Wed Flags: Why We Marry The Wrong Person

Anyone you marry will probably be at least a little bit wrong for you. We don’t expect pure bliss every single day. Yet, so many couples display such a deep, grating incompatibility that something more than everyday friction is clearly at work. They’ve simply married the wrong person. 

How do we keep making this mistake? You would think smart, educated people would avoid it, but academic success provides no immunity. Otherwise brilliant people blindly make this leap every day. Given that picking the wrong partner is the most expensive and exhausting mistake you can make, you’d think we would pay more attention to how we choose. 

The tragedy is that the reasons we ruin our lives are entirely predictable. 

When we start looking for a partner, our wish list is a blurry mess of sentiment. We want someone “fun,” “kind,” or “up for adventure.” These aren’t bad traits, but they completely ignore what we specifically need to avoid being miserable. 

We’re all crazy in our own distinct ways. We’re uniquely neurotic, unbalanced, and immature. The problem is, no one ever pushes us to map out the exact shape of our madness. A good partnership isn’t a match between two perfectly healthy people (those barely exist). It’s an arrangement between two delightfully damaged people who have figured out how to safely accommodate each other’s insanity. 

If you think you are easy to live with, that’s a red flag. The only normal people you know are the ones you don’t know very well. Being single is a dangerous trap because it gives you the illusion that you’re agreeable. When you get angry alone, no one hears you shout, so you underestimate your temper. When you work until midnight, no one asks you to come to dinner, so you ignore your controlling habits. We need to know our flaws long before we say our vows. A standard question on any early date should simply be: “So, how exactly are you mad?”

This lack of self-awareness is twice as bad because the people we date are just as clueless about themselves. 

We try our best to figure them out. We visit their hometowns, meet their parents, and scroll through their online profiles. We feel like we’ve done our work. But this is like assuming you can fly a jet because you successfully threw a paper aeroplane. 

In a smarter world, couples would submit to rigorous psychological testing before tying the knot. Hopefully in the future, this wouldn’t sound like a joke. To make marriage work, you need to deeply understand how a person views authority, humiliation, sex, money, children, and ageing. You simply cannot get this from a standard pub chat. 

Without this hard data, we rely on looks. We stare at their eyes, their smile, the bridge of their nose, and assume these features hint at a flawless soul. Our brains naturally fill in missing information. Just as we look at a sketchy Matisse drawing and see a complete face, we take a few charming quirks and construct an entirely perfect personality. We are brilliant, terrible artists of our own delusion. 

We think we want happiness in love, but the truth is a bit darker. We actually want what feels familiar. 

We first learned what love was when we were children. Sadly, those early lessons often came mixed with pain: feeling controlled, ignored, humiliated, or abandoned. When we grow up, we might actually reject healthy, mature, reliable partners. Why? Because they feel weird and alien. They don’t make us suffer in the way we expect love to make us suffer. 

Instead, we gravitate towards people who will frustrate us in comfortingly familiar ways. We marry the wrong people because the right one feels undeserved. 

You can never rationally choose a partner if the thought of staying single terrifies you. To make a good choice, you have to be completely at peace with the idea of living alone for years. Otherwise, you end up loving the fact that you aren’t single more than the person who saved you from it. 

After a certain age, society makes being single feel like a punishment. Couples stop inviting you to dinner parties. Going to the cinema alone feels awkwardly defiant. And frankly, finding casual sex without enduring searing humiliation remains maddeningly difficult. 

If society operated more like a giant university (with communal dining, endless parties, and easy hookups) people would only marry because they actually wanted the companionship of a specific person, not just to escape a lonely Sunday afternoon. 

Hundreds of years ago, marriage was a cold, ruthless business transaction. It was about trading land and securing wealth, completely disconnected from happiness. That trauma sparked a massive rebellion: the Romantic marriage! 

The Romantic ideal dictates that feeling “in love” is the only justification you need. Instinct became a god. If you try to analyse your relationship, write a list of pros and cons, or think too hard about a proposal, people accuse you of being unromantic. The ultimate modern romantic gesture is whatever Bruno Mars happens to be singing about: to recklessly propose after a few weeks, entirely bypassing the logical reasoning that we assume makes people miserable.   

It’s time for a third era: the Psychological marriage. We shouldn’t marry for land, and we shouldn’t marry just because we feel a rush of blood to the head, either above the waist or below. We should marry after sober, deliberate examination of our tangled psychologies. 

Right now, we fly blind. We read zero books on the subject, spend barely any time with actual children, and politely avoid grilling divorced couples on what went wrong. In the old days, people asked: who are their parents? How much land do they have? How culturally similar are they? In the Romantic age, people looked for the following signs: an inability to stop thinking of the lover. A sexual obsession. A belief that they’re an angel. A longing for constant contact. 

Today, we need to ask: How are they mad? How can we raise children with them? How can we develop together? How can we remain friends? How can we accommodate our needs for sex and loyalty? 

We have a desperate urge to make nice things permanent. We want to live in the beautiful European country we visited on holiday, and we want to marry the person we are currently having a brilliant time with. 

We mistakenly think marriage bottles joy. You remember the exact moment you decided to propose. You got married to lock that feeling in place. 

But marriage doesn’t freeze time. That golden moment depended on the fact that you weren’t working, you were staying in a beautiful hotel, and you had only known each other for a short time. Getting married throws you into a completely different reality involving a mortgage, a commute, and two crying toddlers. 

We should take a lesson from the Impressionist painters. They understood that the most beautiful things in life (a snowy afternoon, a break in the clouds) are entirely fleeting. Happiness arrives in minutes, not decades. We should learn to appreciate the short burst of everyday paradise without feeling the desperate need to trap them in a marriage. 

We all know the bleak statistics. We’ve watched friends go through messy breakups. Yet, we silently exclude ourselves from the rule. Because finding someone we love feels like a one-in-a-million stroke of luck, a 50% divorce rate seems likely a totally acceptable gamble. We just assume the misery is meant for someone else. 

By the time we consider marriage, we are usually exhausted. We’ve endured unrequited love, messy breakups, and endless, disappointing parties. We just want the turbulence to stop. We hope a wedding ring will end love’s painful grip on our lives so we can finally focus on something else. 

It won’t. There’s just as much fear, rejection, doubt, and betrayal inside a marriage as there is outside of it. It’s only when you’re single that a marriage looks enviably peaceful and boring. 

Preparing for marriage shouldn’t be left to instinct. It requires an education. We stopped marrying for money, and we’re finally starting to see the fatal flaws of marrying purely for romance. It’s time we start marrying for psychology. ⬣