Our culture, our pop culture in some ways especially, will often give us what I call the soul-mate myth. And it’s this idea that there’s some perfect person out there waiting for you and that once you find them and love them and then marry them, you’ll have this perfect connection that engenders intense emotional connection, sense of romance, passion that in turn leads you to be happy and fulfilled most of the time. I think there’s a kind of naïveté that we have around the soul-mate myth, rather than recognizing that we’re all flawed.
Having a list of, in a sense, four or five nonnegotiables for a potential spouse or romantic partner but not a list that extends to 20 items. Any kind of serious relationship, including marriage, is going to be at times deeply challenging and hard and require a lot of work. So I think kind of having a more realistic understanding of the way that love and marriage tend to work out for most of us would be helpful in reducing the expectations and making people more realistic about it.
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