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Marriage requires time, energy, empathy. It requires mental, physical, emotional and spiritual support. A successful marriage forces two people to put the success of the marriage above their individual successes. No institution that I know of forces an individual to abandon selfishness so completely. For it to work, individuality itself needs to be abandoned.
So it's not really surprising that so many talented, ambitious people have had failing marriages.
> Marriage requires time, energy, empathy.
Yes! As do all things. If you're not willing to commit the time, energy, and empathy necessary to get a cooperative task done, don't start it.
> It requires mental, physical, emotional and spiritual support.
No! Co-dependence is the path to ruin. This is very different from empathy and rendering help. Don't be a crutch for anyone else. Ever.
> A successful marriage forces two people to put the success of the marriage above their individual successes.
No no no! This is the path to misery and unhappiness. Your interests should coincide! They should be mutually shared! The success of any partnership is based on common interests, not on the partners selflessly making themselves miserable for the sake of some perceived interest of the other party.
Always pursue your own happiness. A healthy marriage is where you can make the other person happy by doing just that.
> For it to work, individuality itself needs to be abandoned.
Absolutely not! This sort of romantic nonsense plays well on Disney movies, but doesn't work in real life.
You'll just make yourself miserable, then you'll make your partner miserable, then your kids, and then everyone else in your family.
Absolutely take care of yourself FIRST. If you don't take care of yourself and your needs, you can't take of anyone else!
Nobody needs a useless, moping wreck of a person who is always depressed. Take care of yourself, then take care of others.
It works the same way as those emergency instructions you see on a plane. Put your mask on first. If you're not breathing, you can't help anyone else by definition.
> So it's not really surprising that so many talented, ambitious people have had failing marriages.
So many talented, ambitious people have failed marriages because they over-think things. They go on the Internet and read stupid posts. Normal people don't do that!
> No! Co-dependence is the path to ruin. This is very different from empathy and rendering help. Don't be a crutch for anyone else. Ever.
Support != dependence. It's as simple as someone who gives a shit about you beyond the level a room-mate would. I don't need my wife to get through life. But it's nice when she wishes me luck, or comforts me when something goes bad. And vice versa.
> No no no! This is the path to misery and unhappiness.
Disagree strongly. If I say, decide unilaterally to move to NY for a job (without the wife's approval), we're going to be unhappy. Compromise = putting the marriage first = trying to avoid when your wants/success directly conflicts with your partner's.
> Your interests should coincide! They should be mutually shared! The success of any partnership is based on common interests
Please, no 2 people have the same interests. Some shared goals are of course important (do both people want kids, want to live in the same country, enjoy certain activities together?), but they can enjoy different interests and get along. For example, when I play golf my wife will go on a spa date with a girlfriend or something...
> A healthy marriage is where you can make the other person happy
Fixed it.
> So many talented, ambitious people have failed marriages because they over-think things.
I'd say more likely because they pursue their own goals to the detriment of their relationships (and it's not always romantic partners, sometimes it's family and friends).
> > It requires mental, physical, emotional and spiritual support.
> Co-dependence is the path to ruin.
Co-dependence is a path to ruin, sure, but despite what one might infer from the elements that comprise the name, mutual mental, physical, and emotional support isn't even remotely the same thing as co-dependence. [0]
> > A successful marriage forces two people to put the success of the marriage above their individual successes.
> No no no! This is the path to misery and unhappiness. Your interests should coincide! They should be mutually shared!
Both are right -- or wrong -- but in any case incomplete. Successful marriage requires a certain degree of shared goals (particularly, the shared goal of success of the couple together), but real people never have all of their interests shared. The common goals provide the basis for each partner to compromise the pursuit of some of their non-shared goals in ways which accommodate the other partners (non-shared) goals, because doing so promotes the common, shared goals.
There are extremes, and I fear that the GP's intent was lost.
Compromise and selflessness are key to marriage. Individual ambition is the opposite of these qualities.
Extremity ambitious individuals who are not able to transfer this ambition to include the well-being of their partner set up the marriage for failure, regardless of their influence our talents.
I not saying that's what happened, but the GP points out that otherwise successful people with poor marriages isn't so hard to imagine.
Yes, there must be balance. "Abandon individuality" carried to it's literal extreme is wrong. But the essence of the GP's statement has truth: individual focus and individual ambition don't necessarily translate to a good relationship.
> Compromise and selflessness are key to marriage. Individual ambition is the opposite of these qualities.
We're spending a lot of time talking about things in the abstract.
A good example of what you're talking about is a wife quitting her job and staying home with the kids, even though she knows that it would make her miserable.
To you, that's a curtailment of ambition, compromise, and selflessness. To me, that's the beginning of the end. She will make herself miserable and then, she will make everyone else miserable around her.
I'm sure you have a counter-example at the ready, so let me say this. The key to a successful partnership (love, business, friendship, whatever) is pursuing common goals and interests without fucking the other person over. That last part is important.
And honestly, you should be living your life that way with regard to everyone, not just your spouse. Why hurt other people? Be confident in yourself, what you have, and what you can achieve. Then give as needed to others. That's not compromise or selflessness ... that's just sharing what you have with others.
I suppose where we disagree is that you feel you need to throw yourself on the sword to avoid hurting others? I have never found that to be the case in my life. I have always had enough to give to others without compromising myself.
> A good example of what you're talking about is a wife quitting her job and staying home with the kids, even though she knows that it would make her miserable.
> To you, that's a curtailment of ambition, compromise, and selflessness. To me, that's the beginning of the end. She will make herself miserable and then, she will make everyone else miserable around her.
Adding to this, I'm transgender, and my experiences with talking to other members of the trans community line up with this perfectly.
A lot of trans people are in similar situations. A good many of us don't realize it until later in life -- or if we do realize it earlier, we run headfirst into denial and don't accept it until later in life. As such, many trans people are already married when they accept being trans. Sadly, one of the most common responses to this acceptance is to say "well, I'm already married and my spouse is straight, so I'll just keep it a secret and resign myself to living with the dysphoria and never transitioning". Or they do try to come out, but their spouse reacts poorly, so they back up and lie through their teeth, saying "sorry, it was just a phase, it's passed now", and they go right back in the closet.
It doesn't work. Ever. What happens is that a) the dysphoria not only doesn't go away but often gets worse, and b) they come to resent their spouse for keeping them in the closet and preventing them from transitioning. So their marriage completely deteriorates over time, and they wind up coming out and transitioning years afterwards anyway. That's a good way to guarantee not just a divorce but a very bitter, resentful divorce that will guarantee no chance of them even remaining friends afterwards. Expect lots of recriminations of "What do you mean you've been keeping this secret from me all these years?" vs. "I sacrificed everything to make you happy!". Both parties will ultimately walk away from the marriage knowing that they wasted years, if not decades, of their lives.
And this is why the trans community has such a high suicide rate (well, half of it: the other half is that the people who did know young often have parents who are unsupportive to the point of abusiveness).
If they refused to sublimate their ambitions and make themselves miserable for their spouse's sake, things would have never gotten that bad. Maybe they'd somehow stay together after transition, or maybe they'd realize their goals are incompatible and amicably split up before they could waste too much time in an unhappy situation.
"you need to throw yourself on the sword to avoid hurting others"
Like I said, there are possible extremes, but in essence, yes.
I believe that love is characterized by sacrifice.
I wish I could upvote your post more than once. Co-dependence doesn't appear to be a healthy basis for any adult relationship.
As you say, co-dependence is different from offering empathy and help, I suspect the difference is when it becomes self-destructive. People have to take responsibility for their own happiness, partners (and friends and family) should never see it as their own responsibility to 'make you better', support seems to work best by being a friend for someone to talk to whilst they work through things for themselves.
For those who haven't heard of co-dependency (in relationships), here's an overview of some common issues:
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-17039/10-signs-youre-in-a-cod...
Co-dependency is definitely something to watch out for. I've read a number of books on the subject, and I'm a little surprised I was interpreted that way.
There's a huge difference between healthy support and enabling bad behavior.
Examples:
Your husband is drunk in the gutter. You can A) leave him there or B) drag him inside, clean him up, and put him to bed. If you pick A, you're allowing him to experience the consequences of his own mistakes. If you pick B, you're enabling him and saving him from his own mistakes. The person picking B is co-dependent, not supportive.
A wife has always dreamed of having a lake house. The state of the house is immaterial, she just wants to walk out the back door and see the water. She finds a house they can afford now, but the husband finds the dwelling unlivable, and they're unable to afford a nicer house. The husband can A) veto the lake house outright, saying he won't be uncomfortable for her dreams or B) move into the house and be uncomfortable for his wife's dreams or C) put a plan together to earn/save extra money and make sacrifices to get the house that will be agreeable to both of them. The person picking A is taking care of themselves, but sticking it to his wife. The person picking B is being co-dependent, doing something that makes him miserable for the good of their partner. The person picking C is the healthy one here, enduring shared, temporary pain to achieve an end that is agreeable to both.
A husband and wife have a vacation fund. They set a goal to save enough to go to Nepal the following year, and put together a savings plan to go. The wife follows the plan, sacrificing her gym membership for jogging and making fewer trips to the hair stylist. The husband ignores the plan, buys a new TV, eats at restaurants too often, and finds himself with a sizable debt at the end of the year. When it comes time to pay for the trip, the vacation fund has enough money to A) Pay for just the wife to go on the Nepal trip B) Pay for both of them to go to Disney Land instead C) Pay off the husband's credit cards. The person who chooses C is a text-book co-dependent. The person who chooses A is probably being healthy, but missed an opportunity for relaxation with her husband. This makes B a suitable option as well. The husband still has to handle his credit card debt, but his wife was willing to sacrifice her Nepal trip so they could be together. Perhaps it will inspire the husband to change his spending habits the next time around, or perhaps next year he'll be waving to her from the dock as she leaves on a cruise with her friends.
The key to avoiding codependency is setting clear, definable limits with your spouse, and then allowing them to suffer the consequences when they ignore those limits. It takes a level of self awareness to set good limits, but self awareness is not selfishness.
If you're able to build a marriage around self-sacrifice that has clear, definable payoffs, then your needs will naturally begin to align and the needs of the couple will supersede the individual needs.
> Your husband is drunk in the gutter. You can A) leave him there or B) drag him inside, clean him up, and put him to bed. If you pick A, you're allowing him to experience the consequences of his own mistakes. If you pick B, you're enabling him and saving him from his own mistakes. The person picking B is co-dependent, not supportive.
Outside of the context of an extended pattern of behavior, that's a bad example: as an incident, in isolation, it is not essentially co-dependent.
Broader context might reveal it to be part of a codependent relationship (e.g., the same thing happens weekly, with the same response, and no discussion or addressing of the problem) or a supportive one (e.g., it happened once, was followed by a discussion of why it happened and mutually agreed and followed-up-on steps to prevent it from happening again).
Context makes the difference between A being healthy and reasonable and just being an absolutely horrible partner (and person.)
Great examples, thank you padobson. I especially like the last one (the Nepal trip) as it's a little more challenging to find the right option, as there are always some grey areas when it comes to what's best (ultimately what was right would be what was right based on the personalities of those involved).
Just one thing, I dislike this notion of setting boundaries and building a relationship around self-sacrifice. I realise compromise is part of relationships and sometimes necessary but I don't think it should be central. To me a successful relationship is based on enjoyment. Enjoyment of the way you can share yourself with another, and they can share themselves with you. In my mind it's that which is central, through good times and bad, and the self sacrifice and boundaries only serves to keep a good thing going. Perhaps that's naive, but that's what I believe. I appreciate you didn't intend to suggest otherwise, I just think it's worth remembering that a relationship between two healthy adults shouldn't be based on a burden.
I completely agree that if the purpose of a marriage (or life in general) is to maximize enjoyment, then you definitely don't want to build it around self sacrifice.
An equally commendable goal, I think, is to become a more caring, empathetic person. In this context, self-sacrifice would take a more central role.
Personally, I'm trying for a mix of the two. I want to enjoy my life and marriage as much as possible, but I'll make enjoyment sacrifices if I can look back on my life and be satisfied that they were for the greater good.
I had a different interpretation of OP's post. Phrases like "put the success of the marriage above their individual successes" and the like are more of a sentiment than a prescribed behavior. It's like telling your spouse "you're more important to me than my job". On the one hand, in my case it's true - my wife is more important to me than my career in a general sense - but on the other hand it's not like she's making me abandon my career to, like, wait at home and fawn over her or anything. But if that prioritization actually caused me to make sacrifices where I'm no longer happy, then that's more of the "path to misery" IMO.
You can have a feeling of love strong enough to believe your spouse is the most important thing in your life, without being codependent. The codependency comes from the outcome: does this feeling cause you to abandon your own needs? To abandon your own pursuit of happiness? If not, maybe you do actually love the person deeply and you don't need to go worrying that you're in some dangerous, codependent relationship.
Full disclosure, happily married 9 years now.
> No no no! This is the path to misery and unhappiness. Your interests should coincide! They should be mutually shared! The success of any partnership is based on common interests, not on the partners selflessly making themselves miserable for the sake of some perceived interest of the other party.
Yes, what GP advocates is the foundation of an abusive relationship. There is no swifter way to guarantee the onset of emotional abuse than by pressuring any partner into sacrificing their happiness for the other.
> So many talented, ambitious people have failed marriages because they over-think things. They go on the Internet and read stupid posts. Normal people don't do that!
Normal people also have failed marriages for the same reasons.
Selfishness and a lack of genuine communication ruins marriages.
How long have you been married?
Not that I'm the person you ask, but for the sake of addressing your unspoken implication: 20 - and I concur with most of what the OP said.
So does pretty much any therapist working with couples.
We can quibble about details, but codependence and abandoning your individuality is the path to misery.
Married for 12, my parents and wife's parents have been happily married for 30-35+.
My issue isn't with the statement that "codependence and abandoning your individuality" is a path to misery, but with OP's huge extrapolations that giving 100% to marriage constitutes "codependence and abandoning your individuality"
> How long have you been married?
6 years now. 2 kids. Why?
I think you really misinterpreted the person you were responding to.
This says it better than I can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10706886
FWIW, I've been married 12 years with no kids and your response to this comment was absolutely spot-on and the response I wanted to make when I first read it. You said it much more eloquently than I would have.
This part rather struck me:
In the manly consideration toward Mrs. Dickens which I owe to my wife, I will only remark of her that the peculiarity of her character has thrown all the children on someone else. I do not know — I cannot by any stretch of fancy imagine — what would have become of them but for this aunt, who has grown up with them, to whom they are devoted, and who has sacrificed the best part of her youth and life to them.
It perhaps makes sense in a Victorian context, but today you might wonder, well, why he didn't look after the children himself?
It seems to me unlikely that he expected his wife to do everything for the kids. Having a nurse was common in those days. The complaint seems to be that his wife did nothing for the kids.
His wife also wasn't earning any money, presumably. So Dickens had to work to provide for everyone.
Also, they had ten kids.
When I first read "the manly consideration toward Mrs. Dickens" I thought he was talking about sex.
Having assumed that meaning, the next part about how her sister raising the children seemed to suggest that they had not had sex and that the children were not Mrs Dickens's.
But I think I was wrong because, he then goes on to strongly deny having an affair. Why hint at one affair, then deny another.
I think he meant "manly consideration" in the sense of "It would not be fitting of a man (read: gentleman) to make disparaging remarks about his wife in public". Perhaps I'm totally wrong though.
That's what he meant.
> It perhaps makes sense in a Victorian context, but today you might wonder, well, why he didn't look after the children himself?
The kids were taken care of. We're all better off that he was able to make the time to write as prolifically as he did.
Note his forceful denials of an affair at the end, which we now know to be false. Of course, he couldn't possibly admit to such a thing back then, but it does make you doubt the rest of the account.
> Note his forceful denials of an affair at the end, which we now know to be false.
Do we? Do we know that an affair (as opposed to an unconsummated infatuation) existed at the time of the letter, as opposed to later? A quick googling indicates that Miss Ternan may or may not have returned his affections.
Despite what various public figures would have one believe, it is possible (if not terribly probable) to resist temptation…
Citation for the affair? Wikipedia gives only weak evidence for them living together after the separation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens#Middle_years
And if you click the "Ellen Ternan" link there you will see that they lived together for 10 years and are even suspected of having a child (who died early).
Yeah, but he wrote this before he and his wife separated. Living with Ellen Ternan for ten years after that isn't good evidence that they had an affair before it.
There was a recent biography of Dickens by Claire Tomalin that went into some detail, or online I found this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/3554534/The-se...
Reputation damage control. Same with telling the wife to stay with him even though neither of them saw any benefit in it, the children were already cared for by their aunt and Dickens was apparently "cared for" by a lover.
This really just reminds me how much I hate Dickens' writing style. He adds unnecessary lists in the middle of sentences which distracts the reader, and adds little unrelated remarks that distracts from the point of an individual sentence.
As part of my humanities requirement I took a "modern english novels" class in college. Little did I know that literature departments have an erroneous definition of modern.
> I have uniformly replied that she must bear our misfortune and fight the fight out to the end, that the children were the first consideration, and that I feared they must bind us together in “appearance.”
I'm curious as to what he actually said to her. Nobody talks to their spouse in such a stuffy way, even if they are estranged.
Have you read the Pickwick Papers? It wouldn't surprise me if Dickens did speak that stuffily.
Is there an explanation for the "peculiarity of her character?"
On a slight tangent: Darwin's children drew vegetable battles on the manuscript of On the Origin of Species.
http://theappendix.net/blog/2014/2/darwins-children-drew-veg...
Just a slight tangent.
Sorry - I have no idea how I misread the title so badly. I'd delete this but I've missed the window.