Success and Coffins

I once heard the phrase, “The only successful marriage is someone standing next to a coffin” and couldn’t help but chuckle in side. The bluepill harpies love to laugh and wallow in the supposed failure when one of our brethren is about to end his marriage. The funny thing is, where’s the failure? In investing there’s the sunk cost fallacy and it applies to life too. It’s a value we discuss often here; we challenge the guys in shitty relationships to not get stuck in it. Yet there are the naysayers laughing at those guys, “Oh look another merp has sabotaged his marriage”

Several threads in the past week or so have discussed the states of marriage. This is a supposition on my part but in one of those threads I posited that probably 80% of marriages are just ok. If you were looking at a bell curve, maybe 10% on either end were extreme. 10% were disasters, and 10% were excellent. But that middle hump is likely just meh. Divorce now stands at 40-50% depending on your source. The supposed positive; Divorce numbers continue to decline, but those numbers are likely skewed. Men and women are living together and marrying less. Men are opting out of marriage, likely due to the penalty of divorce among other things. It’s possible that many of the divorces of the past are not happening simply because people cohabitate, the relationship ends, and they move on. So the question still remains, if you’re marriage (or LTR) ends in divorce was it a failure?

Of course not; that’s simply the attitude of someone who has no outcome independence or abundance mentality. Let me give you a simple analogy. You set up a great vacation, and take the trip of a lifetime. You go to some amazing tropical paradise or old world destination. You eat drink and be merry. One day before the trip is over, your wallet gets stolen. Would you call that trip a failure? Hardly. The end may have sucked, the fallout may have been a pain, but in the end you’ll look back at those pictures and say, “Ohh wow that was incredible. I can’t wait to do it again.”

Vacations and Wallets

I’ve been lucky enough to have three serious relationships in my life. One was in college; she was a fun, party girl who was down for anything. She was the first girl I thought I could see myself with in the long term. The second was a girl I met just out of college. She was finishing up her degree in grad school, I was a young budding engineer, and she really knew how challenge my intellect. To this day she was the wittiest girl I have ever dated, searing, dry and goofy would spill out of her mouth in a matter of seconds. She’d leave you gasping and wondering, ‘was that an insult or was she flirting?’ Currently I’m in my most recent. I met my wife through work and she had a proper resume for being my misses. She was funny, attractive, low n-count, wanted a traditional family; the package. Throw in dating in between, some short term flings and plenty of frogs instead of princesses and you have the sum of UE McGills love life. These were and are still all successful relationships, and to date none have ended with me standing next to a coffin.

I talk to my wife about aspirations for our kids; how to teach them when a relationship has met its natural end. My biggest fault was those early long term relationships probably went on too long because I didn’t know how to say, “yep this has run its course.” I was too invested in the memories of the past and the romanticized version I had in my head. I think especially guys with a nice guy tendency get so invested in trying to fix things that they forget to say “yep, not worth fixing time to move on and put energy into something else.” I hope that I can impart this on my kids that it’s ok to say “We’ve changed and the relationship is different now and not for the better. Maybe it is time to end it.”

People get caught up in the past; they romanticize it for what it was, and not for what it is. What it ‘is’, is in the past. It will have no ability to change the present from where you are now. It’s like that great vacation where you learned a lot about the world but had your wallet stolen. You may have learned about the Louvre or that Elephants are matriarchal but you also learned to keep your wallet in your front pocket and not advertise it.

My relationships were fundamental in changing me and allowing me to grow to a different point. The girl in college taught me to never go back to a party, the girl early in my career taught me that sometimes someone is too insecure and demanding, no matter how much they make you laugh. My wife has taught me what it means to raise a family and give beyond just you. You know what? I wouldn’t give any of those relationships up, or the experience they provided. So how could I call them failures? If my wife asked me tomorrow for a divorce would it be a failure? Three kids, and at least 15 years of good times would be hard evidence against it.

Backstory to you 2.0

Sometimes people sabotage their marriage. Maybe they sprinkle some alpha on it. Maybe they vetted wrong. Maybe even both partners woke up and went, ‘meh’. Surely that’s not a failure, just a change in the circumstances. I think many people sabotage marriages, jobs and friendships because they just don’t have the courage to stand up and say “This aint working!”

So remember our mission isn’t to save marriages, it’s to save the man. You need to be able to step outside the situation and ask yourself, ‘has this met its natural end or is the value worth me putting effort into it.’ If you embrace abundance mentality you know you can replace the contents of your wallet. You know that you can always look back and remember the fond memories. And you know you can always look back and say, “this is where I learned to do...”

So if you’re miserable and she’s miserable be a leader and end it. There’s no failure in that. Your mission should be and should always be focused on rule zero. If circumstances change, acknowledge and move on. Don’t be afraid of failure, because if you can walk away from something and say “I learned to do xyz” it’s not a failure.