"For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text."
And here:
"We make mistakes, too, because we are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate."
And here:
"Finally, we marry to make a nice feeling permanent. We imagine that marriage will help us to bottle the joy we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: Perhaps we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat, with the evening sun throwing glitter across the sea, chatting about aspects of our souls no one ever seemed to have grasped before, with the prospect of dinner in a risotto place a little later. We married to make such sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage."
Actually, none of this is untrue. There is no doubt that there are many marriages based on such internal and external circumstances. People, at times, tend to see the marriage through the lens of two philosophies: Romanticism or Utilitarianism. Sometimes, these two outlooks are meshed with one another and people find a way to make the practical infinitely romantic.
After presenting this problem, de Botton proceeds to offer a "solution" out of this bizarre and inevitable marital quagmire:
"This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage."
And again:
"The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition."
This is where the confusion ensues. De Botton tries to deal with the spiritual matters in a non-spiritual way. He wants pessimism (read: atheism) to be the salvation of the marriage, frankly a kind of "lowered expectations" way of life. To tolerate something is to truly dislike it. I can tolerate the neighbor's constant lawnmowing. To tolerate is to be so utterly annoyed, and ultimately bitter.
De Botton is a strange moralist. Stick it out, he says, but you're stuck forever. What he does is essentially present a psychoanalytical picture of marriage. Psychoanalysts are famous for reducing people to a bunch of "issues," "signs", and "signifiers." Certainly, there is no such thing as love, and we are kidding ourselves if we think so. And if there is no love, then one's partner is replaceable, and one certainly married him/her because of "mommy" or "daddy" issues. Definitely a possibility, but the problem here is that de Botton sees this as the reality.
Psychoanalysts (and perhaps a little bit here too, de Botton) take great pleasure at dismantling the sacred bond of marriage and engaging in all kinds of shock created statements. It is a form of perverse sadistic moralism, which is meant to put the person who disagrees with this philosophy on the defensive.
The problem here is that de Botton (and psychoanalysts) sees the pessimism as the beginning, middle, and end. There is nothing beyond, say, loneliness because there is no such thing as the interiority of spiritual life. If indeed this is your outlook, then you are asleep. You have not seen the human being that is in front of you clearly, and what's more, you have not seen your own self clearly either.
This is, I must admit, a strange article coming from de Botton. I have read a few of his books, and I liked them. But, granted, they did not focus on reality of intimacy and relation between people.
No, thanks. You may remain in the cave, staring at the wall, without any awareness of the possibility of being.
3 comments:
Are you being quite fair to de Botton?
"To tolerate differences with generosity" of course is most of all generosity to another Person, which seems altogether consonant with the injunction to hate the sin and love the sinner. To be sure we probably ought NOT equate the operation of even power mowers with the commission of sin (though like the miseries which afflicted Job it is nothing to celebrate).
Recently I discovered the nytimes obituary from five years ago of Harvard Law professor William Stuntz (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/us/21stuntz.html?referer=), and the law professor's personal example has kept me returning to what became, really, a deserved eulogy:
"Mr. Stuntz wrote extensively about the chronic pain he suffered after a back injury in 1999, saying he felt better after realizing it was futile to dream of being painless. 'Hopelessness turns out to be surprisingly good medicine,' he wrote. [So perhaps becoming reconciled to toleration only sounds like pessimism! —bc].
"He kept writing when he was dying of cancer, saying that he found hope in a single passage of the Book of Job. 'You will call and I will answer,' Job says. 'You will long for the creature your hands have made.'
"Mr. Stuntz wrote, 'The concept that God longs for the likes of me is so unbelievably sweet.'"
First and last there, good wisdom to remember. (Be well, Emina. For our sakes, keep writing!)
I read de Botton as opposing the kind of pie-in-the-sky romanticism that leads people to leave their spouses after years of marriage because marriage turned out not to "make them happy," or because their spouse turns out to be something other than the dream of a spouse they once had. Pessimism in this context is not atheism--it's the acknowledgement that we cannot and ought not expect fulfilment from anything human or earthly--and spouses are human, and (as Christ makes clear) marriage is earthly, even when it is sacramental. Toleration isn't necessarily barely-contained-abhorrence. Toleration can be mercy for the people around us, and mercy on ourselves.
Thanks for the comments, folks! :)
The way I look at it is that my husband and I don't tolerate each other. In other words, if something is wrong, you tell the person immediately. To tolerate, the way I define it, is to live a life of quiet desperation, until you blow up. And in marriage, this is not good. We are to be honest with each other. Now, of course, charity and love is the foundation of any marriage, and you don't pick your husband or wife apart for silly things. You should never pick them apart. But, to be honest with one another, that is the point here. And to be honest, certainly does not mean to have romanticism about one's partner. Quite the opposite of course.
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