Relationships

Why is it that people get married? I don't mean "Why does marriage exist" but rather, what are the reasons that we choose to live and likely share our life with another person?

Naturally, reasons vary from person to person. There are a variety of practical reasons to marry someone you're in a relationship with, but they are rarely cited as the actual "raison d'etre" for the finalization of a marriage. Generally speaking, the primary reason people will cite is love (that's not necessarily a bad thing!).

It does, however, warrant clarification. As I've experienced life, I've often heard a philosophy - especially among the more intellectual married - that love has very little to do with feeling. Often, initially, it has a lot to do with feeling, but a lasting love is based upon effort, persistence, and choices. Love, to cite the overused idiom, is a choice. Some days, it's a more difficult choice than others.

Love as a choice makes sense to me. It's not and likely never will be a universally shared view...but part of maturity is learning to accept that there are multiple answers to many questions, and that life experiences and genetics can and do create situations where different answers to the same question are correct for different people. For me, love as a choice is not only the way I want it to be, it's the only possibility I can accept. It's as apparent as 2 + 2 = 4. I'd argue that my "faith" in that possibility reinforces it for me and talk about how we create our own realities...but I won't talk about that in this post.

What is the motivation behind a choice for love? What is it those in a relationship look for in a lifetime partner? I've been struggling with this question for quite a while, after I chose to end my semi-successful relationship overseas not because I was unhappy, but because I made a decision that it wasn't the type of relationship I wanted to have.

It's more than a little audacious to compare myself to Einstein, but I'm reading his biography right now. His experience in relationships was, to me, quite interesting. Let me tell you about them.

Einstein's first serious relationship was with beautiful woman a few years older than him while he was in his late teens. The woman was gracious, caring, and deeply infatuated with Einstein. She was in no way Einstein's intellectual equal, and on an intellectual level was completely unsatisfying for the young physicist. He broke off the relationship, much to her dismay. Einstein wrote a letter to her father apologizing for ending the relationship because he knew what an effect it would have on her. He felt a lot of guilt; my personal feeling on the matter is that the guilt was due to his complete inability to return any kind of love. The limerence (now an accepted concept for me) went away, and nothing was left for him. She, sadly, had a nervous breakdown shortly after her relationship with Einstein ended.

Einstein's second serious relationship was with a fellow classmate from his University: Maric. Maric was able to have intelligent discussions with him about topics that interested him greatly. They also shared a a bit of an "outsider" attitude and a general disrespect for authority. They dated through their university years, but Maric was unable to graduate from the advanced physics course and therefore unable to continue to graduate school.

Maric and Einstein were married, and their relationship still had a strong tie to their shared intellectual interests. As one might predict, this foundation proved shaky. Over the next 10 years, Einstein continued his schooling, formulated theories, met with the most intelligent and most highly regarded physicists of the world as he attempted to complete his theory of relativity and a related theory about the wave/particle properties of light. Maric stayed home and raised their children, shutting the door to any opportunity for her to keep any kind of pace with Einstein. Not surprisingly, she basically dropped out of the academic world completely.

This relationship did not function well. Both Einstein and Maric were eventually unhappy - Maric dissatisfied and depressed, Einstein annoyed and seemingly uninterested.

Einstein divorced (eventually, you're getting the short story here), and remarried a non-scholar (his first cousin Ilse, actually). Ilse was not educated, and wanted nothing more from life than a husband and to take care of the household and to support her husband. I can't tell you how this relationship ended...I'm still in the middle of the book. At the very least, there is some happiness in the relationship.

Are relationships with a strong intellectual component doomed to run into difficulties due to the realities of family-raising and a woman's undeniably heavy role in that process? Given, this is a single example of a rather unusual case, but the fact is that that if we choose to grow in life (as opposed to stagnating, surprisingly a common choice), we all change in different ways. Relationships that form due to shared interests will likely find that over the course of time one or both individuals will disagree at a fork, and go different ways. The shared interest will not always be there.

Is it a better answer then to take Einstein's path? Give up on attempting to find a partner that can satisfy intellectual needs (let the social and possibly work environments deal with that), and instead focus on finding a partner that you get along with in a domestic environment? There is no right answer...I'm only seeking my answer.