How to Choose a Spouse
“Tall, dark, handsome, sense of humor”, “must love dogs”, “adventurous, fun-loving, sporty” - what’s on your ideal partner list?
“Marriage is an institution with the best of intentions that is sorely tested overtime. I would not automatically applaud a marriage that has lasted 50 years. I would ask what has happened to the soul during that time. Has it grown? Has it developed? Did they mutually support each other’s growth and development, or did something get stuck at that point? Are early family dynamics still dominating that relationship?” (James Hollis on This Jungian Life’s podcast, although I can’t find the exact episode now.)
We have inherited a very specific idea of what supposedly makes a relationship successful, and in our mononormative heternormative society, it’s all about happiness and longevity. Maybe babies, if you’re considering the social angle. Either way, popular culture is all about who makes who happy (whom?), and I know you know someone (or maybe even are someone) who thinks if two people break up after 3, 8, or 47 years together, something must have gone wrong and time has been wasted.
As Jungian analyst Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig put it in his book “Marriage is dead, long live marriage”: if your goal is happiness, marriage is probably not the place to look. But if your goal is wholeness (i.e., a more complete, more honest, more developed version of yourself), there is almost nothing better than the sustained encounter with another person over decades.
"Marriage is not comfortable and harmonious. Rather it is a place of individuation where a person rubs up against oneself and against the partner, bumps up against the person in love and in rejection, and in this fashion learns to know oneself, the world, good and evil, the heights and the depths." (Adolph Guggenbühl-Craig, Jungian analyst, and like you can’t make that name up.)
This is not a popular POV, and probably makes zero sense if you’re in your 20s, have Sensing and/or Thinking preferences, are suffering through dating apps, and genuinely looking for someone to share your life with. But stay with me and maybe I can help you expand your search criteria, to make your choice more robust.
Happiness is the metric everyone has in mind when choosing a romantic partner, and I’m sorry to break it to you - happiness is simply not something stable that you can attain and maintain without considerable effort, no matter whom you choose. You’ve probably already scrolled past a dozen social media self-help posts saying just that, but let me slow it down so it can really sink in: Phases of unhappiness will occur in all your relationships, and if you think it’s your partner’s job to make you happy, you’re setting yourself (and them) up for failure.
IFS-founder Dick Schwartz has a delightful term for our partners: he calls them our tor-mentors. Geddit? Tormenting us by activating all our protectors and exiles so we might pay attention to and heal them, thereby mentoring us and helping us grow in our Self-leadership.
Let me know if you recognize this pattern: you meet someone, all is cozy, things go well, they get you, you feel like you can finally relax - and then there’s a glitch and the harmony gets interrupted. If things go off consistently, you (consciously or unconsciously) engage in one of three projects:
try to change your partner back to who they were at the beginning
try to change yourself
look for a new partner
This is not a character flaw. It is a completely understandable response to disappointment. But it is also, if we stay there, a way of opting out of what the relationship is actually offering. Of course you can break up and try again with someone else, but more likely you’ll hit the same wall again with the next person. (Flashback to the first time I read a short story driving this point home, 25 years ago, in Barcelona, by Quim Monzó, in case you want to look him up.)
So, as projections fade and the early glow of romantic love rubs off, we experience disappointment and conflict. Jung saw these not as signs of failure but as opportunities for internal work: the transformation of an emotional connection into something more conscious. The disappointment is not an obstacle on the way, it is the way. It's what clears up the projection and leaves you standing in front of an actual person, which is both more demanding and ultimately more interesting than standing in front of an image you constructed yourself. Again, definitely not what movies, books, or songs are teaching us, but the very unglamorous work of adulting and relating.
Notice I’m not saying you should stay with folks if they actively make you unhappy. Not at all. (And I’m happy to write another post about how you can become the primary caretaker of your protective and exiled relational happiness parts without having to rely on your partner so much.) But for now, I really invite you to stay with this thought experiment:
what if you entered a romantic relationship not just with list of demands, but also include a personal growth mindset?
Jung views marriage as a crucible of transformation, tempered by our shadow, capable of forging us into our best or worst selves. (crucible, noun: 1. A vessel made of a refractory substance such as graphite or porcelain, used for melting and calcining materials at high temperatures. 2. An extremely difficult experience or situation; a severe test or trial.)
In his essay “Marriage is a psychological relationship,” he points out the limitations to choosing our partners:
The young person of marriageable age does, of course, possess an ego-consciousness (girls more than men, as a rule), but, since he has only recently emerged from the mists of original unconsciousness, he is certain to have wide areas which still lie in the shadow and which preclude to that extent the formation of psychological relationship. This means, in practice, that the young man (or woman) can have only an incomplete understanding of himself and others, and is therefore imperfectly informed as to his, and their, motives. As a rule the motives he acts from are largely unconscious. Subjectively, of course, he thinks himself very conscious and knowing, for we constantly overestimate the existing content of consciousness, and it is a great and surprising discovery when we find that what we had supposed to be the final peak is nothing but the first step in a very long climb. The greater the area of unconsciousness, the less is marriage a matter of free choice, as is shown subjectively in the fatal compulsion one feels so acutely when one is in love.
In other words, you don’t know what you don’t know, and you’re very likely choosing your partner based on unconscious patterns you’ve internalized after watching your parents’ relationship, or the one you had with your caregivers growing up. The more unconscious you are about how those experiences are influencing you, the more you’re at their mercy. Always looking for Dad’s attention? You’ll likely choose an emotionally unavailable partner and expect them to redeem that part of you that felt rejected. Mother too critical? You might be so starved for loving kindness that you’ll accept way less than you give in return.
Adopting a growth mindset might even begin to fill your spiritual buckets, as you learn to see your soul and your Self as part of something bigger. This Jungian Life podcast has an episode on marriage where they use an alchemical framing:
“Jung saw marriage as an alchemy of instinct and divinity, a blending of the physical and spiritual that extends beyond legal and familial ties into the realm of the sacred.”
The alchemical metaphor here supports the idea of iteration and development. Alchemy doesn't start with gold, it starts with lead: something seemingly worthless, basic, unpromising. The work is to find what's valuable in the difficult material, not to swap it out for something more convenient.
Finally, Brené Brown, James Hollis, and Dick Schwartz all agree that our intimate relationships can never exceed our relationship with ourselves. This is uncomfortable to sit with, particularly when it's easier to locate the problem (or the good stuff, if you have low self esteem) in the other person. But it points to something I’ve experienced myself and am trying to get across to my clients: the degree to which I can tolerate knowing all my parts — with all their inconvenient characteristics, moods, or burdens — is directly proportional to the degree to which I can tolerate knowing those things in my partner. Or, in the words of Jung “Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
So when you’re looking for someone to reach that 50th anniversary with, doing a lot of inner processing will be inevitable. Transcending your dominant cognitive function, balancing your psyche, differentiating and individuating are tough but important tasks here in “Earth school", as some people call it. Choosing the right kind of partner who is understanding and supportive of those goals because they’re on their own path is oh so helpful.
By that definition, a successful marriage won’t always look or feel happy. It may contain a great deal of friction. But what distinguishes it from a marriage that sucks is whether both people are actually growing.
Now, I’m curious - what parts of you are showing up reading this piece? Maybe a part thinks I must be a bit of a masochist, and that with the right person surely all this stuff will be easy? Or maybe another part is wondering whether you broke up with your last partner too quickly? It’s the nature of the thing that my blog posts and videos are pretty generic and may not capture your individual situation. That’s what 1:1 coaching is for. So if there’s anything here that resonated that you’d like to talk about, schedule a free consult now to see if we’re a good fit.
