Dating, Relationships, Marriage

	Is marriage over-rated?
	What is the secret to a happy marriage?
	Why are fewer and fewer people getting married?
	How do you think marriage changes people?
	Should people stay married if they no longer love each other? Do you think you've got what it takes to stay happily married? Watch the video in bits and and discuss: Divorce Ceremony What is the significance of the following? The location The banner The safety pins The scissors A beautifully wrapped gift The order of people in the procession Woman don marry herself sake of family pressure What's different about this news headline? Answer: It's in Pidgin English. Read on: One woman wey don tire to dey answer kweshun about why she never marry don finally marry but her partner na herself. Lulu Jemimah don tire of lecture unto why she suppose settle down wit correct husband.  Unto say she wan make her papa and mama free her, she plan fake wedding and send real invitation to her paddy dem. She rent wedding dress, waka go di venue of di marriage ceremony and even do speech to her guests dem wia she explain say groom no dey. And di entire ceremony no cost more than $3 - wey be her taxi moni go di venue - because her paddy dem contribute awoof tins, moni and gifts. Image copyrightLULU JEMIMAH Why do you think Lulu went to the trouble to marry herself?

Lead in: discuss in groups

1. Do you think you're easy to live with?
2. In what ways are you a bit crazy?
3. Do people you're really close with sometimes criticise your personality? How do you react when they do?
4. Are you pessimistic or optimistic about finding a compatible life partner?


Watch the first 2 mins

1. What is the topic of the talk?
2. Why are many people privately very angry?
3. What does the speaker hope to do about this?
4. Why are angry people actually optimists?
5. Why is it hard to diminish hopes around love?


Watch 4.00-

1. What does a stranger learn about you in 10 minutes that you don't learn in 40 years?
2. What are we addicted to?


9.50-10.40

1. How long does it take a child to learn that it's parent is one person?
2. What does the child realise when they learn this?


13.20-14.00

1. According to de Botton, why do we often reject perfectly acceptable candidates for life partnership?


17.00-17.16
1. What do we believe true love is?


18.00 - 19.00
1. Why is "good enough", really good enough?
2. What is compatibility?



Prelearn Language:

17 collocations

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

By Alain de Botton

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 eriwbeildng aarry 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 andstard uqoestin on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”

Perhaps we have a lnatet tncendey 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 aclm pu in response to humiliation. Noy’sbod rfpeect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely dlvee iton our mplecoxities. Whenever ascual resiplathions threaten to vereal uor fwsla, we blame our partners and clal ti a yad. 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.

Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we kmae a sbta ta 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, finiilynte dkni 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 cefuarlyl oidvdea investigating.

For most of rdeecodr torhisy, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her elparc of dlan adjoined yours, his family had a ouisflrinhg essbuins, 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, ni ndshiigth, 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 acuncot rfo itlfse.

What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six months since they met; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it can feel. Recklessness is taken as a coeigunterwht to all the errors of reason, that calystat of misery, that accountant’s demand. The prestige of instinct is the traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable reason.

But though we believe ourselves to be senekig hpiaespns 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 damiyncs: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s wahrmt 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 — geivn that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.

We make mistakes, too, because we are so lonely. No one can be in an omalpti frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be holywl at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately pkyic; 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 tlbote hte oyj we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: Perhaps we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat, with the venieng usn 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 teh suttiintion fo mrgriaae.

Indeed, marriage tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and more administrative aplne, which perhaps uoldnfs in a suburban house, with a glon cmuomte and maninddeg ceildrnh who llki teh iopsasn from which they emerged. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the ronwg intngredie to bottle.

eTh oogd wnse 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 stifysa our every yenarnig.

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 (thowiut any alimce) 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 icwhh crplaaruti tyviear of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

This philosophy of pisessimm orsffe a stliouon to a lot of distress and atiogitan around marriage. tI gihmt snodu dod, tbu pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not na gumnaret agnsait that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares uor eyver taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of epcrfet iplemetcomntary, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is teh teru rkemar fo the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its pritecodnion.

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 adtop a more forgiving, humorous and kdliny iveprspeect on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners.

General questions:

1. What was wrong with the so-called marriage of reason? What has replaced the marriage of reason?

2. According to de Botton, why do we often reject perfectly acceptable candidates for life partnership?

3. According to de Botton, who is the person who is best suited for us as a life partner?

3. Why does Botton believe the Romantic view of marriage is "harsh"?

4. Why does he believe the pessimistic or tragic view is better?

Do you agree with the writer?

Video:

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

divorce	Bride	Groom	Vow
Anniversary	Fiancé	Proposal	Affair
Arranged marriage	Casual	Playing the field	Flirting
Crush	Engaged	Butterflies in your stomach	A fling
Chat someone up	Fall out	Tie the knot	Long distance relationship
Unrequited love	One-night stand	Platonic	Communication
Respect	Break up	Drift apart	separate

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