Monogamous marriage-for-life is a pre-Internet system and mainstay of human civilization for quite some time. During its glory days, traditional marriage made sense because men and women brought different things to the marriage—things the other could not easily provide. But in the age of equality, every individual can handle a solo life without that much special effort. No mate needed. For that group, marriage is designed to fail. And by that I mean a spouse will generally, over time, start to look worse than a coworker, friend, or almost anyone else. Everyone but your spouse has the advantage of being able to show only their good side. Spouses don’t have that option. That’s why they can’t compete.
Marriage would work better if people didn’t have easy Internet access to alternatives, but they do. The system guarantees that a couple will start to look increasingly flawed to each other while serving up unlimited mating alternatives—and worse—endless love stories of fictional people who are happily married and always romantic.
I often advise “follow the money” when trying to predict anything. With marriage, there can often be financial incentives to divorce, especially for the person who brings the least financial strength to the marriage. If one partner can leave a suboptimal marriage and take a good chunk of money, and maybe get an automatic babysitter during the shared custody years, that makes divorce feel like a practical option, if not desirable. I don’t believe many people divorce for money alone, but “follow the money” predicts better than you wish it would. Be realistic if you plan to take a marriage path. That’s all I suggest.
Breakups
If you live a normal life, you will probably experience several breakups. They will hurt. I have some experience in this domain and can share my most effective reframes. Realistically, time is the only healer, but you might be able to handle the recovery better with some useful reframes.
Usual Frame: I want my relationship to last forever.
Reframe: Nothing lasts forever.
Best case scenario, you spend your lives together until one of you watches the other die of age-related problems. Life is not designed to give you a happy ending. And nothing lasts forever. As awful as this sounds—and it is awful—the sooner you embrace doom as inevitable, the sooner you can stop worrying if things will work out for you in the end. In the long run, all businesses will fail, all governments get replaced, and all humans expire. If humans did not experience loss, we would have no capacity for joy. And you and I want joy.
Here’s another reframe I found useful.
Usual Frame: This breakup ends my hopes for happiness.
Reframe: There are happier third marriages than first.
I have no idea if that is true, and I don’t plan to research it because accuracy is not an active ingredient in reframes. Anecdotally, people in their third marriages do seem happier, and that’s good enough for me. If you have never observed that pattern, perhaps this reframe is not for you. But if you have, tell yourself the relationship you are leaving was practice. The odds of getting the right relationship pairing on the first try or even the first several are low. But the odds of finding one of your million-or-so best potential matches in the long run are good.
Breakups can signal the beginning of hard times. But just as often, and perhaps more often, the freedom you gain from a breakup starts to pay off right away. You will rediscover some of your favorite activities, have more time to work on fitness and your career, and still upgrade your relationship in time. Don’t rush it.
Here’s a reframe that captures all of that.
Usual Frame: I have lost my soulmate.
Reframe: I have a million soulmates I have not yet met.
Not counting online dating, the main place people meet and fall in love is in the workplace. What are the odds that you and your soulmate ended up working for the same company? The obvious explanation is that humans can fall in love with a variety of people. If you are experiencing a breakup, you are not losing your soulmate. At worst, you are losing one of your million-or-so soulmates.
One of the best reframes for surviving a lost love comes from Dr. Seuss. It shifts your focus away from wallowing in your own pity to how lucky you were to have experienced that human connection in the first place. It’s easy to lose sight of that.
Usual Frame: I am crying because my relationship ended.
Reframe: “Don’t cry because it is over, smile because it happened.” — Dr. Seuss
My closing advice for this topic is to talk to people who are delighted they broke up with their exes. They’re easy to find. Most recently divorced people fall into that category. When you’re in the middle of your breakup recovery period, feeling happy again can seem impossible. All those now-happy people thought something similar. Learn something from their numbers.
Talking to Teenagers
If you are an adult with teens in your home, you have experienced the joy of trying to reason with them. This generally devolves into you-against-them in a power dynamic that turns into shouting and tears and bad feelings that can last days. The teen sometimes has some impact as well.
One solution you might try involves explaining to the teen that everyone starts life with a young brain, including the two of you. If people are lucky, they live long enough to have an old brain that is past its expiration date. Somewhere in the middle are the people most capable of making decisions, and that’s where the parent happens to be. You wouldn’t want to ignore biology; human brains are at their best somewhere in the middle of a person’s lifespan, not at either end.
Great power comes with great responsibility—to paraphrase Spider-Man—so it’s your job to keep the teen safe and on the right track, and you take your responsibility seriously. That’s why you are making the decisions, not the teen.
There’s a reason Americans can’t run for president until age thirty-five. When it comes to life-and-death decisions, we want the best brains on our side. Without getting political, there is a good reason citizen are concerned when their president is over age seventy-five. Beyond that age, citizens can’t be sure what we’re getting.
That’s the little speech I used with my stepson. Obviously, he never changed his mind about what he wanted and why, but he understood my reasoning and had no counter to it. That’s why we got along. I never made it personal, and I carefully explained why it was in his best interest—like it or not—to do what I asked or advised him to do. I also never tried to give him advice in a domain he knew better than I did—such as snowboarding—to keep my story consistent about who should be making decisions. Had we gone snowboarding together, I would have followed his lead within reason because that was his domain. Here’s what it looks like as a reframe.
Usual Frame: A teen can’t understand the “reason” parents have given, and it turns into a power struggle.
Reframe: The parent is a guide for young brains that are not yet capable of understanding adult reasons.
Here’s another reframe that can take energy out of the you-versus-them dynamic. Frame the issue as you being responsible for the teen’s future self, not the current version of the teen.
Usual Frame: I’m talking to you, teen, and this is between us.
Reframe: I must answer to your future self, not your current self.
The idea is to reframe the conversation as you siding with the teen’s future self against the current teen whose brain is not yet developed, and I recommend explaining it that way to the teen. That way, it’s two against one. Tell the teen you’re raising them to become a successful and happy adult, and that adult will someday hold you responsible for what you do to their teen self. When the teen says (and they always do), “I don’t understand why you are making me do this!” you can simply answer that their future self will thank you for not taking the advice of a minor with a half-baked noodle for a brain. This framing allows you to take sides with the teen—albeit their future self—against the current version of the teen who has not yet developed risk management skills. If I tell you I’m siding with future you, not present you, it’s a bit of a mind-bender. It’s hard to feel anger toward someone who is taking your side more aggressively than you are.