As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes in Monogamy (1996): ‘There is always someone else who would love me more, understand me better, make me feel more sexually alive.’ It’s a theme he develops in his book Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2012): ‘Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live.’ However instructive past regrets may be toward making better decisions in the future, imagining that we could be happier with someone else can burden an otherwise reasonable life or romantic relationship. The researcher Susan Shimanoff of San Francisco State University discovered that regret was the most common negative emotion, and the second most common emotion of any kind – after love. Yet, the emotion of regret is far more common than most of us realise. In this event, a breakup is unfortunate, but you will, and must, move on.įrom this perspective, failing to move on is an expression of existential cowardice, of failing to meet life’s challenges, and of tempting your future self with regret. It limits the personal rewards that you, and perhaps your partner, can achieve. We were invited to ask: what is a tolerable (versus an intolerable) amount of conflict in our relationships? How much happier could I be with someone else? Should I be? Would I be, if I left? What does it say about me as a person if I stay? As the sociologist Andrew Cherlin writes in The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today (2009): According to the culture of individualism, a relationship that no longer fits your needs is inauthentic and hollow.
UNREALISTIC OPTIMISM. HOW TO
In a study of magazine articles offering marital advice between 19, Francesca Cancian and Steven Gordon traced a similar trend: they found that, over time, marital advice transitioned from emphasising how best to occupy a spousal role to recommendations about how to achieve happiness and express one’s emotions as an individual.ĭuring this transition from role to self, the question of whether we’re with the right person became far more important as a determinant of identity, values and self-esteem. Sociologists such as Anthony Giddens observed that, as our lives became ‘disembedded’ from the older frames of religion, tradition and marriage as an economic system, our intimate bonds became far more central to our sense of wellbeing. Part of our confusion today is tied to a belief that happiness and personal growth should organise all of our decisions about relationships, which is a relatively recent disposition in Western societies.
But it can want some pretty messed-up things. Not that they weren’t there – they were just eclipsed by my desire to exchange her more introverted but steady nature for someone more edgy and extroverted – someone I imagined myself to be (minus my irritability and judginess). The long-term strengths I now admire, need and value in my wife, 30 years later, were scarcely discernible to me during those early years. For those worried about their own relationships, we provided a cozy bed of schadenfreude for them to rest their weary heads upon. At some point in that era, my wife and I fell into a disconsolate rhythm of sniping and arguing, an activity that often followed us to the dinner tables of our friends. It’s a painful reality to consider, and something I thought about in my current marriage in the early years after the birth of our twin sons. It is not uncommon in my practice to hear people wonder if they married the wrong person.
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