Would you bet on your marriage?
Years ago, I watched this brilliant TED talk, amongst the best I’ve watched. I was fortunate to be living in Barcelona at the time so I got to meet Conor in person. He is one of the coolest people I’ve met - so much positive energy, it’s infectious.
The talk is titled - the discipline of finishing.
When I met Conor, I asked him, “How do you manage to be so positive all the time? I love writing, but I think I am a tad bit too cynical. How do I change that?” He said, “No! Don’t change that. You do you. The world needs realists too. How would we live in a balanced world otherwise?”
That conversation really stuck with me.
I rewatched the talk today, and it made me wonder - how many of us would bet on our own marriages, the way we bet on ourselves? How many of us can bet on being able to reach the “finish line”, and do so while enjoying it all along?
To call a marriage successful, you need to “finish”. While it may not be sufficient, but you have to admit that “finishing” or being together forever is a necessary condition.
If you had to bet on someone being able to “finish”, and enjoy it while doing so, Conor says (quoting Warren Buffet) it takes three things for an individual:
Energy - to keep going
Adaptive intelligence - to overcome hiccups
Integrity - to be focussed or not distracted
If you think about it, this is pretty much what it takes to build a successful marriage.
Should we break this down a little bit?
Energy
Being married is like running an ultramarathon such as Marathon de Sables. If you’ve never run an ultramarathon (aka never been married), it would be a struggle to understand why someone would put themselves through the challenges that they do running an ultramarathon like this.
While the duration may be very different, it requires the same sort of attitude to push yourself through to the finish line when things get tough. Enjoying the journey in general and not worrying about the finish makes it easier to keep going.
Contrary to what modern pop culture tells you, it’s not the #couplegoals that make your marriage worth it, it’s waking up next to each other, wanting to spend yet another day or wanting to go on yet another adventure together that gets you going.
Apparently, most of these ultra marathon athletes apparently only think about running the next 5 minutes, and that fuels their energy to finish.
Adaptive Intelligence
You don’t need a 150+ IQ to have a good marriage. You need some basic smartness to pick and fight your battles, in order to adapt to the vagaries life poses to all married couples - children, career, blurring boundaries with your own families, social pressure, temptations, etc.
A 150+ IQ may or may not serve you in these situations.
Professional competence is welcome - brings income into the household, signals status if you are low on self-worth. But it almost NEVER guarantees marital success. So, if you’ve mistaken professional abilities for relationship competence, you might want to reconsider?
Sometimes, pain may be unavoidable, but are you smart enough as a couple to take a blow where it hurts less? Are you smart enough to realise that it might just be a minor blip in a lifelong journey, be able to pick yourselves up and march on?
Integrity
At its core, integrity is about saying NO. It’s about not indulging in actions that you can’t reconcile with your values. So, in that sense, integrity in a marriage starts with identifying marital values of you and your partner, and the courage and discipline to say NO to anything other than that.
A successful marriage is filled with lots of NOs. NOs to each other and NOs to others, including your own children. I’d written about establishing healthy boundaries to make a relationship work, having integrity is about respecting these boundaries consistently as a couple.
Look around you - how many couples do you know who embody energy, intelligence and integrity? Several, probably. But we fail to appreciate them simply because we may not measure quality of marriages based on these metrics.
Instead, we are conditioned to applaud couples who’ve amassed wealth, miles, children or social media marketing skills. I am not dissing on these “accomplishments” by any means but I am only hoping to encourage a bit more diversity in the stories we tell each other.
What does it take to run good marital operations? What does it take to feel more secure in a relationship? How do you negotiate for more freedom in relationships? I wrote about hierarchy of marital needs, but as a society, we need to start recognising the journey of sustainably achieving these needs in a marriage, including failures along the way.
The more we populate the world with stories of “perennially happy couples”, the more injustice we do to our future generations. Whether you believe in it or not, people who are married today have an onus to contribute to this balanced view of building committed romantic relationships.
The rules for cis-gender-heterosexual-monogamous marriages have been laid out by our society. Sure, you can make some amends to your individual contract, but beyond certain boundaries, it ceases to be cis-gender-heterosexual-monogamy.
So, if you’ve chosen to be in one of these, I’ll be honest - it takes energy, intelligence and integrity to see it through to the end.
What I’m reading/ watching/ listening to:
Machos Alpha: watched this brilliant Spanish show on Netflix. It’s a coming of age of these four 40+ year old men who are friends, and learning to live in a modern world. I can’t remember the last time I have laughed so much. They do not hold back.
Twenty Five Twenty One: if you have ever been in love as a teenager, this is an absolute must watch. The last Korean show I’ll watch for a while. sniff sniff.
Couples who’ve been together 30+ giving love advice: this was so cute. we need more of this and from all different life stages from across India and rest of the world.
Old people talking above love: I bet you can’t watch this without smiling.
Shapely Gal song: Your Existence by Wonstein