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Opinion | Even have-it-alls like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie will fail at marriage when couples don’t speak the same love language
- Bertie Wai says many modern marriages are premised on unreal expectations. When we expect one person to meet all our needs, read our minds and always put us first, it is a recipe for discontent. Nor does the prevalence of social media help
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The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, and his wife, MacKenzie, are breaking up – and joining the proverbial other half of the population whose marriages end in divorce. Clearly, when it comes to marital bliss, even have-it-alls like the Amazon billionaire couple can end up in the same place as many of us.
My grandparents had an arranged marriage and did not part until death. When my grandma died, my grandpa was heartbroken. As a young child, I watched them bicker, but I also watched him cry, overwhelmed by memories of her, after she was gone. I don’t know if we modern people would call it love, but the bond between them was undeniable and transcended their differences.
A paradox presents itself then. Why is it that deep attachments can be formed in arranged marriages between people who often didn’t even know who they were marrying, but modern marriages, riding on the promise of romantic love and the force of free choice, often splutter? Shouldn’t it be the other way round? How do we begin to understand the discrepancy in our expectations of marriage?
I wasn’t born in the era of arranged marriages, but I have mused enough about modern relationships to have a few thoughts.
In big-screen love stories or other popular narratives, romantic love is often synonymous with the quest for “the one”: the person who will make all our dreams come true and fulfil all our needs.
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