为何你终究会嫁错了/娶错了人

为何你终究会嫁错了/娶错了人

作者：阿兰·德·波顿

（谷歌翻译，沈睿校译）

这是人们最害怕发生在自己身上的事情之一， 我们会竭尽全力去避免它，然而结局终归一样：我们人人都终归嫁错了/娶错了人。

原因之一是，当我们试图与他人建立亲密关系时，会出现很多令人无法回避的问题。首先，我们只有在那些不太了解我们的人面前，才显得正常。如果我们生活在一个比我们现在更智慧的社会里、任何早期约会，在第一次见面的晚餐上，一个标准问题都应该是："你哪儿疯了？"

我们每个人都有潜在的一种倾向，当有人与我们意见不合时， 我们会很不爽；或者我们只有在干活的时候才能放松；也许我们在做爱之后，有点复杂的感觉；或者在遭到指责时，一句话都不想说。人谁都不完美，问题在于，结婚前我们很少深入探究彼此的复杂性。在两个人的关系尚不稳定时，当我们的缺点弱点被暴露了后，我们就把错推到对方身上，说对方不适合自己，干脆分手了事。至于我们的朋友，他们不会愿意花很大的心力去点醒我们是我们的错。因此，独自生活的好处之一就是我们真地觉得自己其实挺好相处的。

我们的伴侣也不见得比我们更有自我认知。当然，我们会尝试去了解他们，我们去拜访他们的家人，我们看他们的照片，见他们的大学朋友，所有这些都让我们产生一种"做足了功课"（准备好了）的错觉。到头来，婚姻是不了解自己、也不了解对方的两个人，开始了一场充满希望的、奢侈的、无比亲密的赌博，把自己和一个他们无法想象的未来捆绑在一起，并且他们之前还一直小心翼翼地避免去探究那个未来。

有历史记载以来的大多数时间，人们结婚是出于所谓有道理的逻辑：因为她家的土地与你家的相邻，他的家族生意兴隆，她的父亲是本地的地方官，有座世袭的城堡需要继续下去，或者双方父母信奉同一部圣典的同一种诠释。从如此讲逻辑有道理婚姻，流出来的是孤独、不忠、虐待、心肠冷酷和穿过孩子们房间的门传来的尖叫。从今天来看，这种所谓的有道理的婚姻根本就没道理；它往往是利益的权衡、势利的算计，狭隘的为榨取好处所驱动的。这也是为什么现在代替这种婚姻的我们所崇尚的"感觉婚姻"，在很大程度上无需为自己争辩。

在现代的“感觉”婚姻中，要点是两个人被一种不可抗拒的本能相互吸引，并在心底认定彼此就是对的人。事实上，一场婚姻看上去越是草率（也许两人才认识六个月；其中一个人没有工作，或两个人都才勉强算成年人），有把握感觉就越是强烈。莽撞行事被视为对“有理由的婚姻”的种种错误——那些制造不幸的元素、精打细算的权衡的彻底改正。推崇本能的感觉——跟着感觉走，是对千百年来不合理的“有理由”造成的创伤性的反应。

但是，尽管我们相信自己在婚姻中寻求的是幸福，事情却没这么简单。我们真正寻求的是熟悉感——这种熟悉感很可能使我们幸福的计划复杂起来。在两个成年人的关系中，我们寻找的是重新创造我们自童年时就熟悉的感觉。我们大多数人童年时尝到的爱，常常与其他感觉相混淆，这其他的感觉具有更破坏性的互动：比如想帮助一个大人——这个成年人完全失去了自我控制力；我们觉得父母对我们没有温暖的爱；或者是恐惧——害怕父母的愤怒；或者是自己没有足够的安全感而告诉他们我们想要什么。自然而然，等我们成年后，我们会发现自己会拒绝某些结婚对象，不是因为他们不好，而是因为他们"太好"了——他们太平稳、太成熟、太善解人意、太可靠了，因为在心底，这种"对"的感觉如此陌生。我们嫁错了/娶错了人，是因为我们不把被爱与幸福感联系在一起。

我们也犯错误，因为我们如此孤独。当单身变得难以忍受时，没有人能处于最佳的状态去选择伴侣。我们必须完全能坦然接受多年独处的可能，才能恰当地挑剔；否则，我们爱的可能不再是那个将我们从单身命运中拯救出来的伴侣，而更多的是"不再单身"这个状态本身。

最后，我们结婚是为了让美好的感觉永恒。我们想象婚姻能封存当初求婚念头涌现时的喜悦：也许是在威尼斯，在环礁湖上，坐着摩托艇，夕阳的余晖洒在海面上，我们谈论着似乎从未有人理解过的灵魂，稍后还打算去一家意大利烩饭馆吃晚餐。我们结婚是为了让这种沉迷的感觉永恒，却没意识到这些感觉与婚姻制度本身并无牢固的关联。

的确，婚姻决定性地将我们带入另一个截然不同、更偏向日常生活的层面，这或许会在郊区的房子里展开，伴随着漫长的通勤和令人抓狂的孩子，他们的出生杀死了我们的激情。唯一的共同因素就是身边的伴侣，而这一点，或许正是那个不该被存放起来的错误的因素。

好消息是，即使我们发现自己嫁错了/娶错了人，也没什么关系。

我们不必抛弃他或她，只需抛弃那个奠定西方世界250年来婚姻观的基石的浪漫理念：即有那么一个完美的人的存在，这个人能够满足我们所有的需求，抚慰我们每一种渴望。

我们需要用悲剧性的（有时是喜剧性的）认知来取代浪漫主义观点，即：每个人都会让我们感到沮丧、生气、厌烦、疯狂和失望——而我们（并无恶意）也会对他们让他们感觉同样。我们的空虚感和不完整感会绵绵无期——这一切都是很通常的事情，也不构成离婚的理由。选择跟谁共度一生，仅仅是辨别我们愿意为哪种特定的痛苦牺牲自己。

这种悲观主义哲学为围绕婚姻的诸多痛苦和焦虑提供了一种解决之道。这听起来或许奇怪，但这种悲观主义减轻了我们的浪漫文化强加于婚姻之上的、过度的想象压力。某个特定的伴侣未能将我们从悲伤和忧郁中拯救出来，并不能构成反对那个人的理由，也不意味着这段婚姻就该失败或被升级。

最适合我们的人，不是与我们志趣完全相同的人（他/她并不存在），而是能够明智地处理两个人的差异的人——那个善于处理分歧的人。与其追求某种理想化的完美互补，不如具有宽容的能力，以宽容来包容差异和不同，这才是"并非错得太离谱"的人的真正标志。相匹配是爱的成果，不是它的先决条件。

浪漫主义对我们并无益处；它是一种苛刻的哲学，它让我们在婚姻中经历的许多事情显得异常和可怕。我们最终感到孤独，并让自己确信那存在瑕疵的婚姻是不"正常"的。我们应该学会与"错"和平共处，努力以更宽容、幽默和善意的眼光看待我们自己以及伴侣身上存在的诸多"错"的例证。

原文：

IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.

Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”

Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.

Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.

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 from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the marriage of feeling — has largely been spared the need to account for itself.

What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six months since they met; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it can feel. Recklessness is taken as a counterweight to all the errors of reason, that catalyst of misery, that accountant’s demand. The prestige of instinct is the traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable reason.

But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.

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.

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.

Indeed, marriage tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a suburban house, with a long commute and maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerged. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.

The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person.

We mustn’t abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.

We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

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. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.

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.

Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not “normal.” We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness,” striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners.