The nY Times doesn't understand dating and marriage

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

This might sell de Boton's book, he is good at fantasy.

The Course of Love: A Novel by Alain de Botton
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More below. Hat tip to the King!

"It's one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.

Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”

Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with."

He can't be this big a Lolly Knob. What is dating for if not to actually figure out the person you are dating? Beyond that there are not that many personality types, especially after we eliminate the Unicorn, or the willingness to date the crazy chick. If we just take the middle of the bell curve, there are not that many distinct personality categories, yes, women move around within the zone like mad. So, after that if one wishes to marry, one need to date enough to figure out the generally acceptable traits, and the generally unacceptable traits, then date to find a person who completes your personality flaws the best. If flaws are news, you're not ready. Determine the parameters, and how much difficulty you are willing to endure, focus on the goal of family, and things should be pretty clear once a reasonable fit comes along.

Here is a simple, and funny guide. It addresses men first, then women. 

​"Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating."

Oh dear. Look, if you are not fully aware of who you are, what you are, your strengths, your flaws, all of those simple things that any mature person knows, you are not a mature person. Marriage is only for mature persons. Clear? Mother of Pearl!

He is just warming up.

"For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the marriage of feeling — has largely been spared the need to account for itself."

This is so much air masturbation. This is not even remotely what happened, how, or why. It is unlikely this fluffy reasoning ever even happened, but perhaps during the modern era, at the margin, rarely. In a second strange twist of reality the outcomes are also fantasy. I am sorry but loneliness, infidelity . . . mostly these things are features of the modern era. Not some hoary past thousands of years, and "most of recorded history" ago. Marriage more than 100 years ago was made by serious people in the face of huge amounts of incredibly hard work, long hours, and much deprivation. Fluffy, romantic notions of loneliness, or emptiness were not much a part of the equation. 

​Heating water with firewood, in the cold north of Sweden, and washing for herself, her husband, and seven children. I am sure his grandmother had ample time to lie on her fainting couch, back of wrist to forehead, sighing forcefully, wistfully dreaming of marital fulfillment. Right before spending two hours baking and then an hour preparing dinner, and then cleaning up after. Right.

"Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating."

Oh dear. Look, if you are not fully aware of who you are, what you are, your strengths, your flaws, all of those simple things that any mature person knows, you are not a mature person. Marriage is only for mature persons. Clear? Mother of Pearl!

Hhe is just warming up.

"For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the marriage of feeling — has largely been spared the need to account for itself."

This is so much air masturbation. This is not even remotely what happened, how, or why. It is unlikely this fluffy reasoning ever even happened, but perhaps during the modern era, at the margin, rarely. In a second strange twist of reality the outcomes are also fantasy. I am sorry but loneliness, infidelity . . . mostly these things are features of the modern era. Not some hoary past thousands of years, and "most of recorded history" ago. Marriage more than 100 years ago was made by serious people in the face of huge amounts of incredibly hard work, long hours, and much deprivation. Fluffy, romantic notions of loneliness, or emptiness were not much a part of the equation. 

"But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy."


It seems we just fell into an autobiography hole. Alain while you might have been confused by feelings of wanting to help some pathetic adult parent, or damaged by emotional deprivation, insecurity, or fear, most of us were not. Your lede brings us all in to this maelstrom of insanity which only applies to a small few. Correct your lede. Of course, then you will not be read. 

"We make mistakes, too, because we are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.

Finally, we marry to make a nice feeling permanent. We imagine that marriage will help us to bottle the joy we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: Perhaps we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat, with the evening sun throwing glitter across the sea, chatting about aspects of our souls no one ever seemed to have grasped before, with the prospect of dinner in a risotto place a little later. We married to make such sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage."

As we said before, marriage is only for the mature. This need for airy happiness is foolishness. Happiness is not a metric upon which to build relationships of any kind. In the end, happiness is nothing more than the temporary elimination of the troubles, and vicissitudes of life. Thus, we are happy after an engaging movie, because it diverts us from our daily problems. Our potential marriage partner must do things other than this, that person must take our partial personality and complement it, and as much as possible make it whole, or more whole, at least.

Maddog feels the beginnings a freshet of reason.

"Indeed, marriage tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a suburban house, with a long commute and maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerged. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle."

If this horrible description fits, you are deeply selfish, immature person and you need an intervention, today. We live in the greatest time in human history, we have more, with little real need, which has magnified our want, and the self to gargantuan. Down this smooth, wide road lies frustration, anger, self pity, and madness. You might want to take the narrower, rocky, more difficult path, spend time with family, and friends, love, live, and never forget what is important family, friends, work. Notice how self is not among them? 

Here is the freshet.

"The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person.

We mustn’t abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.

WE need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for."

Falling so deeply into the self, is always a mistake. The mature never even contemplated the romantic after youth, and always understand that occasional feelings of disappointment, emptiness, incompleteness, frustration, anger, and annoyance are simply part of being human. They should be OODA looped, and lesson learned, reduced. 

We agree the human condition is comedic. 

And here the freshet becomes flood.

"Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not “normal.” We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness,” striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners."

All of this to sell a book!? Well, he is good at fantasy. You might want to give it a try. We accept book reviews.