According to sociologists, Europeans after parting find a new partner for one to four months, and in Russia this process often takes several years.
Moreover, many of those who once survived the divorce (half of men and three quarters of women) do not recover in repeated marriage*. How to explain this phenomenon? I believe that one of the main reasons is the desire for many of our compatriots to “serious” relations and willingness to depreciate any contact that does not correspond to this high bar.
Compared to pragmatic Europeans, today we are much more idealists and maximalists. All of us were raised in the traditions “Crane in the sky, not a tit in their hands”, the red lion casino “all or nothing”, which are essentially built on dissociation, the gap of the two worlds – the perfect and real. At the same time, the perfect world is extolled by us, while the real world, on the contrary, is belittled, denied, ignored. Let us recall in this regard at least the textbooks of literary antipodes-the “not our” reserves the practice of Stolz and “ours”, the native Lesoboku-lamer Oblomov.
Probably, in the soul of every person there is a kind of inner clames, directed not to reality, but away from it – to an unattainable abstract ideal. Sometimes (especially often this happens after a breakdown) it can intensify, starting to dictate our will to us and imposing a certain type of behavior. As a result, many people have been living within the limits of an enchanted circle for years, suffering from loneliness, but never daring to overcome an unhealthy obstacle separating them from others.
Meanwhile, in the very desire for serious relationships there is nothing shameful. Outside of them, it is difficult to imagine the marriage, family, children. The problem arises when one who has not had any relations for a long time seeks to immediately enter into serious ones – and does not agree to any compromises. I will allow myself a metaphor: a person really wants to go to Tibet or at least to Baikal, but he just cannot (and, most importantly, does not want to) go beyond the threshold of his own apartment.
In my opinion, the only way to defeat the inner Oblomov is the willingness to establish and maintain relations with people around us. Not “romantic”, not “promising”, but the most ordinary human relations. And then, if we do not rush, run ahead and set ourselves obviously unattainable goals, it may very well be that some of them will actually develop into something more. After all, in the end, we make our relationships not so much we do not so much as life itself.