A great many people are single for longer than they intended for one reason: they are waiting to feel certain.
They have been told, by roughly every film they have ever seen, that love is something that happens to you — that the right person produces an unmistakable feeling and the feeling is how you know. So they date, and it is nice, and it is not that, and they move on. Sometimes for fifteen years.
The feeling is real. It is just not the thing.
None of this is an argument that attraction does not matter or that you should marry someone who leaves you cold. It matters. It is necessary.
But feelings are, by their nature, weather. They are affected by sleep, stress, novelty, how the week went and what else is going on in your life. The things you found thrilling at twenty-two are frequently not what you want at thirty-eight, and the things that sustain a person at sixty are not what moved them at thirty. If the whole structure rests on how you feel, the structure moves whenever the weather does.
Anyone who has been married a long time will tell you the same thing: there are stretches — sometimes long ones — where the feeling is thin. Illness, small children, grief, work, the sheer ordinariness of a Tuesday in February. Marriages do not survive those stretches on feeling. They survive them on a decision that was made and keeps being made.
The Jewish version of this
There is a well-known teaching, associated with Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, built on a piece of Hebrew: the word for love, ahava, contains the root hav — give.
The claim is not that giving is what you do because you love someone. It is the reverse: you come to love the people you give to. Love is downstream of investment, not upstream of it. Which is why parents love newborns who have contributed nothing to the relationship, and why people who stop giving to a marriage usually stop feeling much about it not long after.
If that is right, then “waiting until I feel it” has the causality backwards. You are waiting for an output while withholding the input.
What choosing actually looks like
Not gritted teeth. Not staying in something bad because you committed. Choosing is specific and daily:
- Deciding that this person’s life is one you are going to take seriously, and then acting like it on days when you do not feel like it.
- Repairing after an argument rather than waiting for it to fade.
- Giving the benefit of the doubt on the small things, deliberately, as a policy rather than as a mood.
- Continuing to do the things you did when you were trying to win them, after you have won them.
People who do that report, reliably, that the feeling comes back. Not continuously — in returns. That is what a long marriage actually feels like from inside.
They are not your best friend
Worth saying plainly, because the phrase is everywhere and it sets people up badly.
A spouse is not a best friend. A best friend is someone who is like you, who agrees with you, who is easy. That is a real and good thing and it is not marriage.
A spouse is the other half of something — frequently very different from you, and useful precisely because of it. The patient one married to the decisive one. The one who plans married to the one who notices. Those differences are not obstacles to get past on the way to becoming the same person; they are the reason the household functions. Two people who are identical have not built anything, they have doubled up.
Expecting a spouse to be a best friend also loads one relationship with a job it cannot do. You need friends. Your marriage will be better if you have them.
How to tell the difference in practice
If you are trying to work out whether what you have is worth choosing, the useful questions are not about intensity:
- Do you want the same life — children, city, the kind of Jewish home, the pace of things? (Jewish Home Vision makes this concrete.)
- Does conflict resolve, or does it go quiet and come back?
- Can you say something true that is hard to say, and does the relationship hold afterwards?
- Do you respect them — not admire, respect?
- Are they someone you would want your children to resemble?
Those have answers. “Do I feel enough?” does not, which is why people can turn it over for years without getting anywhere.
One caution
None of this means override your instincts. If something is wrong — if you are uneasy, if you are being diminished, if you do not respect them — that is information and it should be listened to. “Love is a choice” is not a reason to choose someone who is bad for you, and anyone using it that way has understood it backwards.
It is an argument against one specific error: waiting, sometimes for a decade, for a feeling that was never going to arrive in the form you were told to expect.