A marriage made in cynicism

Is cyn­icism about mar­riage a guid­ing prin­ciple of our gen­er­a­tion? It does seem to be get­ting that way. In dis­cus­sions I have, there is rarely a voice that comes out in sup­port of the insti­tu­tion. This means that these con­ver­sa­tions rarely last very long, as it’s fairly dif­fi­cult to have a wide-ranging heated debate if everybody’s in agree­ment. Sadly, what always sur­prises me is that people I know whose par­ents have had a long and happy mar­riage are equally cyn­ical — if, like me, your par­ents divorced (and, frankly, didn’t exactly behave like Mr and Mrs Blissfully-in-Love before that), then I guess this anti-marriage atti­tude is under­stand­able. The first views you’re going to get of mar­riage are most likely going to be from observing your par­ents, so I some­times fail to under­stand why the chil­dren of con­ten­ted couples often carry around the same neg­at­ive atti­tude as the chil­dren of unhappy rela­tion­ships and divorce.

I’ve writ­ten this post the wrong way round. What promp­ted these thoughts was read­ing the art­icle Mar­riages made in hell by Bar­bara Ellen:

“True love is very rare, and should be cel­eb­rated as such. In an aver­age life­time, if you find love once, you’re lucky. If you find it twice, it’s a mir­acle. Any more than that and you’re kid­ding yourself.”

This means that, like her, I get unbe­liev­ably soppy when I see a couple who seem to just be so right together (no names though, you’ll under­stand) because, although we can often kid ourselves that we’re in love, when it really does hap­pen it’s some­thing worth cel­eb­rat­ing. Even if it’s happened to other people and not to you. Sniff.

Hav­ing said that, I also agree with Bar­bara Ellen that when Crap Couples (her term, not mine) split up, it’s not wrong to be relieved — that’s not a cyn­ical atti­tude, just real­ism and relief. This is the 21st cen­tury, after all, and (for bet­ter or worse, and indeed for richer or poorer) it isn’t a hugely dif­fi­cult move to get out of a relationship/marriage these days. This descrip­tion, in par­tic­u­lar, rang some dis­tinct memory bells:

“They are Crap Couple, and every­one knows at least one of them. She’s frazzled from all the effort it’s taken to nab him; he just stands there pulling rue­ful ‘doomed’ faces like some­thing out of The Likely Lads.”

That’s the worst, isn’t it? To see someone who’s happy that they’ve got who they want, while the other half of the rela­tion­ship is look­ing for the quick­est way out. I do, how­ever, think that the “he” and “she” in the descrip­tion can eas­ily be swapped around — and into every com­bin­a­tion of she/he, he/he and she/she as well. Crap Couples are all-inclusive, as every­body must real­ise, and respect no bound­ar­ies of rela­tion­ship types.

Maybe it’s time to stop beat­ing ourselves up for being cyn­ical about mar­riage and rela­tion­ships. We’re not being cyn­ical. We’re the real­ism gen­er­a­tion. We know and appre­ci­ate a really good thing when we see it, and the rest of the time we’re just being realistic.