Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person
为什么你会嫁错人

IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.
这是我们最害怕发生的事情之一。我们不遗余力地避免它的发生。然而，我们还是这样做了：我们嫁错了人。

Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”
部分原因是，当我们试图与他人亲近时，就会出现一系列令人困惑的问题。只有那些不太了解我们的人才会觉得我们很正常。在一个比我们更聪明、更有自知之明的社会里 任何早期晚餐约会的标准问题都会是："你是怎么疯的？"

Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.
也许我们有一种潜在的倾向，当别人不同意我们的观点时就会大发雷霆，或者只有在工作时才能放松；也许我们在性生活后会对亲密关系感到棘手，或者在受到羞辱时会变得沉默寡言。人无完人。问题在于，婚前我们很少深入了解自己的复杂性。每当偶然的关系有可能暴露我们的缺点时，我们就会责怪我们的伴侣，然后收工。至于我们的朋友，他们并不关心我们，也不会做艰苦的工作来开导我们。因此，我们独来独往的特权之一就是，我们给人的真诚印象是，我们真的很容易相处。

Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.
我们的伙伴没有更多的自我意识。自然而然，我们会尝试去理解他们。我们拜访他们的家人。看他们的照片，见他们的大学同学。所有这些都会让人觉得我们做足了功课。其实不然。婚姻最终就像一场充满希望、慷慨大方、无限善意的赌博，由两个还不知道自己是谁，也不知道对方可能是谁的人，将自己绑定在一个他们无法想象的未来，并小心翼翼地避免调查。

For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the marriage of feeling — has largely been spared the need to account for itself.
在大部分有文字记载的历史中，人们结婚的理由都是合乎逻辑的：因为她的地块与你的地块相邻，他的家族生意兴隆，她的父亲是镇上的治安官，有一座城堡需要维护，或者父母双方都赞同对圣典的相同解释。在这样合理的婚姻中，流淌着的是孤独、不忠、虐待、心硬和从幼儿园门外传来的尖叫声。事后看来，理智的婚姻一点也不理智；它往往是权宜之计、狭隘、势利和剥削。正因为如此，取而代之的感情婚姻在很大程度上无需为自己辩解。

What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six months since they met; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it can feel. Recklessness is taken as a counterweight to all the errors of reason, that catalyst of misery, that accountant’s demand. The prestige of instinct is the traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable reason.
在感情婚姻中，最重要的是两个人被一种压倒性的直觉所吸引，并从心底里知道这是正确的。事实上，越是看似轻率的婚姻（也许他们相识才六个月，其中一人没有工作，或者两人都刚过而立之年），就越能给人安全感。鲁莽被认为是对所有理性错误的抗衡，是痛苦的催化剂，是会计师的要求。本能的威望是对几个世纪以来不合理的理性的创伤性反应。

But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.
尽管我们认为自己在婚姻中追求的是幸福，但事情并非如此简单。我们真正追求的是熟悉感--这很可能会让我们原本的幸福计划变得复杂。我们希望在成人关系中重现童年时熟悉的感觉。我们中的大多数人早年品尝到的爱往往与其他更具破坏性的动力相混淆：想要帮助失控的成年人的感觉，被剥夺了父母的温暖或害怕他的愤怒的感觉，没有足够的安全感来传达我们的愿望的感觉。因此，作为成年人，我们发现自己拒绝某些婚姻候选人，不是因为他们错了，而是因为他们太正确了--太平衡、太成熟、太善解人意、太可靠了--因为在我们的内心深处，这种正确感觉是陌生的，这多么合乎逻辑啊。我们和错误的人结婚，是因为我们没有把被爱和幸福感联系起来。

We make mistakes, too, because we are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.
我们也会犯错，因为我们太孤独了。当单身的感觉难以忍受时，没有人会以最佳的心态去选择伴侣。我们必须完全接受多年孤独的前景，才能适当地挑剔；否则，我们就有可能爱上不再单身，而不是爱上让我们免于这种命运的伴侣。

Finally, we marry to make a nice feeling permanent. We imagine that marriage will help us to bottle the joy we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: Perhaps we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat, with the evening sun throwing glitter across the sea, chatting about aspects of our souls no one ever seemed to have grasped before, with the prospect of dinner in a risotto place a little later. We married to make such sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage.
最后，我们结婚是为了将美好的感觉永久化。我们想象，婚姻将帮助我们把最初求婚的念头萌生时的喜悦装进瓶子里：也许我们是在威尼斯，在潟湖边，在汽艇上，傍晚的阳光在海面上洒下灿烂的光辉，聊着我们灵魂中似乎从未被人领悟过的东西，想着稍后在一家意大利调味饭馆共进晚餐。我们结婚是为了让这种感觉永恒，但我们却没有意识到，这种感觉与婚姻制度之间并没有牢固的联系。

Indeed, marriage tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a suburban house, with a long commute and maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerged. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.
事实上，婚姻往往会果断地将我们推向另一个截然不同的、更加行政化的层面，这个层面也许是在郊区的房子里展开的，有着漫长的通勤时间和令人抓狂的孩子，他们扼杀了婚姻所产生的激情。唯一的共同点是伴侣。而这可能是错误的成分。

The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person.
好消息是，如果我们发现自己嫁错了人，这并不重要。

We mustn’t abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.
我们不能放弃他或她，我们不能放弃的只是过去 250 年来西方人对婚姻的理解所依据的浪漫主义基本思想：一个完美的存在，他能满足我们的所有需求，满足我们的每一个渴望。

We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.
我们需要把浪漫主义的观点换成一种悲剧性的（有时是喜剧性的）认识，即每个人都会让我们沮丧、愤怒、烦恼、疯狂和失望--我们也会对他们做同样的事情（没有任何恶意）。我们的空虚感和不完整感是无止境的。但这一切都不是不正常的，也不是离婚的理由。选择与谁相伴，不过是确定我们最愿意为哪种痛苦牺牲自己。

This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.
这种悲观主义哲学为婚姻中的许多苦恼和焦虑提供了一种解决方案。这听起来可能有些奇怪，但悲观主义缓解了我们的浪漫文化对婚姻施加的过度想象压力。某个伴侣未能将我们从悲伤和忧郁中拯救出来，这并不能成为反对这个伴侣的理由，也不能成为婚姻应该失败或升级的标志。

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.
最适合我们的人不是与我们品味相同的人（他或她并不存在），而是能够明智地协商品味差异的人--善于处理分歧的人。与其说完美互补的概念，不如说能够宽容地容忍差异，这才是 "不会过分犯错 "的人的真正标志。兼容性是爱情的成就，但绝不是爱情的先决条件。

Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not “normal.” We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness,” striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners.
浪漫主义对我们毫无助益，它是一种残酷的哲学。它让我们在婚姻中经历的很多事情都显得格格不入、骇人听闻。我们最终会感到孤独，并深信我们的结合是不完美的，是不 "正常 "的。我们应该学会包容自己的 "错误"，始终努力以一种更加宽容、幽默和善意的视角来看待它在我们自己和我们伴侣身上的多种表现。