What does a happy marriage look like? That’s easy: It looks like a man in charge.
Repeat that: The marriage is the man’s relationship. He makes contact. He forms the affiliation. He pushes the frontiers. He closes the deal.
Do you dispute this? He was in charge of the relationship from the beginning. He initiated it. He nurtured it. He pursued it. He escalated it. And he put the ring on it. Is any of that untrue?
He is the leader of that marriage, and he is the only leader of that marriage, because the relationship exists only because he quite literally made it happen.
There’s more: As a matter of ontology – as the practical expression of our biologically-engendred sex differences – in a male-female relationship, the male will be dominant. Not dictatorial, just the moral leader of that little polis, that family.
This will be the case even after he has ‘checked out’ – seemingly abdicated on his leadership role – because while he can lead her, she cannot lead him: He will not yield to her dominance.
There’s still more, the teleology inexorably implied by that ontology: The man is leader of the marriage because he waives the right to swoon – in battle and in the bedroom – conceding it to her.
All of this is actually expressed biologically, whether they like it or not – or even know that it is going on – but understanding it conceptually makes it possible to negotiate it rationally.
A romantic relationship works swimmingly well for both of them when he is driving it, and it begins to fail when he lets go of the wheel.
When the man wants the marriage to work, it works. When he doesn’t, it doesn’t.
If you want a happy marriage, marry the man who burns to be happily married forever to you. Marry the woman you can’t bear to live without. No other marriage can work for long.
Note the implication of those words: The love that is dispositive in a marriage is his. She has to love him, obviously, but the marriage will be happy to the extent that he loves her more than he hates the thought of losing her. This is why arranged marriages worked, because he went into it with the expectation that it would work so he worked hard to make it work.
As always, we are steadfastly striving to solve a terrible problem by looking at it from precisely the wrong direction:
Women can’t fix marriage. Only men can.
