Rabbi Simcha Cohen
One of the most widespread sociological phenomena is the formation of a lasting, exclusive pair bond between a man and a woman. Although many of us think that such long-term commitments are a given, in fact they are not. One of a person's strongest impulses is the desire to live freely, without any restrictions, shackles, or coercion of any kind. Despite this, almost every society and culture has a generally accepted concept of family life. Within it, spouses consciously limit their personal freedom for life, giving up a substantial measure of their own comfort and selfish desires in order to build a family; they “enslave” themselves by committing to care for their spouse and children for many years.
Why, despite a person's strong desire for independence, does that person lock themselves into the rather restrictive framework of family life?
In seeking an answer to this question, we will discover that a substantial proportion of our actions are dictated by our very nature, leaving us almost no choice about whether to perform them. The Creator of the world instilled in us a basic drive for self-preservation: He created the distressing feeling of hunger and the pleasant feeling of fullness so that we would not forget to “refuel” our bodies. He instilled in us a feeling of tiredness that makes us go to sleep and give our bodies a rest. He gave us a system of reflexes that keeps us away from various dangers, such as very hot objects or sharp objects that can cut. The feeling of fear, the release of adrenaline into the bloodstream during danger, and a feeling of disgust toward moldy or foul-smelling food all help us protect ourselves.
The Joy of Life Together and the Hardships of Loneliness
Just as the Almighty makes us protect our lives, He also guides us toward marriage. To this end, He instilled in our psyche the pleasant feeling of waking up in the company of someone close to us who loves us, as well as the opposite feeling — the unpleasant sensation of prolonged loneliness.
Which of these feelings does more to draw a person toward marriage? The joy of having a loved one present, or the fear of loneliness?
It turns out that the main feeling that strengthens and preserves the marital bond for most married people is fear of the hardships of loneliness. The desire to be together, however, is secondary. When someone is asked, “Why are you married?” they usually answer, “We have children together, we share an apartment, I am used to living this way, society disapproves of divorce, and so on.” Such an answer explains why a person does not divorce, but not why they are married. Yet when the same question is put to someone who is happy in family life, the answer is different: the main reason is “wanting to be with my family”; it feels good and pleasant to “be together.”
We see that most people enter into marriage and maintain it not because they want to be married and connected to their wife/husband, but primarily because they fear loneliness. In other words, the hardships of loneliness outweigh the joys of life together, and they are taken into account more than anything else. We find a similar dynamic in eating. The suffering caused by hunger is stronger than the pleasant feeling of fullness. Anyone who examines the relationship between pleasure and suffering more deeply will inevitably conclude that a person's desire to avoid suffering has a much stronger influence on their decisions than the pursuit of pleasure.
As we have already said, the function of loneliness is to encourage people to form social bonds, particularly with a permanent partner with a view to marriage.
Indeed, many single men and unmarried women find loneliness very painful, and they are well aware that it is the main reason for their desire to marry. Once a person has started a family, however, the feeling of loneliness becomes dulled and loses its strength and influence, since it has no real function in family life — just as hunger disappears after eating, because there is no longer any need to make a person seek food.
Although hunger resembles loneliness in many ways, there is a fundamental difference between them: while a person clearly remembers the distressing hunger they felt before eating — after all, they experienced it very recently — a married person almost completely forgets how painful loneliness is, because they have not experienced it for a long time. As a result, when people encounter difficulties in family life and are wavering between keeping the family together and dissolving the marriage, they do, of course, consider the loneliness that will follow separation, but they do not give it the weight it deserves.