In the NY Times:
L.A. Paul, a professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Yale, began her 2014 book, Transformative Experience, by asking readers to imagine they’ve been given the opportunity to become a vampire. All their friends have become vampires, and they seem happy and stylish, not to mention immortal.
Trouble is, Paul wrote, “you cannot know what it is like to be a vampire until you are one.” And there’s no going back. She called this “a special sort of epistemic situation.” Special, yet not unusual. Paul wrote, “For many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it.”
Getting married is probably as transformative as becoming a vampire. . . .
By and large, as I have said here many times, getting married makes most people happier. But not everybody, and the effect is larger for men. One of the few demographic facts that the men of my acquaintance seem to all know is that married men live ten years longer, but that isn't true for women. Plus there is a real risk that things will turn out terribly for everybody, including any children, so marriage is indeed a leap into the unknown.
1 comment:
I imagine the factor (or set of factors) that actually matters is all the things that go into creating and maintaining healthy long-term relationships, rather than a made up legal / religious status. It's just that the one often goes hand in hand with the other, I suppose, for arbitrary reasons of tradition and societal norms.
My intuition suggests to me that people who aren't equipped to forge healthy long-term relationships are probably also not equipped to make healthy decisions in other regards, and consequently don't live as long because they don't take as good care of themselves, physically or emotionally.
There's also something to be said for outside perspectives on problems - many of us, even the best of us, are blind are to our own flaws when viewed from our own vantage points, and it can be extremely helpful to have someone you can trust (who also knows you incredibly well) to give you a second perspective to challenge your own complacency. "Parallax", as my friends and I tend to refer to it.
Personally, I really hate the "vampire" comparison - I feel it's utterly absurd for something to think "you cannot know what it's like to be married" before you are. Worse, it feels like a cop out and an excuse for our society's tendency to not talk about important things like that. You absolutely can be taught what to expect out of marriage, even if imperfectly - we just don't have a tradition of bothering to explain things to anyone.
And it's not just marriage / relationships. We don't really talk about sex. We don't really talk about mortality. We don't really talk about any of the most important, impactful aspects of human life. Instead, we mostly expect people to just "figure it out" as they go along, bumbling through things, and then cluck disapprovingly when they muck it up.
You can teach emotional intelligence. But we don't really have the desire to - nor the levels of empathy and humanity, both individual and societal, that best serve it.
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