In today's world, replete with self help books, and guides on how to be your best self, or how to have multiple orgasms, marriage appears to be out of date. A so called bad marriage certainly is out of fashion. Relationship therapists will try and help iron out problems. They will tell you have to communicate better. They will tell you to make date nights, or to draw up love maps. They will aid you in how to make bids to one another, and how to respond creatively to bids. They will tell you to avoid sarcasm, stone-walling and other destructive behaviours. Maybe they will teach you to have more sex? Perhaps they actually think you would be better off apart and you should do an conscious uncoupling.

I'm sure some of this maybe helpful. But we may wonder if this misunderstands the psychological nature of marriage. If marriage is simply a welfare arrangement, or a wellness deal, then it seems doomed. There are few happy marriages. There are lots of happier ways to arrange one's living arrangements. Perhaps a commune, or a polyamorous set up? Or living together without marriage. But I would echo the experience of the analyst Guggenbuhl-Craig:

@In my practice I have made the following remarkable observation: the level of difficulty in a marriage, the sum of suffering, irritation, anger, and frustration, also the neurotic and perverse elements which are to be found in a marriage - all these do not necessarily parallel a tendency to dissolution of the marriage. That is to say, outwardly bad marriages are often clearly viable and actual continue until the death of one of the partners. On the other hand, less problematic marriages, those which contain less pathology, often show a tendency towards dissolution; they seem to dissolve more readily than do the more difficult marriages. The observer who sails under the flag of wellbeing has difficulty in understanding this. His tendency is to give those marriages in which neuroses, sexual perversions, twisted relationships, and similar phenomena appear, a bad prognosis.@

This is because marriage is really nothing to do with wellbeing. Just like climbing Mount Everest is not really a pleasant experience. Certainly marriage, considered psychologically, may provide solace and satisfactions, but it is also painful. So why do we do it? Because we are not utilitarians. We are not trying to constantly maximise our happiness. In the Sunday papers we are pressurised to do so. Hack this, tweak that. But we actually seek out difficulty and meaning. Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig argues that marriage involves sacrificing things we hold dear in our personality, in order for the marriage to continue. This is the opposite of the idea that we can have it all. He argues that marriage, in old-fashioned language, is about salvation. He understands it as mutual confrontation until death. I will write more about this in coming days.