A friend forwarded an
article that quoted J.R. R. Tolkien's letter to his son. He was attempting to pass on his fatherly wisdom in
regard to how expectations around marriage had become unrealistic. This was of course in the forties. I wonder what he would surmise in 2018.
“When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soulmate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along. Someone whom they might indeed very profitably have married, if only --. Hence divorce,
to provide the ‘if only’.”’
There is no denying that options have exploded in the last century. It used to be that you went to the store to buy bread. There may have been a few options, though my mom is gone so I cannot conveniently ask her. Come to think of it many people baked their own. Now there are, and this is a conservative guess, over fifty choices from whole wheat bagels with poppy seeds to gluten free sandwich loaves sliced extra thin. Does that make
the final decision more likely to be perfect, or simply exhausting? I doubt that my mother, or her mother before her, expended a crumb of energy worrying if there was a better loaf out there somewhere, if only she had driven to a few more supermarkets.
Now admittedly choosing supper is less consequential that selecting a life partner, and yet I wonder if the deluge of options there has served us as much as we would like to think. One used to marry from the
pool of people within perhaps twenty miles, and now it is not unheard of to find someone in an online selection that stretches across the continent.
"The essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’ (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering. … Only
a very wise man at the end of his life could make a sound judgement concerning whom, amongst the total possible chances, he ought most profitably to have married! Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married
to.”
I am intrigued by his inference to the possibility that the person you marry is not the only consideration. How we evolve as a human being in concert with another imperfect being is perhaps what truly launches us out of that narrow compartment where the only question is whether we are ourselves happy.
