Predicting marital success or failure.
The people described below have been disguised.
It has often been said that love is a necessary, but not sufficient, reason to get married. However, it is not necessary, and it is certainly not sufficient. Arranged marriages are common in different places around the world, as they have been throughout history. These couples may not have met each other before marrying, and no one pretends that they are in love. Yet, these marriages seem to do well enough. However, judging from the few arranged marriages I have seen up close in this country, they do not go smoothly. In our culture, arranged marriages are not encouraged, and, for that reason, there are subtle social stresses that act to pull the couple apart. For one thing, the roles of the husband and wife are likely to be defined differently here than they are in other places, such as Pakistan, for instance, or India. In this country, couples should probably not get married unless they are in love. Getting along after marriage is hard enough even when they are in love.
I read a study recently that purported to examine the brains of people romantically in love (using a PET scan, which indicates the activity level of different parts of the brain.) According to the investigators, two areas of the brain were affected. The pleasure center was lit up. No surprise there. That is why people write songs about being in love. The second area of the brain is ordinarily important in making judgments about other people. Activity in this brain center in couples in love was suppressed. No surprise there, either. That’s what “love is blind” means. Everyone has a friend or a sibling who seems inexplicably to have fallen in love with someone obviously beneath them. According to the same study, this brain state—which reflects romantic love—usually lasts about three years. That too seems to make sense. The romantic songs I was referring to talk about love lasting until the mountains crumble; but we all know better. Three years is long enough for couples to pair off and marry and have children. By that time a different kind of love ties couples together. And that kind of love does not have an expiration date.
People can fall in love pretty much with anyone. Getting married should involve a rational decision. It is possible to walk away from a relationship despite being in love. Someone should think twice, or three times, before marrying an alcoholic, or a compulsive gambler, or a philanderer. If such a sensible person turns away, someone else will come along. Typically, young people fall in love three or four times before settling down finally.
Having said that, I have learned not to tell people they should not marry a particular person. Most of the time, I cannot really know how that relationship will turn out. Even when it seems obvious to everyone that a particular marriage is doomed from the start, it may not be so.
Steve was 22 when he met Georgina, age 19, in a mental hospital. Steve, who was my patient, had already been admitted twice with acute episodes of paranoid schizophrenia. Both times he responded readily to drugs; and between episodes he did not show much evidence of his underlying illness. Georgina, as I remember, had been admitted for an acute depression. She was thought to be suicidal. They hit it off. Some months after they were discharged from the hospital, Steve told me that they were planning on getting married. I am in general circumspect about telling patients what to do (for one thing, they ignore me), and I had already learned to be modest about predicting how relationships between two people were likely to turn out; but I thought this time I was obligated to suggest that they put off their plans. I did not comment on the advisability of marrying someone one meets on a psychiatric ward. I had already known a number of couples who had met in that setting.
“Steve,” I said, “the two of you don’t really know each other very well. Neither one of you has a job. Both of you are young. Both of you have serious mental problems that you are just now starting to get ahold of. Why don’t you wait awhile? Maybe a year. Or maybe two years.”
I was not the only person to try to deter these two young people. Both of their families said the same thing, much more stridently; but it made no difference. They were married soon after. It was a small wedding at a clerk’s office. No one in either family was invited to attend.
After another three years, Steven was working, and Georgiana was at home with a small baby. They were both doing much better than anyone could have anticipated. Having each other to lean on had made a significant difference in their illnesses and in their lives.
Estelle was a third year student at a prestigious law school. She had always been successful; but she was one of those people who thought their success was a fluke, and that she would be discovered to be a fraud someday. Her low self-esteem was the reason she was in therapy. But she was in love, she told me, with a fellow student, who seemed to be in love with her. At the same time she was dating a very successful lawyer who had been in practice many years. Both men proposed to her. She accepted the older man, the one she did not love! I could not help waving my arms around.
“How in the world can you marry this guy,” I expostulated, “when you love the other one?”
“I know I won’t be any good as a lawyer, but I will always be recognized as the wife of a terrific lawyer.”
I complained that there was every reason to think she would be a good lawyer, the guy she loved was also going to be a good lawyer—and who cares anyway?
That was the only reason she gave, but as time went on, I realized the real reason. She thought she would not succeed at her marriage either. She did not care if her marriage to the older lawyer broke up, but she would feel terrible if she married the man she really wanted, and then he left her!
She and the older, successful lawyer had one of those weddings that was so expensive, they could have used the money to buy a house.
Still, they were together a few years later, when last I saw her; and she did not seem unhappy.
I met Mary when I was in Germany. She was the very attractive daughter of an army officer. She came to see me because she was phobic and had other assorted symptoms, which I don’t remember very well since it was a long time ago. But I remember that she was thirty-seven and desperate. She had not married. She thought that she would be humiliated if she had reached the age of thirty-eight, and she was still single. She preferred being married and, if necessary, divorced, but not single. That would be too awful. So she got engaged to the first two men who came along. Simultaneously.
I listened patiently while she explained to me the difficulties of being engaged to two men at the same time when all three of them did not live very far away from each other on army bases in Germany. For instance, the diamond ring she got from both of them had to be the same cut because she was afraid she would leave the ring on inadvertently when she went from one to the other. There were all the difficulties, you might imagine, of scheduling parties and dates.
I listened to what I thought was a bad joke as she told me about the two halls they were thinking of scheduling for the weddings. I had trouble taking the whole thing seriously, especially when she disappeared for a weekend to be with still a third man in case he turned out to be better. I did not start to get upset until she was within two weeks of marrying the first of her scheduled husbands.
“You have to turn one of these guys down! Probably you should turn both of them down, but YOU MUST TURN ONE OF THEM DOWN AND GIVE BACK HIS RING!
“Why do I have to give back the ring?”
Finally, she broke it off with the second man. All the arrangements were already made with the first wedding. If there was more of a reason for marrying the first guy, I never found out what it was.
She insisted that I come to the wedding. I demurred, explaining that psychiatrists did not do that kind of thing; but she begged me. I went. At least it was a chance for me to wear my dress blues, which the army made me buy, but which there was never any reason to wear.
I have never been at a wedding like that one. Half the people there were celebrating. The other half, her family, kept coming up to me (they knew I was her psychiatrist) and shaking their heads about how terrible the whole thing was.
Still, I ran into her in the States years later, and the marriage seemed to be working. More or less.
I have learned to be modest in predicting how couples will do. Sometimes when the relationship seems made in heaven, it falls apart; and sometimes when it seems no one in his right mind would encourage a couple to marry, it works out. (c) Fredric Neuman2012