Do You Expect a Spouse to Save You?

Success and happiness are, in large part, a matter of expectation. To borrow an analogy from C.S. Lewis, if you have two groups of people in the same building and one thinks it’s a hotel and the other thinks it’s a prison, they will come away with very different opinions of the accommodations.

It is for this reason that one of the greatest and most insidious pitfalls of romantic relationships is setting your expectation too high. Let me explain, because it’s probably not what you’re thinking.

What do you expect to get out of romantic relationships?

I’m sure you’ve heard the line, “You complete me,” from the movie Jerry Maguire, even if, like me, you’ve never seen the film. It’s a romantic line, and works fine as poetry, but beware of taking it at face value, for the sentiment it expresses will kill your relationship as certainly as a cancer will kill your body.

In the Symposium, Plato describes love as a kind of lack: we sense something is missing in ourselves and desire someone or something to fill it. He was mistaken, or rather, that is not the kind of love that ought to exist between human beings, at least not as its chief element. Love as a perception of lack and need is the kind of love that that ought to draw a man to God; it isn’t the kind that ought to draw a man to a woman.

To expect another person to complete you, to expect that she will fill you up where you are empty, that she will prop you up where you are weak, in a word that she will make you happy—is to expect too much of any other person.

Human beings are not meant to save each other in that way. We’re not equipped for it.

The blunt truth is, a relationship will not make you happy, and you have no right to expect it will.

Happiness means living well, fulfilling your purpose here on earth. It is not for anyone else to ensure that for you, to fill in where you are wanting, or to lead you on to perfection.

Now, of course, these things will be involved in any healthy relationship: we must and ought to support one another, advise one another, try to hold each other up when we need help. The thing is, though, this cannot be either the foundation or the main tone of the relationship. You cannot expect happiness to come from the other person, because that’s simply beyond her capacity.

To borrow an analogy from Prof. Tolkien, we ought to see each other, not as guiding stars, but as companions in a shipwreck. It’s a very good analogy; for people trying to make it through a shared disaster do not expect each other to solve the problem, only that they will be there to help each other through it.

Instead, love between two people means an overflowing of self.

Allow me to offer what I think is the proper alternative to Plato’s idea of lack that needs to be filled: Love between people is more of an overflowing of self. Two selves meet, join, and overflow one to the other.

But mark this: neither is fundamentally changed by the process.

They remain what they were, with their gaps and flaws and cracks, only grown to include each other. The completion, the perfecting of self and hence the happiness is something that can only be achieved by the self and God, not by the spouse.

You mustn’t expect a spouse to make you happy; you should rather expect to be happy together. But if you were incapable of happiness before you met her, you will still be afterwards.

True love is not completion but expansion.

By the way, this is not to say a spouse will be incidental or that you should cultivate a Buddhist-style detachment from her. Only that her share in your happiness is one that did not exist before her, not something that had been plaguing you for years that you expect her to fix.

It is akin to two houses, built side by side, being expanded until they form a single mansion, rather than material from one house being used to shore up the flaws in the other. Once this is done, they of course can’t be returned to their original state without violence.

Thus, love is not completion but expansion. Tom Cruise would have done better to tell Renee Zellweger, “You make me more than I am.”

Marriage, by itself, won't make you happy. But it will expand your capacity for happiness.

This does not mean, by the way, that you ought to put off searching for a spouse until you feel satisfied with yourself enough to expand it to include another.

It just means that, whatever you need to improve, you mustn’t expect marriage or your spouse to provide it. Marriage expands your capacity for happiness: it does not, in itself, make you happy.

It’s hard, isn’t it? It’s a little frightening even, to know that even such a glorious thing as marriage will not make us happy. But unless you understand this before going into marriage, that the same conditions for happiness apply in and out of a relationship, and that others cannot provide them, your relationship will suffer from your unrealistic expectations.

Somewhat paradoxically, though, once you stop expecting your spouse to make you happy, you will find that you are much happier with her.

Don’t expect her to be your savior, or your idol, and you will be more able to appreciate what she is: a person, who also has needs, lacks, and flaws that need filling in, who is also pursuing happiness and trying to find her way towards it.

In fact, your companion in a shipwreck.