And contrary to the psychology industry’s biological notion that we choose our mates based on a biological desire to keep our species going, we actually come together on a psychological plane. What actually happens as we mature into adults, and experience relationships that do not lead to marriage, is we develop an unconscious picture of this soul mate. Anyone who has met that one person understands that falling in love is not a biological experience but a mental one, that falling in love happens at a speed unimaginable to those who have not had this most wonderful experience.

But now comes the hard part, trying to figure out how to develop a life together. While the falling in love part happens beyond any imaginable time frame, the falling out of love happens at a turtle’s pace. What is needed to understand is this change in the relationship that takes someone from “for better or worse” to it’s over.

As it turns out, we develop our emotional perspectives from birth, by the examples given to us by our parents. In marriages where the couple struggles between sticking together and splitting up these influences can determine the outcome. What cause those conflicts in so many marriages are these negative insecurities from our past that cause us to fear the same result from our partner today.

What we are doing when we introduce anger and arguments into our marriages is projecting these past insecurities onto our partners, fearing those same results that we have seen before. This is where the wedge in the marriage comes from. What eventually happens after we project those insecurities enough times is we transfer those negative emotions from our past relationships onto our partner causing us to decide to get divorced.

The secret to success is confronting our demons and slaying our dragons, as the sayings go. And this takes courage. For us to be able to look at our partners from a clear, objective perspective we must understand and overcome those influences from our past, we must forgive those who we believe have caused us to be fearful of our current relationship. In psychological terms this is called catharsis. What we must do as individuals is realize that we can look anew at our perspective of our own insecurities. Only then will we be able to develop a marriage where we can stick together throughout whatever life dishes out to us.

To give an example, I forgave my parents when I was 25. I had a conversation with a friend where each was trying to outdo the other on who had the worst childhood, only he still loved his parents. I realized after that conversation that I was wrong in the anger I had built up towards my parents. I admitted for the first time in my adult life that I was wrong. Admitting your mistakes gets a lot easier after that first time.

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The most obvious example is the a-ha. You study a science problem from every angle, yet have no idea whether or not you really understand it; then suddenly, without any effort on your part, you suddenly “get the picture.”

To understand why our brains might have developed such a mechanism, consider how we recognize a face. You’re walking down a busy street; you subliminally see but do not consciously notice hundreds of passersby. Nevertheless, your visual system is silently looking for good matches for faces from your past. When it “recognizes” a face as being quite similar to Joe Blow, your college roommate, it notifies you that you are looking at Joe Blow. This recognition occurs at an unconscious level; the feeling of knowing that it is Joe is an unconscious visual system calculation of the likelihood that the face actually is Joe’s. Without this mechanism, all perceptions from the trivial to the urgent would be given equal weight. With this feeling of knowing as part of perception, the unconscious brain can steer us toward looking at or thinking about things that it considers important.

However, we are subject to all sorts of perceptual errors. To grasp how difficult it can be to shake an unjustified sense of correctness, look at Muller-Lyer optical illusion.

Though the two horizontal lines are exactly the same length, we “feel” that the top line is longer than the bottom one. Our intellect tells us they are equal; our unconscious perceptual processes tell us that they are unequal. Worse, even knowing they are the same length cannot dispel the clearly irrational feeling that one is longer than the other.

Take-away point #1:

Just as we cannot consciously will ourselves to see the two horizontal lines as equal, we cannot will away false feelings of knowing.

Take-away point #2:

There are two types of knowledge—that which can be scientifically (empirically) tested, and that which cannot. Whenever you have a sense of “being right,” ask yourself if this feeling can be objectively tested. For example, you can measure the length of the two horizontal lines and “know” whether they are equal or unequal. You can ask the passerby if he is Joe Blow from college.

But, for those thoughts and ideas that cannot be objectively tested, you must operate with considerable caution and due respect for the possibility that your “sense of knowing,” no matter how overwhelming, can be dead wrong.

The antidote to unjustifiable “certainty” is a healthy dose of humility. It might even be that your biology is preventing you from seeing that a contrasting view has a grain of truth.

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