If you don’t get the girl (or guy), you can’t be fulfilled. If you do get her, you’ll soon learn that she can’t live up to your impossibly high expectations — or you can’t live up to hers. This will cause her to leave you — or you to leave her. Or you’ll both be chronically unhappy.
Of course, the worst time to have the epiphany that you have wrongfully elevated your partner is after a few years of marriage and kids.
“The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy,” wrote C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity. “I am not now speaking of what would ordinarily be called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in reality. I think everyone knows what I mean. The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us.”
Or, as Tim Keller, pastor of Christ Redeemer in New York City, has said regarding the Old Testament story of Jacob: “You go to bed with Rachel; in the morning it will always be Leah.”
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