Nerve Endings Firing Away

I have always wondered how two complete strangers seem to live in perfect harmony a la Indian arranged marriages for many years. I find it confounding especially since it beats all logical underpinnings. Human relationships are weighed with income, class status, religion and caste, physical characteristics, and even complexion whereas in fact common sense prevailing, we would like to compare deeper emotional compatibility. Marginal Revolution has an interesting concept for the secret to a good marriage. They call it, selective forgetfulness.

“The couples who stay together are the delusional ones – the ones who look at their past with rose-colored glasses [; ] A distorted view of your marriage that emphasises the positive and forgets the negative is crucial to accounting for who stays and who flees when it comes to relationship endurance [; ] We tend to remember slights and frustrations more than favors and kindnesses. So inevitably in a marriage the weight of negative remembrances of thing past comes to exceed that of the positive. Divorce is the result.”

So effectively, if you choose to block out the bad stuff and disagreement and focus on the better moments, you are likely to last longer. This might seem quite optimistic but such behavior often flirts with borderline of compromise and as the guys at MR put it, delusional. I have seen couples who would be obviously better off separated but insisted on staying together by seeing the brighter side of things; often their children (apart from the social constraints). Reality often is subjective and people often choose their own beliefs. If you have seen Memento, you know what exactly I am talking about. Convincing self using appropriately worded language is enough to keep you in a world of your own. After all, it boils down to what exactly you want to believe in. If you want something real bad, you can use language and reason to justify individual behavior. As one of our professors answered when asked about effective time management, you do what you want to do. Society be damned, admit it, you want to.