irreconcilable differences. Nobody can figure out why those particular birds don’t get along with each other, but clearly: They just don’t get along. They bicker and compete for food. They argue over who will build the nest. They argue over who will guard the eggs. They probably argue over navigation, too. Ultimately they fail to produce healthy chicks. (Why such contentious birds were ever attracted to each other in the first place, or why they didn’t listen to their friends’ warnings, is a mystery—but I suppose I’m hardly one to judge.) Anyhow, after a season or two of strife, those miserable seagull couples give up and go find themselves other spouses. And here’s the kicker: often their “second marriage” is perfectly happy, and then many of them do mate for life.

Even among birds with brains the size of camera batteries, there does exist such a thing as fundamental compatibility and incompatibility, which seems to be based—as Jordan explains—on “a bedrock of basic psycho-biological differences” which no scientist has yet been able to define. The birds are either capable of tolerating each other for many years, or they aren’t. It’s that simple, and it’s that complex. The situation is the same for humans. Some of us drive each other nuts; some of us do not. Maybe there’s a limit to what can be done about this. Emerson wrote that “we are not very much to blame for our bad marriages,” so maybe it stands to reason that we should also not be overly credited for our good ones. After all, doesn’t every romance begin in the same place—at that same intersection of affection and desire, where two strangers always meet to fall in love? So how can anyone at the beginning of a love story ever possibly anticipate what the years might bring? Some of it really has to be chalked up to chance. Yes, there is a certain amount of work involved in keeping any relationship together, but I know some very nice couples who put heaps of serious labor into saving their marriages only to end up divorced anyhow, while other couples—no intrinsically nicer or better than their neighbors—seem to hum along happily and trouble-free together for years, like self-cleaning ovens.

Rutgers University report called “Alone Together: How Marriage Is Changing in America,”

From what I could understand of the Rutgers report (and I’m sure I didn’t understand everything), it seemed that the researchers had discovered trends in “divorce proneness,” based on a certain number of hard demographic factors. Some couples are simply more likely to fail than others, to a degree that can be somewhat predicted. Some of these factors sounded familiar to me. We all know that people whose parents were divorced are more likely to someday divorce themselves—as though divorce breeds divorce—and examples of this are spread across generations. But other ideas were less familiar, and even reassuring. I’d always heard, for instance, that people who had divorced once were statistically more likely to also fail in their second marriage, but no—not necessarily. Encouragingly, the Rutgers survey demonstrates that many second marriages do last a lifetime. (As with seagull love affairs, some people make bad choices the first time, but do far better with a subsequent partner.) The problem comes when people carry unresolved destructive behaviors with them from one marriage to the next—such as alcoholism, compulsive gambling, mental illness, violence, or philandering. With baggage like that, it really doesn’t matter whom you marry, because you’re going to wreck that relationship eventually and inevitably, based on your own pathologies. Then there is the business of that infamous 50 percent divorce rate in America. We all know that classic statistic, don’t we? It gets tossed...

people whose parents were divorced are more likely to someday divorce themselves—as though divorce breeds divorce—and examples of this are spread across generations.

I’d always heard, for instance, that people who had divorced once were statistically more likely to also fail in their second marriage, but no—not necessarily. Encouragingly, the Rutgers survey demonstrates that many second marriages do last a lifetime.

when people carry unresolved destructive behaviors with them from one marriage to the next—such as alcoholism, compulsive gambling, mental illness, violence, or philandering. With baggage like that, it really doesn’t matter whom you marry, because you’re going to wreck that relationship eventually and inevitably, based on your own pathologies.

if only 6 percent of people who went on roller coaster rides damaged their middle ears, the public would be clamoring for action. Yet the most intimate of disasters . . . happens over and over again.” But that 50 percent figure is far more complicated

The age of the couple at the time of their marriage seems to be the most significant consideration. The younger you are when you get married, the more likely you are to divorce later. In fact, you are astonishingly more likely to get divorced if you marry young. You are, for example, two to three times more likely to get divorced if you marry in your teens or early twenties than if you wait until your thirties or forties. The reasons for this are so glaringly obvious that I hesitate to enumerate them for fear of insulting my reader, but here goes: When we are very young, we tend to be more irresponsible, less self-aware, more careless, and less economically stable than when we are older. Therefore, we should not get married when we are very young. This is why eighteen-year-old newlyweds do not have a 50 percent divorce rate; they have something closer to a 75 percent divorce rate, which totally blows the curve for everyone else. Age twenty-five seems to be the magic cutoff point. Couples who marry before that age are exceptionally more divorce-prone than couples who wait until they are twenty-six or older.

statistics get only more reassuring as the couple in question ages. Hold off on getting married until you’re in your fifties, and the odds of your ever ending up in a divor...

Education. The better-educated you are, statistically speaking, the better off your marriage will be. The better-educated a woman is, in particular, the happier her marriage will be. Women with college educations and careers who marry relatively late in life are the most likely female candidates to stay married.

Children. The statistics show that couples with young children at home report “more disenchantment” within their marriage than couples with grown children, or couples who have no children at all.

people who live together before marriage have a slightly higher divorce rate than those who wait until marriage to cohabit. The sociologists can’t quite figure this one out, except to wager a guess that perhaps premarital cohabitation indicates a more casual view in general toward sincere commitment.

Heterogamy. This factor depresses me, but here goes: The less similar you and your partner are in terms of race, age, religion, ethnicity, cultural background, and career, the more likely you are to someday divorce. Opposites do attract, but they don’t always endure.