I was at a friend’s house this weekend and with all the bloody Valentine stuff going on, of course the conversation steered in the direction of love and marriage and happiness and all that fun stuff. Anyway, someone made a comment that a lot of guys end up cheating because they compromise on who they get married too. And the choir said “Amen!”. Forget the cheating bants, it’s not really why we are here, plus we’ve written about it times without number, it’s too broad, let’s talk about the compromising thing. So you have a dude, steady job, good income with a good amount of savings and of marriageable age and he decides to go fishing around to find a nice sweet girl, good family, similar background and also of marriageable age and puts a ring on it, perhaps one Valentine’s day. Vom. The guy compromises because he figures it’s the “right time” to get married, especially in Nigeria where a married man is synonymous with being responsible, charitable and a damn all rounder, especially when you add kids into the mix. I’ve heard of men being refused promotions because they hadn’t yet reached that milestone and were over a certain age, is that not a form of madness? But I digress.
I know I’ve been talking a lot about the man’s point of view but it’s partly because I feel that everyone knows all too well how women compromise, it’s almost expected. The worst one for me though is when a woman knows that the man is making a compromise by proposing to her and she still sees no reason to not go along with it. It’s like being in a damn lucky dip, there’s nothing about you that makes you the winner, your number was just in the right place at the right time. I’m sure you’re probably wondering why on earth I’m going on like some bitter old hag but the truth is that enough people don’t face up to certain realities in life and then they wonder how ‘everything’ went bad.
The answer for me is simple, everything went bad because most people these days don’t really take the necessary time out to really get to know their partners before they get married. We have very little idea of our significant others flaws because we spend so much time masking our own. We want to be seen as perfect and see them as perfect so that the notion of crazy, stupid, unimaginable, Disney love is closer to our reality than the cold hard truth of flawed, over analysed, under appreciated but ultimately better love. I say better because in my opinion, it is better for me to have critiqued my significant other to the point where I know exactly how they would react if I did certain things, than it is for me to have a significant other who is only mine because of convenience and good timing.
A friend of mine recently sent me an article of the same title from The Philosophers Mail that really resonated with me. They had up the simple sketch above of a person’s face and then said “We don’t see this picture as someone who has no nostrils, eight strands of hair and no eyelashes. Without even noticing we are doing it, we fill in the missing parts.” The trouble is that what our brain places in those holes of knowledge are usually what we want to see, reflections of ourselves, and not necessarily the true form of our supposed beloved. Many people don’t want to look and truly assess whether they are mostly compatible with the people they are dating seriously. I say mostly compatible because life, not Disney. And this lack of desire to truly seek is the root cause of people making the wrong choice in what is arguably the single most important decision in their lives.
Woosh. You guys, at this point let me just confess that this is more of a rant than anything else. I think I finally exhausted most of my points before I realised I didn’t even really have a question to ask.. *sigh*. Well, I suppose I want to know your thoughts on my rant, do you agree or disagree? Do you think it’s possible to truly know all of someone’s flaws and still have that Disney type of love for them?
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