5 Things Marriage Isn't

Marriage is like a tube of toothpaste: You get the best results when you start squeezing at the bottom. (Insert your own marital hanky-panky joke here.) The most successful marriages start with a solid foundation. That foundation is built on many things--mutual interests, shared beliefs, selflessness, and, of course, love--but the biggest problem going into many marriages is that those basics are often held back by unrealistic expectations.

All of us know someone for whom marriage didn't work out. We've all heard the statistics. First marriages have a failure rate of more than 40 percent. Second marriages end in divorce 60 percent of the time. This is particularly true of the generation whose parents married (and subsequently divorced) in the 1970s.

We think we know what marriage is because we've seen it on TV. It's Monica and Chandler, all candles and sex and witty banter. It's the end-of-the-day slow dancing of Cliff and Claire Huxtable. It's the tuxedos and pigtailed flower girls and white chiffon spectacle of The Bachelorette on ABC. Then, when everything doesn't turn out exactly as we dreamed, we look for an out, blame it on irreconcilable differences, and scrap the covenant.

The differences aren't the problem, though; our irreconcilable expectations are. Let's look, then, at some of those predetermined ideas and dump marriage out of its box. Here's something you should know before you say "I Do": not what marriage is, but five things it isn't.

In a society where we're plugged in twenty-four hours a day, where "community" is more often used to describe your Facebook friends than an actual neighborhood, people long to connect intimately with someone.  

We see couples everywhere--in restaurants, on TV, on the bus or train or sidewalks on the way to work--and feel like something is missing in our lives if we're alone. As humans, we have an innate need to belong, and we expect a spouse to provide that sense of acceptance and intimacy and comfort. We're Jerry Maguire looking for a soul mate, someone to whom we can say, "You complete me."

Best case scenario, that's what a good marriage will provide. But I know couples in loving relationships who remain lonely. Why? After all, they've found a perfect mate who has taken great strides toward fulfilling their need for intimacy. But that's a heavy load for one person to bear, despite the stories Cameron Crowe tells. Lonely single people become lonely married people. If your goal in marriage is to satisfy your need to belong, your next stop may be heartbreak.