By Dr Rahim Said
Socrates, who was married and therefore qualified to comment, is often paraphrased as saying: “By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”
Forty years into marriage, celebrated quietly in Bali this 9th of February, I suspect Socrates underestimated a third possibility: if you stay married long enough, you become both — occasionally happy, frequently philosophical, and permanently aware that marriage is not an event but a long conversation.
These days, that conversation seems to be going out of fashion.
Marriage, as an institution, is said to be crumbling. Divorce rates are up, commitment is down, and the word “forever” now sounds less like a promise and more like a reckless business plan.
Among today’s young — brilliant, busy, globally mobile — marriage often feels like an inconvenience.
Why anchor yourself when the world is your co-working space? Why negotiate toothpaste tubes and emotional labour when airports, visas and digital nomad lifestyles beckon?
Stability, after all, doesn’t photograph well on Instagram.
We live in an age where youth travel light — emotionally as much as physically. Relationships are expected to be frictionless, portable, and easily upgraded.
When things get difficult, the modern reflex is not to repair but to replace. There is always another city, another partner, another beginning waiting somewhere beyond the next flight.
Yet marriage, at its core, is the opposite of nomadism. It is about staying. Staying when conversations get repetitive. Staying when dreams change. Staying when one of you is tired, ill, distracted, or temporarily less interesting than they once were.
Marriage is not an endless honeymoon; it is an agreement to endure boredom without mistaking it for failure.
What strikes me, looking at our own four decades together, is not that we avoided conflict. We didn’t. It’s that we never treated conflict as proof that the marriage was a mistake. Disagreement wasn’t a sign to exit; it was part of the curriculum.
Today’s culture tells young people to “follow your heart”. That sounds liberating until you realise the heart is a notoriously fickle travel companion. It changes its mind mid-journey. It gets bored. It gets distracted by better lighting elsewhere.
Marriage, however, requires something unfashionable: patience. And patience, unlike passion, does not come pre-installed. It is acquired slowly, through irritation, compromise, and the occasional, grudging apology.
High divorce rates are often explained in economic or sociological terms — financial stress, changing gender roles, and longer life expectancies. All true. But there is also a quieter reason: we have lost the cultural muscle for staying uncomfortable long enough to grow.
Marriage used to be seen as a framework within which two imperfect people slowly learned how not to leave. Now it is often sold as a lifestyle choice — and lifestyles, by definition, are upgraded.
Our own marriage has survived not because it was extraordinary, but because it was ordinary in the right ways. Shared routines. Shared responsibilities. Shared silences. The unglamorous work of showing up, day after day, even when neither of us was particularly inspiring.
That kind of endurance doesn’t trend. But it teaches something the nomadic life cannot: how to live with another human being without constantly reinventing yourself for an audience.
Celebrating 40 years in Bali is not a declaration of superiority over the young. It is simply a reminder that there is another way to live — one that values depth over novelty, roots over routes. A life where love is not measured by intensity, but by continuity.
Perhaps Socrates was right after all. Marriage does make us philosophers. Because if you stay long enough, you begin to understand that happiness is not found in constant motion, but in learning how to remain — thoughtfully, imperfectly, stubbornly — with one person, in one long, unfinished conversation.
And that, in this restless age, may be the most radical act of all.