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Disproportionate Impact

Marry the right person. This one decision will determine 90% of your happiness or misery.

Ran into this quote by H. Jackson Brown Jr. after over  couple of decades of first seeing it in the most unlikely of places - on the wall of my apartment's gym room. 

I was married by then and wanted to believe he was the right person for me. Where reality did not match up to my imagination, I compensated by attributing qualities to our marriage that simply did not exist, believed if I strove a bit harder, made some more adjustments it could become a thing of perfection. I wanted to believe with very molecule of my being that I was with the right man for me and after the hiccups of my then new marriage had subsided, it would be smooth sailing because all I had to do is apply effort. There was no end to how much effort I was willing to apply and no end to my self-assurance that I could make it right.

When I read this on the wall while working out, I remember experience this sense of dread - 90% seemed like an awfully large number. So if infact it turned out that the person was not right for me, he would drive that percent of my sum total of misery. Not only was Brown correct in his assessment, but from what I have observed since that time, he was understating how disproportionate the impact of the wrong choice in marriage can be. People I know very well who have needed to dis-entangle themselves from bad marriages had over 95% of their lives upended. My own experience is similar. Some days it felt like there was nothing that had remain untouched - maybe 100% of my misery was somehow traceable to it. 

When we finally get it right in whatever form that happens to take, we start to understand the other part of this quote about the 90% of happiness - this is just as true. 


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