3 Factors to Avoid Fear in Every Challenge

Does every challenge require wisdom, equanimity, and detachment…including picking a spouse?

Dear August,

When we met, you told me “Every challenge from picking a stock to picking a spouse requires wisdom, equanimity, and detachment if these decisions are to be based on fact, not fear.” Does this read right for picking a spouse? Or does it need softening for that specific point? - Jamie

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Jamie,
First of all, go to the head of the class for picking this up and stopping me dead in my tracks. I ended up thinking, “Hmmmm, he may have a point. I have to think this one over.” And when someone does that for me it really makes my day. I’ve been chewing on it since yesterday and loved every minute so first and foremost thanks for a good catch and thanks for making me think.

I’m sticking to my guns. I think this apparent flaw in my thinking is a good example of how I tend to be a bit controversial because I so often “break the frame” by going against conventional thinking. If others take issue with this statement as well it will be because they want to think picking a spouse is all about passion and “love,” and my comment smacks of cold, calculating, rational analysis like G. Gordon Liddy marrying his wife because he liked her genes.

But what I’m actually saying is that we should marry for love but that TRUE LOVE (there’s that damn word “truth” again that no one today believes exists) requires more than passion and chemistry. Much more. True love that will stand the test of time and temptation must transcend mere “feelings” and go much deeper. And I would argue that these feelings — which we all feel — must be balanced, informed, and deepened by the “wisdom, equanimity, and detachment” that so few of us have. Our choice in a spouse starts with NATURAL feelings but must be tempered, tested, and found valid through the acquired SECOND NATURE qualities of “wisdom, equanimity, and detachment.” And while it may SEEM that I’m “spoiling all the romance” with my argument, I’m actually trying to make sure that the romance lasts.

By the way, stock investing doesn’t mean being coldly calculating either. Warren Buffet is a very passionate guy. He loves the market, he loves the game, and he is totally committed to it. The romance and passion are definitely there, as a starting point. What he adds is his ability to step back from his passion and make objective and wise decisions on individual stocks. Love and passion are critical to being good at anything we want to do. But they are not enough. As a logician would put it, passion is a necessary but not sufficient reason for getting married.

In the spirit of wisdom, equanimity, and detachment, let’s strip away the veil and look at love and marriage without our rose tinted glasses for a minute. Approximately 50% of all marriages in our society end in divorce. Of the remaining 50%, how many are actually “happy?” How many unhappy people are sticking it out for the kids, for financial reasons, or from fear of being alone?

In fact, the odds against a lasting, happy marriage have gotten so bad that The Wall Street Journal recently editorialized that for the first time since the census was first taken (and even accounting for all other factors) more Americans are living alone than in any kind of relationship. A development The Journal bemoaned, as do I. “Commitment phobia” has gotten so bad that you can barely pick up a woman’s magazine without a cover piece on how to overcome it. More and more people just live together with one hand constantly on the eject button.

So what’s gone wrong? Perhaps many things, but for the sake of this discussion I would argue that too many of us choose our spouses based solely on feelings and eschew my advice to strain these feelings through the sieve of “wisdom, equanimity, and detachment.”

Down through history, I know of no society that left such a momentous decision as marriage entirely to the couple involved.

Our ancestors knew that we tend to marry impetuously for lust not love. They knew long before Freud and Jung that we project qualities onto the beloved that are not truly there. They knew we tend to marry from the fear of loneliness, or just because everybody else is getting married, or from fear of childlessness. They knew that we expect too much of marriage; we expect our spouses to “fix us” when no other person can make us happy and it is ridiculous and unfair to expect them to.

Most importantly, they knew that we tend to overlook fatal flaws because we are convinced that love will get the beloved to change. (I confess to listening to the Dr. Laura Show. I love to listen to people’s heartaches and test my advice against hers. Every single day she tells about twenty unhappy women to suck it up and stop whining because they’re husbands didn’t change after she married him. Her vantage is always the same. “Was your husband a slob before you married him? Then you knew what you were in for, but you chose to ignore it. Get over it. You made your choice and now you’re trying to change the rules in the middle of the game.”)

In other words there are right reasons and wrong reasons for getting married and the word “reason” implies we have to go beyond chemistry and feelings. Whether through arranged marriages or through friends, family, and affinity groups, down through history a much wider group of people were either directly or indirectly involved in the choice of a spouse. The idea that two people in a vacuum make this choice based on emotion is an incredibly new — and I would argue still unproven — idea. Historically, these other people involved in our decision represented the collective WISDOM of society as a whole. They represented the experience of the older and WISER tempering the passionate enthusiasm of the lovers. And to this day, for example, there is research that suggests that arranged marriages in places like India and China do lead to better outcomes. (Disclaimer: I wouldn’t go for an arranged marriage either!)

So I would argue that feelings are a given in a marriage decision just like the desire for gain is a given in choosing a stock. In order to make a good decision in marriage and in stocks we need to add wisdom, equanimity, and detachment.

1. We need wisdom to look at our prospective mate honestly for who he or she is and not what we want them to be. We need wisdom not to rationalize their flaws away. We need wisdom to discern whether these flaws are deal breakers or just things we can accommodate. We need wisdom to discern whether our fault finding is justified or just building a case against commitment.
2. Equanimity implies self-knowledge. It means being comfortable in our own skins, centered in ourselves. Equanimity means we have conquered, or are at least thoroughly aware of, the insecurities that cast a deadly shadow over our decisions. Equanimity allows us to be honest with ourselves and we have to be ruthlessly honest with ourselves about the spouse we choose. What are our expectations? Are they justified? If our needs are justified and our prospective mate cannot provide them, do we have the equanimity to face this truth and walk away? Better yet, do we have the equanimity to break it off if we realize that we will make our prospective spouse miserable? Do we have the equanimity to consult with trusted family and friends over our choice in a mate without getting defensive and angry if they don’t tell us what we want to hear? Do we know ourselves well enough to be able to unequivocally say that we will stick it out when things get tough in the marriage? Can we be faithful??? Do we have the equanimity and character it takes to have the tough conversations about children, religion, money, and lifestyle before we get married and not succumb to the wishful thinking that “we’ll work these things out as they come up?”
3. Neither wisdom nor equanimity can exist without a certain amount of detachment. All good decisions rely on the ability to take a step back from the heat of the moment and coolly evaluate other factors. The single biggest mistake we make is becoming identified to the point that we lose all sense of perspective. In investing they call this fatal flaw, ironically enough, “falling in love with a stock.” Detachment doesn’t mean a character that cannot commit. It doesn’t mean standing aloof coldly watching the world go by. It does mean seeing things the way they ARE and not how we THINK or ASSUME they are. If a potential spouse has been unfaithful in two previous marriages then it behooves the third prospective spouse to step back and consider whether this person will be faithful the third time around no matter how hot and heavy things are.

What is wonderful about America is our can do spirit and the youthful self-confidence that has us forever looking to the future rather than the past. What is bad about America are the flaws that such an attitude reveals. We are so arrogant that we think we can ignore history and tradition whether in picking a mate, a stock, or a spiritual path. We are so damn smart that we cockily assume that we can make it all up as we go along. I respect those who go their own way. I admire those who eschew the guardrails of hide bound tradition and take the road less traveled. I like to think that my own life choices reflect this American trait.

However, too many Americans think that rejecting the strictures of tradition is the EASIER path when actually it is the HARDER path. Tradition is nothing more than the collective wisdom of mankind handed down. When we reject this knowledge then we must do an enormous amount of thinking on our own to discern the outdated from good sense. Too often, modern Americans eschew both tradition and the enormous work involved in thinking it all through for themselves. Yes, Einstein audaciously rethought the universe and dethroned Newton, but he didn’t do it on the cheap. He worked his tail off thinking it all through.

Freud said most people don’t live. They are merely lived by their passions, fears, and insecurities. When we eschew both tradition and hard thinking we are left with trial and error and what we pick up through osmosis from the herd mentality around us. This is a prescription for disaster and 35 million prescriptions a year for Prozac.

Worst of all so many of our decisions are based on superstition and we don’t realize it. We superstitiously believe that MY LIFE will magically work out without tradition or tough thinking. My life will work because I am special and I deserve it because I am my mother’s favorite child. As always, at the heart of this is ego. The hardest truth of all is that life doesn’t owe us anything. The hardest truth is that we are not guaranteed a happy ending just because we are human beings and show up. As Jimmy Carter said, “life is not fair.” Behind so many of our decisions is the implicit assumption that “of course my marriage will work and this stock will go up. Things will work out because life wouldn’t dare disappoint me.”