So, every few months or years I write down my current thoughts on marriage, partially because part of me thinks I'll be super groundbreakingly wise & people will come back & reference my thoughts for years to come, & partially because part of me thinks once I'm actually married I'll be able to look back on these things when times are hard & laugh & laugh. I don't usually post them anywhere, but this time the idea came in a dream & in the dream I blogged about it so I guess I will for real. Here it is:
A marriage involves 3 forms of energy:
First, there is the "passion"--that hard-to-define connection between one person & another. A lot of people call this being "in love".
Second, we have what I call the "connection"--the shared interests/hopes/dreams/&c. of the two people. This is a colder & more sure connection that can be had with platonic friends as well as romantic interests. It can even be had with enemies in certain conditions, but now we're getting side tracked.
Third, there is good old-fashioned work. The energy it takes to stick it through the hard times & build a strong marriage that lasts forever.
These correspond to three things we deal with in Thermodynamics. The hot passion of the "in love" feeling is like a region of high temperature, while the calmer intellectual connection is a region of cold temperature & the work is still work.
The biggest problems seem to come when people treat marriage like a heat engine. That is, they take the energy from the hot place of passion & expect to transform that into the energy to work through difficulties as well as foster a deeper connection. This doesn't work for two reasons: reason #1 is that the heat of passion varies with the season. Sure, sometimes it may be hot enough to get some work out of it, but other times it will be even colder than the cold intellectualism of the connection region, & if hard times decide to visit then, where are you going to get your work? But even if somehow you could keep passion burning forever, I still don't think this would last because marriage isn't a heat engine, it's a heat pump.
In seasons where passion is burning high, you can take that energy & convert it into a more solid connection, then--when the passion dies down--you can switch modes & use the cold connection to increase the heat of passion. But all the time the transformation is affected by putting work INTO the system, rather than expecting to get work out of it. You do need at least some of the other two aspects as well to run the thing efficiently*, but if you're willing to work you can always get the thing running.
At that's what I think at this time.
*When you start incorporating efficiency, this whole thing starts to break down. Ideally, you want to increase both the passion & connection in your marriage, but in heat pumps as the temperatures get further & further apart, more & more work is required to maintain those temperatures. I don't know, maybe that's accurate, but I always thought as you increase in passion & connection the work required would trend downwards (at times it may increase, but the general trend). Perhaps you could say marriage is some sort of magic heat pump with a variable efficiency & have efficiency correspond to outside circumstances? When times are easy, efficiency is high & little work is required? &/or maybe instead of having passion & connection relate directly to temperature, have them be the variables in some sort of exponential or decaying sine function that converges to a certain maximum value? &/or have them be inversely valued--that is, as passion & connection increase in magnitude, they somehow approach the same value? I don't know, & I don't want to do the math to figure it out right now. Maybe I'll write a follow-up someday.
