Creating Your Own Luck

"Over the long term, you both change. You discover the things you don't like about each other and, if you're unlucky, you forget the things you did like. How do you possibly get through all that?"
(Author Salman Rushdie, interviewed in British Elle about his four marriages and four divorces)


Salman Rushdie is one of the world's great writers; I expect he'll win the Nobel Prize in Literature someday. But when it comes to marriage, he's apparently as clueless as the average Joe.

What struck me about the above quote was the word "unlucky". By definition, luck, or the absence of it, is something that's out of our control. Luck is finding a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk, or getting upgraded to first class for no apparent reason. Bad luck is being laid off from your job, or having a tree crash down on your car in a windstorm. There's no question that both good luck and bad luck can affect our health, wealth, and happiness in any number of ways. But when a marriage fails, it's usually not due to something as random or unforeseeable as luck. It's due to attitudes that were formed, decisions that were made, and behaviors that were deliberately engaged in.

Rushdie is certainly correct that people do change over the course of time and people do find out that the other person isn't perfect. But I think he's wrong to conclude that there's nothing we can do about it, other than to accept the inevitability of divorce. We can't stop our spouse from evolving as a human being---and we shouldn't want to---but we can make a conscious effort to understand and appreciate the changes that are taking place in him (and we can try to recognize that we've changed, too, and not always for the better).

We can't pretend that we weren't disappointed when our illusions were shattered, but we can recognize that we created those illusions by seeing only what we wanted to see. And while in times of stress it's easy to forget why we were attracted to someone in the first place, we still have the power to remember the good qualities and the good times.

Readers of my book know that I don't believe every marriage can or should be saved. I don't know how people tolerate physical or emotional abuse for ten minutes, much less twenty or thirty years. But I do believe that there are far too many unnecessary divorces: divorces that were caused not by wrongdoing or genuine incompatibility but by lack of effort.

In marriage, we can't just drift along and wait for our luck to change. We have to create our own luck. We can do it by training ourselves to see the other person through fresh eyes and with a sympathetic heart. We can also do it by anticipating changes and dealing with them in a positive way: accepting the ones that are inevitable, celebrating the ones that are good, and recognizing that every change is an opportunity for insight and discovery.