Marriage. I wondered whether the previous generation was being more careful than my generation, or perhaps simply more selfish. I feel sorry for my generation, the apathy is overwhelming. Maybe that’s why it’s ever so important to find a loving relationship with someone, because so much of today’s culture does not give you that.
Another dimension of marriage is mutual therapy. That’s why it can also be so painful. If you really want to understand your partner, it isn’t enough to discuss things rationally. You have to 'dig wells'.
A portrayal of marriage is brilliant work. It’s ridiculous to think that two people who fall in love and get married are then going to live happily ever after. People get depressed after they get married because they marry on that assumption. In such a perception, you get married to suffer—to dig a well. It isn’t any fun to dig a well. So, why do people even bother?
Because even as an important perspective, it isn't the main thing.
Some people get married and divorced over and over, three or four times. Generally speaking, people like that balk at 'digging a well'. They find it painful, so instead of digging they keep looking for new people. But usually they end up with the same sort of person.
There are even people who divorce and marry someone else, but then end up remarrying the first person. They’re just repeating the same pattern over and over. In the old days, marriage was just two people cooperating. If they did that until they died, then it was considered to have been a good marriage. It’s too unfortunate… these days, people want to understand one another, not simply work together.
But if you want to understand one another, you HAVE to dig a well.
The poor kids today, either they're too selfish to take part in a real loving relationship, or they rush into marriage and then months to years later, they get divorced. They don't what they want in a partner. They don’t even know who they are themselves, so how can they know who they're marrying?
Well, maybe you don’t after all.
You get tested. You find out who you are, who the other person is, and how you accommodate or don't. There isn’t some kind of rule to know if a marriage is going to work. Things are not that simple. But there are a few rules true about love and marriage.
If you don't respect the other person, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.
If you don't know how to compromise, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.
If you can't talk openly about what goes on between you, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.
And if you don't have a common set of values in life, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike.
And the biggest one of those values? Your belief in the importance of your marriage.
There are plenty of cases in which a wife, tries to understand her husband but ultimately decides that she simply can’t. Sometimes, after living together a long time on the assumption that she understands him, she’ll all of a sudden realize that she doesn’t. To start over and try to understand him again is very hard. In most cases, she’ll just criticize him, saying he doesn’t understand anything or concluding that all men are worthless.
What really strikes me about Westernized couples is that as long as they stay together, they’re really intimate and inseparable. Some of them hold hands wherever they go. But when they break up, it’s all over… just like that. You almost never see couples who stay together even though they don’t love each other, for the children’s sake or whatever, as in most Asian couples.
Why? Westernized couples have trouble believing in the reality of their relationship. They feel compelled to fawn over each other because they always have to be making sure they’re really in love. Otherwise they feel very insecure. And if they fail to confirm their love, then they break up… just like that.
In Asian couples, to put it in a favourable light, the husband and wife somehow sympathize with one another even without needing to reassure one another. I believe that’s a more interesting kind of marriage.
Because there is depth in a relationship.
In the West, there’s always this premise of romantic love. Romantic love doesn’t last very long. If you want to sustain romantic love for any length of time, you can’t have sexual relations. It’s impossible to sustain romantic love for a long period of time while engaging in sexual relations. So if you want to maintain the marital relationship, you have to be willing to move it to a different dimension.
Even though the sexual relationship also has a therapeutic function, at some point, though, you have to switch to a different type of therapy. That’s when the well digging becomes necessary. Perhaps, in youth, the sexual relationship is terribly important, but after a while, it’s just not enough any more.
And people who can’t switch to 'well digging' at that point will try to find therapy elsewhere. The other thing you often see is people who simply abandon the idea of expanding their world through relations with the opposite sex. They channel their energy into something else. Someone might become a scholar and conduct exhaustive research into a particular subject. If you direct your energy towards a woman, you’re dealing with a living human being, which raises all kinds of complications.
Or else you work like crazy at the office.
There are an awful lot of people who direct their energy to something other than a living human being. Though it is tempting, you can’t really say that one way is better for everyone. You really can't. Ultimately, it’s a matter of how they want to live. It may be that only a minority of people are capable of investing a great deal in marriage. I personally think it’s the only way for me to live remarkably to the fullest, because it’s not a life lived alone.
Another dimension of marriage is mutual therapy. That’s why it can also be so painful. If you really want to understand your partner, it isn’t enough to discuss things rationally. You have to 'dig wells'.
A portrayal of marriage is brilliant work. It’s ridiculous to think that two people who fall in love and get married are then going to live happily ever after. People get depressed after they get married because they marry on that assumption. In such a perception, you get married to suffer—to dig a well. It isn’t any fun to dig a well. So, why do people even bother?
Because even as an important perspective, it isn't the main thing.
Some people get married and divorced over and over, three or four times. Generally speaking, people like that balk at 'digging a well'. They find it painful, so instead of digging they keep looking for new people. But usually they end up with the same sort of person.
There are even people who divorce and marry someone else, but then end up remarrying the first person. They’re just repeating the same pattern over and over. In the old days, marriage was just two people cooperating. If they did that until they died, then it was considered to have been a good marriage. It’s too unfortunate… these days, people want to understand one another, not simply work together.
But if you want to understand one another, you HAVE to dig a well.
The poor kids today, either they're too selfish to take part in a real loving relationship, or they rush into marriage and then months to years later, they get divorced. They don't what they want in a partner. They don’t even know who they are themselves, so how can they know who they're marrying?
Well, maybe you don’t after all.
You get tested. You find out who you are, who the other person is, and how you accommodate or don't. There isn’t some kind of rule to know if a marriage is going to work. Things are not that simple. But there are a few rules true about love and marriage.
If you don't respect the other person, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.
If you don't know how to compromise, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.
If you can't talk openly about what goes on between you, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.
And if you don't have a common set of values in life, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike.
And the biggest one of those values? Your belief in the importance of your marriage.
There are plenty of cases in which a wife, tries to understand her husband but ultimately decides that she simply can’t. Sometimes, after living together a long time on the assumption that she understands him, she’ll all of a sudden realize that she doesn’t. To start over and try to understand him again is very hard. In most cases, she’ll just criticize him, saying he doesn’t understand anything or concluding that all men are worthless.
What really strikes me about Westernized couples is that as long as they stay together, they’re really intimate and inseparable. Some of them hold hands wherever they go. But when they break up, it’s all over… just like that. You almost never see couples who stay together even though they don’t love each other, for the children’s sake or whatever, as in most Asian couples.
Why? Westernized couples have trouble believing in the reality of their relationship. They feel compelled to fawn over each other because they always have to be making sure they’re really in love. Otherwise they feel very insecure. And if they fail to confirm their love, then they break up… just like that.
In Asian couples, to put it in a favourable light, the husband and wife somehow sympathize with one another even without needing to reassure one another. I believe that’s a more interesting kind of marriage.
Because there is depth in a relationship.
In the West, there’s always this premise of romantic love. Romantic love doesn’t last very long. If you want to sustain romantic love for any length of time, you can’t have sexual relations. It’s impossible to sustain romantic love for a long period of time while engaging in sexual relations. So if you want to maintain the marital relationship, you have to be willing to move it to a different dimension.
Even though the sexual relationship also has a therapeutic function, at some point, though, you have to switch to a different type of therapy. That’s when the well digging becomes necessary. Perhaps, in youth, the sexual relationship is terribly important, but after a while, it’s just not enough any more.
And people who can’t switch to 'well digging' at that point will try to find therapy elsewhere. The other thing you often see is people who simply abandon the idea of expanding their world through relations with the opposite sex. They channel their energy into something else. Someone might become a scholar and conduct exhaustive research into a particular subject. If you direct your energy towards a woman, you’re dealing with a living human being, which raises all kinds of complications.
Or else you work like crazy at the office.
There are an awful lot of people who direct their energy to something other than a living human being. Though it is tempting, you can’t really say that one way is better for everyone. You really can't. Ultimately, it’s a matter of how they want to live. It may be that only a minority of people are capable of investing a great deal in marriage. I personally think it’s the only way for me to live remarkably to the fullest, because it’s not a life lived alone.
People realize there’s no perfect answer in marriage, and that there are things and emotions that are beyond their control. Compulsive drives often go misunderstood and undiscussed. It’s because a person with such energy makes a strong statement that he or she is very much alive. Beneath the behavioural façade, it may reflect the contrary… when you overdo work, television, games, travelling, parties and other avenues of escape, there is an underlying message. Perhaps they are sub-consciously trying to tell each other something, but choose extremes to send the message.
After all, It doesn’t take much to perceive what those unexpressed feelings are.
After all, It doesn’t take much to perceive what those unexpressed feelings are.
-Entails of Haruki Murakami and Mitch Albom
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