When two people decide to get marriage, both of them certainly envision a bright future. Thank God, most families start this way. They may think they love each other so deeply that they will go through life together, no matter whether life will be hard or good. Unfortunately, half of them will get divorced in a couple years. It’s just a plain fact.

What’s wrong with the marriage in modern society? Haven’t all modern young people thought carefully about family life before marriage? Is marriage itself detrimental to something? Well just like the old saying: “marriage is the tomb of love”. Without love, marriage won’t last long.

Marriage consists of two people interacting on a daily basis. It is reasonable that a good start to dissect the marriage is to examine people, ourselves.

“Know yourself”, requested the Greek Philosopher Socrates. Socrates didn’t have a modest wife. But his question is still relevant. The question “Who am I?” is so intrigue that many people get depressed when confronted with this question. As a matter of fact, people in severe depression get so absorbed into this question that self-denying causes him/her suicide. It is such a serious question that most of us don’t dare to ask ourselves this question very often. Incidentally, people generally think low of their worth of life, the self-esteem.

No matter what self-perception you may have, most of us will think we are smart enough to explain and predict our behavior. We always hear these types of assertions: “I know what to do. My gut tells me what to do. I will be responsible to the consequences”. Retrospectively, we also think what we have done is alright, responsible, and worthwhile. Is this true?

Unfortunately, our intuitions are often dead wrong about what we will feel and do. Take the marriage as an example again. People in love are primary focusing on the positives and playing down the hardship of future life. They think their love will last for ever. Needless to say, for quite a lot loves, they fade away before marriage. For those loves which do bring to a culmination, half of them will end after marriage. Statistically speaking, the predictability of our gut is way too low.

Furthermore, the unrealistic optimism, exemplified in marriage situation, make all young couple feel confident that their loves last for ever. When commenting other people’s marriage failure, we always say: “those guys have problems themselves. We are different from others. We are better than them.” It sounds like a joke: “everybody is better than average.” It simply overestimates the future.

Ironically, most people attribute their marriage failure to their partners. They downplay their wrong doings (if any), and emphasize that their wives are mindless, bad tempered, tasteless, or their husbands are disgusting, unfaithful, careless, lazy, so on and so forth. This is the self serving bias all human beings have.

Let’s leave this arresting reality for a moment and examine the so called happy marriage in which marriage do last to the end of life. Naïve people may believe that for a marriage with love, caring and sharing are the most important. Sadly reality is too murky and full of sin. One national survey have shown that 91% of wives and only 76% husbands credit wife did most of the grocery shopping. And husbands always underestimate the proportion of housework wives have done. Do you think there is no daily confliction in these families? Self serving bias is everywhere.

There are more to say about self. Here I give another example of our ignorance of ourselves, but for good purpose. When facing tragedies, people feel tremendous sorrow and think they will never recover. Well, most of us do recover, and quite some can do it in just a very short time. For a simple example, when two dating people break up, one of them may feel deeply hurt. However, most people get a fresh restart within a year. Survivors from disaster such as earthquakes or tsunami quickly recovered even though their relatives may die in the disaster. Evolution of self works pretty well in these situation.

Self-analysis is of no use, to some extent. Even if we do rationalize our behavior before we implement it, our actually behavior may still differ from what we have planned, and the consequence of our behavior are as unpredictable as those unplanned behavior. Our self-report is inaccurate. It is possible that our mental process of thinking itself may be different from the mental process of results. We may don’t know why we behave the way we do. We human beings are hopeless. Period.