The psychotherapist Esther Perel has counseled hundreds of couples who are having trouble in their marriages, and as she sees things, asking all of this from a marriage puts a lot of pressure on relationships. In her words:
Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide: Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise. And we think it’s a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that.6
Ideally, though, we’re lucky, and we find our soul mate and enjoy that life-changing mother lode of happiness.
But a soul mate is a very hard thing to find.
FINDING YOUR SOUL MATE
Okay, so no one said searching for a soul mate would be easy. Still, in many ways it seems like today’s generation of singles is better off because of the changes in modern romance. Taking time to develop ourselves and date different people before we get married helps us make better choices. For instance, people who marry after the age of twenty-five are far less likely to divorce than those who get married young.7
We also don’t even have to get married if we don’t want to. Getting married and starting a family was once seemingly the only reasonable life course. Today we’ve become far more accepting of alternative lifestyles, and people move in and out of different situations: single with roommates, single and solo, single with partner, married, divorced, divorced and living with an iguana, remarried with iguana, then divorced with seven iguanas because your iguana obsession ruined your relationship, and, finally, single with six iguanas (Arturo was sadly run over by an ice cream truck).
There are no longer any predetermined life paths. Each of us is on our own.
When we do marry, we are marrying for love. We are finding our soul mates. And the tools we have to find our soul mates are incredible. We aren’t limited to just the bing-bongs who live in our building. We have online dating that gives us access to millions and millions of bing-bongs around the world. We can filter them any way we want. When we go out, we can use smartphones to text any number of suitors while we are out barhopping. We aren’t constrained by landlines and relegated to whomever we have made firm plans with.
Our romantic options are unprecedented and our tools to sort and communicate with them are staggering.
And that raises the question: Why are so many people frustrated?
? ? ?
For the book, Eric and I wanted to see what would happen if we were able to gather groups from different generations to discuss dating past and present. We organized a large focus group of two hundred people.
We sent out an invite and said that anyone who attended had to bring one or two parents to the event. Then, when people showed up, we split the families into two different sections—young folks on the left and parents on the right. We spent an hour going back and forth between the sides, asking people to explain how they met new people to date, asked each other out, and made decisions about marriage and commitment.
When we talked to the older people who were in happy, successful marriages, the way they had met sounded quaint and simple, with much less stress than singles go through today. Sure, they met at a young age and probably weren’t as sophisticated then as they later became, but as one woman told me: “We grew up and changed together. And here we are in our sixties, still together.”
People from the older generation there that night had almost always asked each other out immediately over the phone or in person. This is how a gentleman named Tim described the first time he asked out his future wife: “I saw her at school, and I said, ‘You know, I have these tickets to see the Who at Madison Square Garden . . . ’”
That sounds infinitely cooler than texting back and forth with a girl for two weeks only to have her flake on seeing a Sugar Ray concert.
When I talked to the people about dating back in the day, they said they’d go to one bar or a mixer, which was like a community dance, usually put on by a church or college or other local institution, where young people could talk and meet. They’d stay there the whole night and have one or two drinks.
That seems more pleasant than what I see out in bars today, which is usually a bunch of people staring at their phones trying to find someone or something more exciting than where they are.