I don't have the answers yet, but I have learned enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..

Wonder why some relationships and marriages just don't work out? Explore this concept with me for a moment.

I have a notion that exotic differences sometimes wildly attract. I am presently having an experience of this in a budding relationship in which I am the exotic component, meaning I am different in religion, family structure, and probably other cornerstones representing what my romantic interest's notion of 'home' is all about. Now, opposites attracting is an old story, and certainly not 'bad', but what tends to happen over time is that one tends to want to return, at a deeper level, to whatever their notion of 'home' is. A case study might help illustrate. In my parents' relationship, two radically different people (a supermodel and a PhD in hard science) attracted to one another. He was Catholic, and divorcing. She was Protestant and never been married. They'd both travelled the world and had terrific careers, but in such different fields! Yet, what drew them together was a sense of 'home' that they both knew and understood well. They both originated from a small suburb in Liverpool during the 50's and 60's. Wherever they'd gone in the world, this place of origin remained deeply locked within, and when they met up, it was this understanding of who they each were at a fundamental level that united them, and still does. Though they now reside on a yacht in the Carribbean, the Liverpool they knew so well during that time continues to be very much alive for them, though it's of course no longer a place one can visit except in the imagination. As the old saying goes, you can never really go back....to which I would add, except in the imagination, of course.

What I experienced during my own marriage was uniting with another who was really an 'other', meaning we were really fundamentally different at our deepest levels. Think Deep South redneck meets Continental European, and you get the disparity. Though we seemed alike at first, during the marriage it soon emerged that both of us were trying to find within the other that place of familiarity in our own lives. The more he retreated into Deep South, the more I escalated Continental Europe. It seemed that on our most fundamental levels, we were truly unable to find common ground. Sadly, love does not conquer all, and when neither could find a place of 'home' in which to dwell within the other, well, the whole thing came apart like a fraying baseball upon meeting the bat swung by Babe Ruth.

I am seeing similar things in some of my friends, who have married exotically different people. In their marriages, they are now gently pressuring the other, often quite unconsciously, to somehow become what they themselves are. The differences that used to be so exotically appealing now open into a gulf of non-connectedness and misunderstanding. Where before there was great effort at bridge-building, now each stares at the other across a seemingly impassable expanse of polarization.