“The difference between marriage and cohabitation is nothing more than a piece of paper,” they’ve told me for as long as I remember. I believed that so much that I didn’t just repeat it and preach it, I lived it. I loved it too, for a short time, until my cohabitant turned combatant. She and I got into one of those mean and dirty “I’m not sure the relationship is going to survive this, and if it does, I’m not sure I want to carry on” fights. Our breakup was a “no harm, no foul, and it was nice learning how a relationship can fail with you” breakup. It was so easy, it was too easy. “These things don’t work out some of the times. See ya, sista.” When I married, however, I learned that after a big fight, both parties go to their respective corners, talk to their managers, and develop a game plan to use in the next round. The next round can involve better strategies to win that round, or it can involve a series of compromises. I’m sure long-time cohabitants go through all the same issues, but at the end of the day, it just seemed so easy for me to walk away. Marriage just felt more substantial, and I found myself working harder to make my marriage survive and thrive. I didn’t want the big “D” on my docket, so I learned that I would have to make what proved to be difficult compromises to make it work. Trying to understand how another person thinks led to me becoming well-rounded, more mature, and a better person. I advanced to a stage they call: adulthood.

Radio talk show host and writer, Dennis Prager talks about these matters, as evidenced by the quotes below, from Dennis Prager’s Thoughts on Marriage lecture, but Mr. Prager is not an expert on marriage, a marriage counselor, or a psychologist. He’s a radio talk show host and author who has been involved in two divorces. “He’s been married three times? Why would you consider his advice on marriage valuable?” I think we can all admit now that we’ve learned more from our failures in life than our successes, and Mr. Prager has also been married to his current wife for sixteen years at this point, which shows that he obviously learned from his personal failures in that regard.

“Either marriage gets better or it gets worse. Couples need to constantly work on their marriage to make their marriages strong.”

To my mind, the idea that marriage gets better or worse with age is almost exclusive to young marriages. I realize that all marriages, like all people, get better or worse with age, but if I married in my early twenties that poor marriage wouldn’t have had a chance. I changed so dramatically between twenty to forty that I was almost a completely different person. I was more stable, confident, and I knew myself better. I also liked myself better at forty, which might sound foo foo, but if we don’t like ourselves, we’re probably not going to like, much less love, another. Second marriages, or those who wait until their mid-thirties to forties, tend to last, because we make rational and less emotional decisions in life. Love is no longer the lone driver, as forty somethings have learned from the mistakes of impulsive actions and reactions based on short-term thinking. Having said all that, marriages between forty-somethings are just as apt to get worse with age for those who don’t constantly work on their marriage to make it better.

“Some romantic ideas can really hurt your marriage. Romance is good but romantic thinking can be damaging.”

“How can romance hurt a marriage? What an odd thing to write.” There’s a difference between romance and romanticizing. We all romanticize the idea of love, relationships, and marriage, and romanticizing them often leads to unreasonable expectations. The culprit for these unreasonable expectations, in my experience, is the love story. How many unrealistic expectations of romance and love are born in the love stories that movies and books provide? They give us the idyllic images we want, need, and begin to believe is out there waiting for us. “I deserve better,” we say when our very specific visions of a very specific Mr. Right don’t pan out. We all have our bullet points, of course, but did we create them, or were they created for us? When Mr. Right fails to meet our idyllic bullet points, captured in the scripts and rewrites of love stories, we venture back into the field. While there, we discover that Mr. Right is largely a fictional character born and raised to feed our need for Mr. Perfect. We all know Mr. or Miss Right is out there, we’ve seen them, but was our mental processing of this issue is a result of digital processing? Those idyllic images they planted in our head messed with us, until we created our own idyllic images that no one born of physical processing can achieve. 

“No human being can fulfill all of your wants or all of your needs.”

Calling upon our wife or husband to fulfill our wants and needs is normal, but demanding that they meet them all, with ultimatums attached, is shallow narcissism. When we enter into a long-term relationship, with expectations for marriage, we expect our prospective other to accept us as is, yet we set conditional expectations for them. We expect them to know us, as is, but we don’t place reasonable expectations on ourselves to know them as is. If we did it right, we should know our potential spouse before we marry them. We should know them warts and all, and we should know that as Dennis Prager points out the term “soul mate”  is equivalent with “clone” and unconditional love should be a term reserved for our children and pets. Relationships between full-fledged, complicated adults come loaded with a myriad of conditions, and we need to sift through the conditions we establish for them to make sure they’re fair, and if they are, we should require them to meet them and vice versa.

“Being in love means always having to say you’re sorry. The three words “I am sorry” can be more powerful than “I love you.””

The ability to apologize often comes in direct conflict with the ego. The ego is that evil, little guy who rests on our left shoulder, just below the ear, whispering, “Don’t let her get away with that.” The ego also characterizes what she said and defines and redefines it. “We firmly established our set of ground rules and our turf, and her words and actions just violated them.” It turns out, she didn’t say what we thought she said, or she didn’t mean it the way it sounded to us, and at some point our over-protective, super sensitive ego took over and led us down a bad road. “I’m sorry, and it will never happen again.”

“We need to teach him how to treat us,” her ego whispers to her. In the early stages of a marriage, or any relationship for that matter, we set out to establish ground rules for how we want to be treated. Those ground rules also come equipped with that one big, no compromising taboo. “You can violate everything else on my list, with some exceptions, except that. I’m very sensitive about that.” For a variety of reasons, and I don’t know if it’s psychological or philosophical, but when someone makes the mistake of telling us where it hurts, that’s the only wound we want to pour salt in.  

I’ve witnessed this peculiar predilection among every demographic, be it old, young, male, female, married, single, and everyone in between. I’ve seen it happen so often that I’ve toyed with it. “It’s hard to make me mad, seriously. I’m basically impervious to teasing, ribbing and razzing, but don’t make fun of my obsession with peanut butter. I’m very sensitive about that.” It’s a joke of ridiculous extremes of course, as I like peanut butter, but I have no unreasonable attachments to it. I throw that out there to see what “they” do with it. It might take an hour, a day, or even a couple days, but someone, somewhere will come up with a clever shot about my obsession with peanut butter, and you can see it on their face that they think they’re hitting us where we live, and they don’t give a durn how bad it hurts. We all do this, our great aunts, our lovers, and even our moms can’t seem to resist the temptation. Knowing about this strange psychological predilection is half the battle, and putting our loved ones through a test of their loyalty is another strange psychological predilection we all partake in, as we’re basically putting them in a position to fail. 

We’ve covered four of the eight points Dennis Prager covered in his Thoughts on Marriage lecture, but one of the most crucial characteristics I think he missed is the need to find someone who doesn’t mind being boring every once in a while. We need to find someone we enjoy spending substantial amounts of time around, and some of that time is going to be spent doing relatively boring things. That sounds obvious, but when we sift through our list of applicants for marriage or cohabitation, we find very fun and exciting men and women who can be extremely funny and wildly entertaining. The idea that a prospective mate can add some fun and excitement to our lives can plant the seeds for a whirlwind romance, as long as they’re in their element. The latter is the key for displays of charisma and energy requires a right time, right place setting, and we might need to take them out of their element to see if they can be boring. If you’re considering a substantial move with another person, you might want to find out how they conduct themselves on a lazy Sunday afternoon, playing parcheesi? Do they need a little sip of alcohol while doing it? They might not be alcoholics, but they can’t do something like play parcheesi without a little edge. Some might need a wager to pique their interest because they can’t imagine playing parcheesi just for the fun of it. Bill Murray once suggested traveling with someone before you marry them to take them out of their element, and to show you how they interact with service industry personnel. The point is we can learn a lot about loved ones at parties and other social functions, but we can learn a lot more about them by cooking a meal with them, raking the lawn, or sitting out on a deck with them and nothing more than a bottle of water.