Marriage forces spontaneity and deliberate decision to coincide impossibly

Evidence

This is the difficulty: love and falling in love are spontaneous, marriage is a decision; yet falling in love should be awakened by marriage or by decision: wanting to marry; this means that what is the most spontaneous must at the same time be the freest decision, and what is, because of the spontaneity, so inexplicable that it must be attributed to a divinity, must at the same time take place because of reflection and such exhausting reflection that a decision results from it. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1157

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes love (spontaneous) from marriage (decision), a core conceptual distinction for Beauvoir’s analysis.
• XREF: The impossible coincidence of spontaneity and free decision parallels Sartre’s account of bad faith — a reader steeped in Continental philosophy will see the resonance. — connects to: Border situations force whole-being choices that abstract thought cannot resolve — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 274; Marriages can misplace emphasis on trivial shared intimacy and lose substance; Sharing trivial daily intimacies can crowd the weighty substance out of a marriage — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 3806 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Marriages can misplace emphasis on trivial shared intimacy and lose substance #expands (0.75)
• Sharing trivial daily intimacies can crowd the weighty substance out of a marriage #expands (0.70) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 3806