A social-psychological argument also helps to account for the formation of particular marriage bonds. This argument suggests that decisions to marry reveal the human predisposition to harbor positive illusions. It is a curiosity of human nature that young people with an urge to marry are oblivious of admonitions about the risks and hardships of married life. Even those who grow up in dysfunctional families become possessed of the idea that for them it will be different -- their marriage will succeed. Experienced married couples can only smile at such illusory expectations as those carried to the altar. But what accounts for such persistent positive illusions? Two things, in my view. The first is that cultures generally present their youth with unrealistically positive images of married life. Marriage is garnished with a mystique of human fulfillment; it is a kind of promised land to which young people are encouraged to aspire. The wedding ceremony itself is staged as a spectacle of transcendence in which the young couple is publicly launched on a sea of hopes and dreams. The splendor of these occasions, focused exclusively on the positive, reinforces highly unrealistic expectations. But another dynamic of illusion is operating as well, and this one concerns the positive illusions young people hold regarding both themselves and the person they are about to marry. The betrothed pair hold each other in such esteem -- are so beautiful and virtuous and resourceful -- that onlookers are driven to nausea. To say that young lovers are excessively biased in their perceptions of each other is an understatement. And if a minor character flaw is to be admitted for the sake of reality -- well, it's nothing that won't change once the marriage begins.

Young lovers have an impaired perception of reality. Their expectations about the state of matrimony are widely unrealistic, their assessments of each other are exceedingly exaggerated (in part because of courtship deceits by the delusion that near-comic proportions. The institution of marriage, then, both has evolved and continues to thrive (at least in part) by virtue of strategies of deception and self-deception.

The work of married life, like the work of any social group, is to prevent and resolve conflicts of interest and to establish in their place confluences of interests. And the domains of these conflicts and confluences are the same as for other social groups: intellectual, hedonic, and self-esteem. When the political realities of married life begin to generate conflicts of interests, and as the sense of we-ness begins to erode, then the marriage stands in need of new means of co-operation to restore coherence. In the case of marriage some advantages are build into the process. The sharing of a household and various material possessions provides conditions for overlapping self interests. The appearance of children is an obvious means of reinforcing we-ness. And the shared history of intimacy is also a powerful resource that is readily accessible to life couples beyond petty conflicts.

....... When altruism in a marriage begins to lose its intensity, the marriage loses its coherence. And the secret of maintaining a high level of altruism is to find the appropriate means of activating the emotional substrates of altruism; that is, affection, sympathy, gratitude, resentment, and guilt. Without the engagement of these emotions, a marriage will begin to dissolve from deficits of kindness, concessions, compromises, demands, and reparations. What, the, are the means for activating the level of emotional involvement required for a coherent marriage? The answer to this question have defined a whole industry of marriage counseling, and I will not attempt to summarize its major theoretical directions.

But petty deceits, constructive as they may be, are not sufficient means to sustain the emotional involvement required for a coherent marriage. Something larger, something more epic is needed. Like comprehensive societie, marriages need a mythology, a narrative, offering a level of meaning that transcends all emerging conflicts of interests. In some relationships this level of meaning is provided by the conventions of a religious perspective, but this is not necessarily the case. Phyllis Rose, in her excellent account of five Victorian marriages, has concluded that marriages involve imaginative narrative constructs, and what matters most is that couples share such a narrative, even if it is inadequate to reality: "In unhappy marriage ...... I see two versions of reality rather than two people in conflict. I see a struggle for imaginative dominance going on. Happy marriages seem to me those in which two partners agrees on the scenario they are enacting, even if... their own idea of their relationship is totally at variance with the facts." The facts, Rose insists, are less important than a shared imaginative view of the facts. A marriage, she says, is "a subjectivist fiction with two points of view deeply in conflict, sometimes fortuitously congruent.

The mythology of a marriage need not be politically correct in order to render a marriage coherent -- it only needs to be fortuitously congruent. This amounts to saying, basically, that the newlyweds have it right. Deluded as they may be about the state of matrimony, each other, and themselves, one thing is clear: They are full of imagination and fancy. And with the fulsomeness of their delusion comes the we-ness of a complete confluence of interests. ~ Extracts - Pages 118 to 221