18 Oct 2026
Earl Nightingale on Why We Marry Opposites—and Try to Change Them
In all the range of things human beings do, I think one of the most interesting is marriage. Why do people marry the people they marry? A human personality is interesting because it's the only one of its kind on earth. No two people are exactly alike in the way they think and talk and do things, and according to the experts, we marry the person who has, or is, what we haven't got and wish we had, or is the type of person we feel we'd like to be. Well, it's something like that anyway. We seem to see in the person we want to marry qualities we don't have.
Maybe you've wondered occasionally why the town's raving beauty usually marries a man who, at least on the surface, doesn't seem to have much to offer. He's usually a very plain, or maybe even a homely person, and he walks to the altar with the girl all the guys in town would give their eye-teeth to date. This has been particularly true of some of our most beautiful and glamorous movie queens, and everyone wonders why. Or the man who looks like a movie idol himself, the best-looking guy in town, and he almost invariably marries a rather plain-looking girl. Now, this has happened so much that finally the experts had to admit that plain girls have a better chance of marriage than the beautiful girls.
Well, it all comes back to what we said in the beginning. Dating is one thing, but when it comes to marriage and picking a partner for life, we are least attracted by beauty and most attracted by certain personality qualities. Of course, this is a deep and labyrinthine subject involving all sorts of psychological stuff, such as marrying a father or mother image, or a person who's shy, sees in a person who's filled with self-confidence the qualities he needs most. You'll usually find a dominating type of woman, for example, marrying a man who seems to thrive on being dominated, and vice versa.
But, and here's the most important part of all, we marry someone for something we see in them, and then spend the rest of our lives trying to change them so they'll be like us. The dominating woman, for instance, who marries someone she can dominate, spends years berating the poor guy because he won't stand up for his rights and be more of a dominant personality. The guy who fell in love with and married a girl who was shy and sort of self-conscious, but who had many qualities that made him love her in the beginning, keeps after her to get rid of the very qualities that attracted him in the first place.
Then, too, once we're married, we have a tendency to take each other for granted. Once the license is legal and tucked away, we feel we can sort of relax and not pay so much attention to the person who was the most important thing in the world a short time before. Then other men admire a man's wife and wish they could be as fortunate when the time comes for them to marry, and the husband, grown used to the fine woman with whom he shares his household, seems to be most attracted, his eye at least, by other women, other wives.
One of the most intriguing aspects of a man, and at times the most annoying, is that he seldom realizes how important are the things he has, until he's in danger of losing them. That is, unless he's a very unusual man. We marry the things we lack and need. There's no reason to suppose a few years later that our lacks and needs have changed.
I'll be back in a minute.
Marriage is like a job or a business. It will grow in exact proportion to the thought, consideration, interest, and enthusiasm we put into it. If things are not going too well, we can usually find the answers by examining ourselves. This is Earl Nightingale. Thank you.
