How to have a great marriage (or not)

Magazines and the internet just keep doing it. They keep coming up with lists and ways to be successful at something when there are no lists and ways that work for all the people all the time. But because it attracts people's attention, they do it anyway. This week, one of the few remaining national weekly magazines did it again. Time magazine's feature story is a six-page spread on how to stay married. And like every other list, it will work for some and fail for others because everybody is different.

It goes back to Sigmund Freud and his concept of the pleasure principle. Now Freud did a lot of work in regards to psycho-sexual feelings and behaviors that turned a lot of people off, even though there was some merit to all of them but the pleasure principle was not tied specifically to sexual feelings at all. Freud simply discovered that all of us are happiest when we're doing what we want to do and we're having fun doing it. It's that simple and that doesn't bode well for long-term marriages and relationships because when we're united with another person, most people recognize the need for compromise and doing a lot of things they DON'T want to do to keep the other person happy.

Add to that the fact that there are as many different personality types as there are people. Some people are dominated and dictated by their sexual drive and focus more on it than anything else. This is okay if your partner is similarly inclined but not good at all if they have a decided lack of interest in the subject. Others love sports, either as a spectator or a participant. I have a friend who has been a runner his whole life and now that he's creeping into the senior citizen crowd, he has cut back on his running and increased his bicycling, having recently made a 100-mile journey on his bike.

Duane Tappe is the most community-minded person I've ever met. He is constantly in service to others because it gives him joy. It's literally in his DNA. He would lose a lot of the happiness and optimism we see in him every day if he was no longer able to do the things that turn him on the most. And the list goes on from person to person.

But despite that, Time magazine presented us with a list in their article that reflects a person's best chances to have a happy, long-term marriage. The longer you wait, (at least until you're 26), have a college degree, don't have any kids either legitimately or illegitimately, are gainfully employed, have similar interests in sexual behavior and are similar to their mate in values and background, you'll probably find it easier to stay married. But I don't think it took a magazine article to point that out to us. These are things we almost intuitively already knew. People who share more commonalities have a better chance at establishing a long-term relationship than people who don't. There's an old saying that opposites attract but don't last and there's all kinds of evidence to support that conclusion. We may be interested in another person because they're nothing like us but eventually, that interest goes away because there's a reason why they're nothing like us. They have a set of norms, values and lifestyles that aren't compatible with ours and eventually that will cause problems in a relationship.

Another obvious point Time magazine made was the need to do whatever we can do to make the other person in our life happy and to avoid contempt at all costs. Therapists say that contempt sets off a lethal chain reaction that kills vulnerability among other things and vulnerability is a prerequisite for intimacy. Without intimacy, commitment is a grind and without commitment, the marriage is turned upside down.

We all know people in relationships like this. They may be friendly to others but they're not to each other. They may have meaningful conversations with others but they don't with each other. They're rude and insensitive to each other although they tend not to act that way towards others. In other words, it's obvious to most onlookers that they're in a bad situation that's likely not going to get any better but they stay anyhow. Some even bury their heads in the sand and ignore infidelity, which is what Hillary Clinton is going through during this election year in regards to her staying with Bill during his period of messing around. Many people wonder how a man or woman could endure that and stay the course but some people do it every day.

Ultimately the Time magazine article concludes with a pearl of wisdom that didn't take research to discover. Their advice is to choose well. They contend that the cascade of hormones that rains down on humans when they first fall in love can sometimes blind people to their poor choices. Try to find someone you know you'll love even when you don't like him or her that much. And then cross your fingers.

So what started out as a scholarly work ends on the other side of science and in the lap of personal decision making, attraction, common sense and choice.

You either choose well or you don't and the biggest problem with that is you usually don't know for sure until you've already said 'I do.'