The School of Life is an institute founded in 2008 by Alain de Botton, a philosopher and author. Located in various cities like London, Paris, Amsterdam, and others, the School is dedicated to enhancing emotional intelligence and understanding to improve people's lives. De Botton's work emphasizes the relevance of philosophy to everyday life, focusing on contemporary subjects and themes. Through his books and teachings, he seeks to address fundamental questions about how we live and navigate life's challenges. The School recently posted an article for all viewers on Marriage, from which I have shared excerpts. For the full article, and other works offered by the School, check their website; www.theschooloflife.com.
Our society typically devotes huge attention to the start of a marriage – and particularly to the actual wedding ceremony. But it’s the continuation of marriage that is – of course – the real challenge and here we are too often on our own. This essay is The School of Life’s guide to the rest of a life together, containing central ideas on how to make a relationship work over decades beyond the wedding day. It provides suggestions on coping with the challenges that any couple will face as they build a life together. The ideas presented are based on the premise that Love is ultimately not just a feeling, but a set of skills that have to be learned and then used throughout the marriage.
Pragmatic Realism
No one can ever disappoint and upset us as much as the person we marry – for of no one do we have higher hopes. The intensity of our frustrations reflects the scale of our expectations. A solution to our agitation and the bedrock of every good marriage therefore lies in a curious area: with a philosophy of (lightly-worn) pessimism, or what we might call pragmatic realism.
The only way to make a marriage work is – curiously – not to expect everything from it. Some of the happiest marriages have been between people who knew that they would, despite their best intentions, make each other a bit miserable sometimes.
There are deep-seated reasons why happiness will not always be present. Each partner’s character and mind is hugely complex and convoluted. We all had childhoods that left us less than ideally equipped to communicate honestly, to confront our awkward thoughts, to remain calm and to avoid sulking. A marriage forces a partner to play an unfeasible number of roles in one’s life: they must be a best friend, sexual companion, household manager, chauffeur, cook, accountant, perhaps co-parent, travel-mate… No wonder if we inevitably all fail at a few of these.
Expecting that there might be problems is not to wish that there would be some, nor does it mean bringing problems into existence. It simply means taking a few sensible precautions. If we suffer around our spouse at points, it won’t be a sign that our lives have gone wrong; rather that our relationship is revealing to us the beautifully complicated nature of true and lasting love.
Why We Married who we Married
Part of making a marriage work involves understanding why we picked our particular partner. There could have been quite a few others, after all. The standard answer is that we picked them because they were exceptionally well-suited to making us happy. The more complicated, psychotherapeutic answer is that we picked them because they felt familiar.
All of us look to re-create, within our adult relationships, some of feelings we knew well in childhood. That means care and tenderness of course, but very often, the love we tasted was blended with a few trickier dynamics: perhaps a bad temper, constant busyness, gloom, fickleness…
It’s almost inevitable (some argue "unconsciously chosen") that we’ve married someone who carries echoes of some of the faults of our parents (the unresolved issues we had with them) . Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be a catastrophe. We simply have to direct our efforts to changing the way we characteristically deal with the difficulties we are attracted to. The way we tend to approach them is in the manner of the children we once were. For example: we over personalize issues, we don’t explain our distress, we panic, we retreat into silence (we sometimes react to what was, instead of what is). We go in for attention-seeking antics.
But there is an opportunity to move from a child to an adult pattern of response to our partner’s most challenging sides. There is a properly grown up – less agitated, less fragile – way of handling them that would solve the problem of having married (as we all do) a fascinatingly complicated person.
The Partner-as-Child
It can seem like an insult to think of one’s partner as being in certain ways like a child. They’ve got a job and a credit card and can drive a car. But there’s a powerful motive for adopting this strange-sounding stance.
We’re noticeably patient and forgiving around children. They might tip the pasta we’ve nicely prepared on the floor, but we don’t shout. They say it’s our fault when the blades snap off their toy helicopter – and we tease them kindly for their condemnation. They have a tantrum because it’s bedtime, but we don’t get too worried because we understand they’re tired or teething or frazzled after an emotionally taxing morning at kindergarten. We soothe, we distract, we calmly try another tactic. Our ego stays intact.
How different to what typically happens when our partners frustrate us. Here, in a heartbeat, we shout, suspect, complain. If we were to regard our partner as a young child  however, the mood might soften. This isn’t condescending. We’re tapping into a constructive way of interpreting the less lovely elements of someone’s character and conduct. We’re seeing them not simply as rational, sophisticated adults who – from sheer malice and selfishness – are behaving badly. Instead we’re recognising how vulnerable they are to hunger, tiredness and their own griefs, anxieties and regrets.
We are so alive to the idea that it’s patronizing to be thought of as younger than we are; we forget that it is also, at times, the greatest privilege for someone to look beyond our adult self in order to engage with – and forgive – the disappointed, furious, inarticulate or wounded child within. We should take care to pin to the fridge door a picture of our partner at the age of three or four, looking especially endearing, and glance over at it at moments of crisis.
Being a Good Student
We’re often encouraged to believe that someone who truly loves us should approve of everything about us, should love us (as we put it) for who we ‘really are’. This is folly.
It is incumbent upon us as a loving partner to accept that our partner may legitimately want to teach us how to become a better version of ourselves. Unfortunately, many of us, at the first sign that the other is adopting a pedagogical tone (maybe pointing out something that we said rather too loudly at dinner, or mentioning a habit that is cropping up again at work), tend to assume that we are being ‘attacked’ and betrayed – and therefore close our ears to instruction, reacting with sarcasm and aggression to the teacher.
We should stop judging these attempts at instruction so harshly. Rather than reading every lesson as an assault on our whole being, as a sign we are about to be abandoned or humiliated, we should take it for what it is: an indication that our partner cares about us and cares about our relationship– even if they aren’t yet breaking the news perfectly (our friends are less critical not because they’re nicer, but because they don’t need to bother: they get to leave us behind after spending a few hours in a restaurant with us, although some true friends will give it to us straight).
Sex in Marriage
Sex is meant to be wonderful, of course. It might have been for a while a driving force in the relationship. Furthermore, our culture is endlessly promoting the idea that great sex is the primary sign of closeness. ‘They haven’t had sex for a while’ is taken to be the leading sign of the death of love.
Yet a more accurate account of human sexuality would normalize the sorrows that almost inevitably attach themselves to sex in marriage. It is almost impossible to be married and, in the long-term, enjoy an extraordinary sex life. There are deep-seated reasons for this. Relationships naturally become very complex arenas of compromise and negotiation; we have to be circumspect, and careful, we have to measure our words and reign in our feelings. However, sex ideally demands the opposite: an uncensored, carefree version of ourselves. It’s hard to submit to being harshly taken by the person you’ve just been disagreeing with about a utility bill. It’s awkward to revel in calling one’s partner rude words when you’ve recently been rather prickly that they didn’t display enough sympathy around your mother’s broken ankle.
The very forces that keep a good enough relationship going – patience, kindness, compromise, biting one’s tongue – work systematically against the raw drama of sex. The waning of sex is – far more than we collectively admit – a sign that a marriage is stabilizing, not failing. If we more publicly admitted this, we’d be less panicked, less ashamed and a little less resentful when the sex got less intense and less frequent. And we’d be less haunted by an unreal, secret tantalizing idea: that is could all be so different with someone else. It wouldn’t be. The fault isn’t us or our partner: our condition is mostly the strange, necessary price of genuinely sharing a life.
Reading Side-by-Side in Bed
For once we’ve taken an early night. Even if it’s just for a little while, we’re side by side, each absorbed in a different world. One of us might be in a submarine beneath the arctic ice floe, the other is flitting through the salons of 18th century Paris, but our toes touch every so often, we stretch a hand back to briefly massage the nape of our partner’s neck before turning a page.
It’s very nice – modest, comfortable and rather sweet. We’re not in the midst of a heart to heart conversation, we’re not engaged in passionate sex, we’re not celebrating each other’s triumphs or heading to the airport for an exciting mini-break. But reading in bed together represents a major achievement. There’s not really anyone else we could do it with.
When we think of what marriage is for, we don’t often think of the small pleasures like this: buying a cheap old vase at a market and a few flowers on the way home; sitting on the floor together and sorting the socks after the wash; watching a TV drama together episode by episode; rinsing and drying the glasses when the friends who came round to dinner have left; assembling a flat pack bookcase and realizing you’ve both got the instructions wrong and that it doesn’t matter.
A marriage will inevitably contain serious problems – because two complicated, independent people can’t join their lives without friction. We tend to be more aware of the troubles than of the pleasures. Not because the pleasures aren’t there but because we don’t always see what an impressive and important element they really are. We take them for granted, we don’t properly appreciate their uniqueness. It may lack glamour, but being able to read in bed together is a major feat; and a sign of deep love. We may be doing better than we think.
Marriage Therapy
Marriage therapy looks like something we could only be interested in when a relationship is failing; in fact, it is the single greatest tool that can help to prevent it from doing so.
Marriage therapy works its magic because it is a safe forum in which to discuss issues that, when handled by the couple alone, can too easily spin into ill-temper and recrimination. The feeling that we haven’t been heard in too long is what prevents us from listening. But in a consulting room, a good therapist becomes the wise broker, allowing each person to have their say, empathizing with both parties, while taking neither of their sides. Therapy becomes a safe diplomatic back channel, away from the conflictual atmosphere of domestic life. The therapist can help the couple to see that behind one person’s rage is pain and a history of despair in childhood. Or they might make someone aware of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of hostile silence or controlling inquisitions. They can hold both parties back from one another’s throats for just long enough that they may start to understand what their previously caricatured opponent is going through.
One of the key tasks of the therapist is to expose us often enough to a more sane, respectful, reasonable and realistic outlook than our own. The therapist’s kindly, wise voice can become our own. We begin to intuit what they would have said in a given situation, and when they are no longer there, at moments of crisis and loneliness, can learn to say some of the important, calming and kind things to ourselves.
Far from a self-indulgence, undergoing therapy is one of the most generous things we could ever do for all those who have to live around us. Those who have spent time in therapy are ever so slightly less dangerous to be around: a little better able to warn those who depend on them of how frustrating and peculiar they might sometimes be. We owe it to ourselves, and just as importantly, those who love us, to take our courage in our hands – and to go and ‘see someone’ forthwith.
Date Night
We’ve co-ordinated our diaries, maybe got in a baby sitter, found a restaurant we both like. Perhaps it doesn’t happen so often these days. It’s an important moment. But then we can end up being rather silent or talking about how nice the mozzarella salad is or what a colleague said in a meeting that morning. We’ve got the opportunity to really talk, for once, but then can’t quite rise to the occasion.
It is no insult to a relationship – or to our intellects – to realize that it may be hard to summon up the questions that are truly going to reopen the channels of feeling between ourselves and our partners. We may require a level of artificiality to get to the sort of conversation we could most profitably have.
Here then are some of the more intimate, frustration-releasing questions that we might systematically ask one another as we work our way through the courses: Â
– In what ways have I hurt you?
– When do I satisfy you?
– Where do you feel under-appreciated?
– What would you like me to apologize for?
– How have I let you down?
– What do you need from me right now?
Such conversations, handled without recrimination or defensiveness, can save love. They can also help sex to go better, given how often a desire not to be touched is – at heart – the legacy of  pent-up irritation and hurt.
Resentment
For a couple of centuries our culture has been feeding us a very alluring, Romantic vision of what a good marriage is meant to be like: we’ll understand one another deeply and intuitively; we’ll have great, loving sex and neither of us will want to go to bed with other people; we’ll be busy of course, but there will be plenty of time for us just to be together, happy in each other’s company; we’ll be soul mates; we’ll love each other just as we are.
This story is particularly powerful because, early on, a relationship really can be a bit like this.
But, over time, every marriage seems to change: there are running disagreements, points of deep tension, sex is patchy, we wonder if our partner might be flirting too much with someone else, there are things we definitely wish we could change about each other, we nag and criticize, we seem to just grunt and sulk instead of having deep conversations. We start to resent each other. This isn’t what a good marriage was meant to be like, we feel, and we secretly (and at times openly) blame our partners for having let us down.
We get angry, but in the background is a less readily acknowledged truth. The ideal was never actually a real possibility for the long term – and not just for us but for pretty much anybody. We should be sad, but not angry or bitter. We must blame our partner and ourselves a little less. It’s not our fault or theirs. We’ve been judging our relationship by the exaggerated standards of fiction, rather than by the more more modest, and much fairer, benchmark of reality.
Other People’s Marriages
Our sense of whether of our own marriage is going well or badly is subtly but powerfully dependent on our mental picture of what marriages in general tend to be like. We’re naturally very given to comparisons. (Whether we feel well off or rather poor always depends on how much money we think other people have).
Unfortunately, there’s a fearsome asymmetry at work which makes us judge ourselves harshly. We know our own marriage from the inside – while we generally have only a heavily edited, limited and sanitized picture of the marriages of other people. Mostly we see others in social situations – where a degree of politeness is the norm. But we’re intently aware of our own sorrows: the cold silences, harsh criticisms, furious outbursts, episodes of door slamming, bitter late night denunciations, simmering sexual disappointments and the times of aching loneliness in the bedroom. Very understandably, we come to the conclusion that our own marriage is uniquely cursed and much darker and more painful than is usual. In times of distress, we might even fling an accusation at our spouse: ‘no-one else has to put up with this.’
Getting a much more accurate idea of what other people’s marriages are really like isn’t prying or cruel, it’s a priority in love because it reveals the true nature of the task we’re undertaking. It’s not that we as a couple are strangely awful or damned: it’s that marriage itself is an essentially and inescapably difficult project. If we could properly see – via tenderly accurate films and novels and honest chats with older honest couples – the reality of pretty much any marriage we might arrive at a surprising and rather heartening conclusion: that our own marriage is – in fact – really quite OK and certainly very normal.
Humour
We know by instinct that humor is pretty important in relationships. But the reasons are often left a little vague. It isn’t that we crudely want entertainment. We don’t just seek relaxation. We want to find a way to be annoyed with, and criticize, one another’s most maddening sides without eliciting a drama, with a special kind of diplomatic immunity that comedy provides. We need our partner, whom we love and yet find extremely difficult at times to live with, to understand what is so disturbing about their behaviors – and perhaps to want to amend them. That is what it means to get the joke.
Spending time closely around someone inevitably exposes us to departures from normality or balance. Our partners are always a little crazy in areas – as we, naturally, are too. We need to say something, but doing so directly and in a serious voice can be painfully counter-productive. Too often, the partner just swiftly feels attacked and refuses the insight.
This is where a certain kind of humor comes in. Exaggerating the exaggeration is a tool for criticizing another person without arousing their irritation or self-righteousness. And the laughter we elicit isn’t just a sign they have been entertained; it’s proof that they have acknowledged an attempt to reform them.
George Bernard Shaw understood this very well. ‘If you want to tell people the truth,’ he remarked, ‘make them laugh, otherwise they will kill you.’ (Visit The School of Life website for the full article and more).
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