"The common denominator in all your failed relationships is you" Pt2

I’d spent the past year with a handsome, commitment-minded man, and these better qualities, along with our having several interests in common, allowed me to overlook our many thundering incompatibilities. 

That's Kate Bolick describing herself at thirty-six. She is a woman who always assumed she would get married and I think we can safely say that a woman at thirty-six has had at least ten years to find a compatible partner. And here she she is "with a handsome, commitment-minded man" but they have "thundering incompatibilities".

I wonder what those were? Perhaps there were serious reasons to believe that a marriage wouldn't work. On the other hand, the ten plus years from your early twenties to age thirty-six is lots of time to find someone with whom you don't have thundering incompatibilities.

After a while you get to thinking that maybe the difference between people who find their way to marriage and those who don't is that the winners understand that marriage means living with certain tensions and losers don't. Or, to put it another way, that one person's dynamic tension is another person's thundering incompatibility.

Take sex, which, along with money, is one of the most common sources of marital stress. Most men have a far more frequent desire for sex than most women. Every marriage comes with an inevitable sexual incompatibility. That means that a successful marriage will necessarily be a partnership between

1. a woman who will have sex far more often than she would choose if it were only up to her, and
2. a man who will have sex far less often than he would choose if it were only up to him.

There will be times when their desires line up perfectly and there will be lots of joy and pleasure here, it is sex after all. That said,  for substantial portions of her marriage, a woman will push herself sexually for the sake of her husband's happiness. And for substantial portions of his marriage, a man will deny himself sexually for the sake of his wife's happiness.

That example it tells us a lot about what "compromise" means. As a strategic matter we think of a compromise as something that makes tension go away. Real compromise is an agreement to live in tension. If either partner just wants the stress to go away, the compromise and then the marriage fails.