5 minutes reading time
I was scrolling through Instagram reels late at night, as one does when the brain has resigned from active duty, and came across an old lady giving marriage advice.
Normally, whenever someone on the internet starts dispensing matrimonial wisdom with soft acoustic guitar strumming in the background, my immediate reflex is to close the app and consider throwing the phone out the window. But this woman said something that caught me right in the teeth.
She said: look at their families before you tie yourself to anyone. We end up like our parents, whether we like it or not, and for a thirty year contract, that is the only metric that matters.
When I was twenty nine, I would have laughed at that. I would have called it archaic village superstition, the kind of backwards claptrap our uncles peddle to justify arranged marriages. I was convinced I was the smartest bastard in the postal code. I had read philosophy, I understood cognitive biases, I thought I was evaluating an individual based on pure, unadulterated reason.
Turns out I was just a dumbfuck with a library card. No I dont have any library card anymore, but it sounded nice.
She was right, or at least mostly right.
Now, I don't buy the strict deterministic version where you wake up on your fortieth birthday and suddenly turn into a carbon copy of your father, down to the brand of beedi he smoked and the way he cleared his throat. People rebel. People swing hard in the opposite direction out of sheer spite. But parents are where you get your first twenty years of raw training data.
That is where you learn how to yell when you are angry, how to withhold affection when you are sulking, how to panic over money, and how much cruelty can be comfortably packed into a quiet Tuesday evening. You absorb all that sewage before your brain is even done baking. You might spend the next ten years reading self-help books and pretending you are enlightened, but under pressure, the default firmware kicks in.
I look at myself now. Did I turn out better than my parents? Not really. In most departments I managed to regress.
My wife, to her immense credit, is miles better than her lineage in plenty of ways. (Thankfully she will never read this. Otherwise I will be several feet under for implying that.)
But the family is still the background radiation. When you look at someone's parents, you aren't looking at a prophecy; you're looking at the source code from which their instincts were compiled.
And that is what you completely miss when you are courting.
During courtship, nobody is being malicious, but everybody is running a subconscious PR campaign.
You put on your cleanest shirt, you listen attentively, you bite your tongue, and you genuinely convince yourself that you are this patient, witty, accommodating creature. You aren't lying to the other person; you are lying to yourself first, and they are returning the favor with equal sincerity. Years ago I wrote about how we only ever meet an episode of a person rather than the whole cursed loaf, but back then I thought pointing it out made me immune to it.
The real disaster wasn't just believing the facade. The real disaster was my sample size.
I went all in after just a few months. A few months. You wouldn't buy a secondhand Renault Kwid with few thousand kilometers on the odometer without checking the chassis for rust (unlike me), but I signed up for a lifetime partnership on ninety days of weekend best behavior. A few months gives you just enough data to confirm whatever flattering fantasy you have cooked up in your head.
Now my wife tells me, almost every other day, that she picked the wrong person. More accurately, she says marriage itself was an error and she ought to have stayed single forever.
She is insightful, self-aware, and entirely justified in her diagnosis. I respect her too much to argue with her about it. Yet I lose my shit on hearing it and I fight with her. I am wrong for her, and she is probably wrong for me. Or maybe nobody is ever right for anybody, but we managed to pile on so much wreckage in our earliest days together that the hull was cracked before the ship even left the harbor.
You think intelligence protects you from making life-altering blunders. It doesn't. Intelligence just provides you with richer, more elaborate justifications for doing something thoroughly idiotic, and leaves you with the vocabulary to dissect the wreckage in your notebook afterwards.
Image Credit: Marriage A-la-Mode: 1, The Marriage Settlement by William Hogarth (c. 1743) via Wikimedia Commons