We can cull. With new awareness we can unbelieve our past beliefs, let them go and take on board a new and more helpful set. And if we can’t do that alone, it’s entirely possible – and utterly wise – to get help; there is a wealth of knowledge and guidance to help us overcome relationship issues. So if you suspect that some events or people have left you vulnerable to wrong choices or misguided decisions, let me encourage – even beg – you to see a professional. We can’t change the life we’ve lived, but we can rethink it, understand it differently and so resolve the pain.
Confucius said that the past needs to be studied in order for us to define the future. Once studied, though, we may want to complete the lesson and move on.
4. Not Choosing
I believe marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor, upon a due consideration of characters and circumstances, without the parties having any choice in the matter.
(ATTRIBUTED TO SAMUEL JOHNSON, BOSWELL, THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON)
If you agree with Samuel Johnson, you’re in a minority. Most people deeply believe that the best life outcomes are created by active and informed decisions. More, that if we ourselves don’t make those decisions, we give up the chance of those best outcomes; we surrender control, cede responsibility and in so doing resign ourselves to compromise – as well as tacitly admitting that we’re not up to the task of managing our own lives.
But let me argue the opposite. Maybe Johnson is right, and letting go of choice is a good idea. It’s not just that love is one of the few areas in modern society where we may still cling to romantic notions of fate determining our future. But also, by handing over control to others, we might avoid repeating past mistakes or making new and future ones. When dealing with ‘winged Cupid painted blind’, as Shakespeare put it, taking our own blind prejudices out of the equation may be no bad thing.
Heads or tails?
Opt to step back from active decision-making, and the first possibility open to us is to toss a coin. When it comes to deciding a lifelong commitment, doing that literally may not seem wise, though devotees of the I Ching might disagree. A friend of mine did once use the system to decide whether to marry her boyfriend; the coins said ‘no’, which in hindsight proved to be excellent advice. And in Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man – as its title suggests, a novel about a man who makes all choices thus guided – several partner-decisions are made that way. The result is whole-scale erotic abandonment under the absolving aphorism ‘Who am I to question the dice?’
Let’s consider next the American psychologist Barry Schwartz, whose work focusses on the reasoning behind choice. His argument is that randomness is a ‘good enough’ option. Once certain standards are met – we like each other well enough, we have similar life goals, we’ve checked issues such as substance abuse and criminal record – there are really no good reasons to discriminate between one suitor and the next. Chance, Schwartz suggests, might well be the ‘most efficient’ but also the ‘fairest . . . most honest’ option.
Interesting ideas, though most of us are wary of making key life decisions with so little information. Which is why I don’t advise either coin-tossing, dice-throwing or absolute randomness. But I do suggest that to circumvent our biases and introduce a little serendipity, daters should, online, approach one random person in every twenty profiles they access, and offline be open to the occasional blind date, opportunity dinner from a colleague or fortuitous encounter at the supermarket checkout. Randomness certainly can open a different, less blinkered and therefore sometimes better door.
Destiny vs growth
The issue of fortuitous encounters brings us to an interesting double standard here. We may recoil in horror at the thought of haphazard chance determining our future life partner, but label that chance ‘destiny’ and we’re entranced by the prospect. On the one hand we feel the need to be in control of our romantic choices; on the other hand the thought of losing control can be hugely seductive.
Enter Professor ‘Chip’ Knee of the University of Houston, and his work on ‘destiny love’, his term for the conviction held by some couples that kismet rather than coincidence brought them together. Believe this, and we are likely to feel strongly and instantly attracted to a partner, the relationship is likely to be passionate and intense, and a magical certainty of success is likely to hover over the whole enterprise. As a perfect example, see that scene in the film Sleepless in Seattle where Sam Baldwin describes meeting his first wife, speaks so movingly of taking her hand to help her out of a car, and – just with that initial touch – realizes ‘we were supposed to be together . . . and I knew it.’
Sam Baldwin was lucky – thanks to a good scriptwriter creating the traditional rom-com happy ending – his ensuing marriage worked well. But the ‘destiny’ assumption may not survive the cold light of real-life daily commitment, because it comes with certain built-in structural defects. The problem is, if fate has generously provided us with a predestined partner, there may seem no need for effort to make the relationship work – and if effort is needed then that particular romance is clearly not as predestined as we thought it was and probably needs to end forthwith. Professor Knee’s work suggests that those who believe in destiny love are likely to react badly when things go wrong, likely to exit relationships lightly, likely to move on quickly – to their next destiny.
Compare and contrast couples convinced of what Knee calls ‘growth love’, who see partnerships as developing slowly over time, with any glitches along the way meaning nothing sinister, but simply indicating a need for more effort. Growth love couples tend to get involved more gradually, have lower expectations, but are more capable of the long haul. It is certainly worth remembering that while belief in fate-determined love – whether on our side or on a partner’s – might add a breathless magic to romance, belief in growth-based love might mean the difference between a ruby wedding anniversary and being left at the altar.
Arranged
Letting destiny decide partner choice may seem like giving away control, but at least destiny (or fate or God or Providence) is all-seeing, all-knowing and infallible. Letting other, all-too-human beings decide partner choice seems a far worse bet, for ordinary folk are all too capable of confusion, ignorance, error and their own personal prejudices. Which is why, while accepting support on partner choice from friends and family may be helpful, it’s usually better to block one’s ears and step away. ‘You should’ and ‘you must’, even when voiced by onlookers with the best of intentions, should not govern partner decisions.
What does have a place, and a long history of some success – it’s even mentioned in the Bible – is allowing others to ‘arrange’ possibilities which we can veto, or from which we make our own pick. Don’t forget that until very recently, especially if a partnership was the way to cement political alliance or unite feuding families, it made perfect sense for elders rather than the happy couple to make the courtship decisions. In Britain, for example, it is only the last two generations of the monarchy that have had any kind of genuine personal freedom over marriage choice. (When certain of those love marriages failed, there was in some quarters a general feeling of ‘Well, what did they expect?’)