Aspiring to be (or remain) married
This incredibly well written piece by Kurt Armstrong gets to the heart of what it means to be or remain married. Or more specifically, why so many marriages fail.
I implore you to read the whole thing, but here is the most important passage:
We have, all of us and to varying degrees, been duped by the sales pitches, the flashing cascade of advertisements traipsing through the sidebar. That jam-packed flow of ads is full of shiny new things, new techniques, new experiences that promise to finally alleviate the so-far insatiable, burning, lonely, primordial ache […]
That narrative of elusive satisfaction isn’t just something we’re repeatedly being told; it is a story we’re literally buying into all the time. No surprise, then, that when our beloved to whom we once upon a time “pledged our troth” inevitably disappoints, we start thinking it might be time to get a new beloved.
What is being described here is a beautiful analogy to the Buddha’s 4 noble truths — the recognition that suffering (or dissatisfaction) is rarely a result of external circumstances, but always of our own confusion or misunderstanding about the solidity of things.
This is not to say that marriage is easy. But it is our culture’s obsession with looking for and finding dissatisfaction everywhere, rather than resolving our internal confusion that leads to phenomena like our exorbitant and increasing divorce rate.
