Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

latent

to clam up

bewildering

array

to delve into

to call it a day

catalyst

hindsight

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?

Pre-learn 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


0:41-2.24

1. Turning _____ into _____ =  "psychological _________"
2. A regularly angry person is in fact a wild __________.
3. _____ turbocharges ______
4. Why did Theodor Adorno attack Walt Disney?

Discuss:

What is Alain suggesting about the nature of hope and optimism?

3.28-5:58

1. According to Alain, what is the reason that no one is easy to live with?
2. What does Alain mean by "a wall of silence"?
3. According to Alain, in what sense are most of us addicts?
4. Why is lack of self-knowledge a disaster, According to Alain?

9:32-11.32

1. How did Melanie Klein believe infants saw their parents?
2. What is maturity, according to Alain?
3. Love = __________ for weakness and _________ of ambivalence

12:15-14:09

1. A lot of our early experiences of love are bound up with _________
2. We are out to find partners who will feel _____________
3. Why do we often reject a perfectly reasonable romantic candidate?

Soren Kierkegaard

20:11-end

1. Compromise is ___________
2. Let's look a bit more ______________ly at the art of compromise.
3. What is Kierkegaard's conclusion about human nature?

Excerpt 

IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great l___ths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person. 

Partly, it’s because we have a be___ering 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 s___-aware society than our own, a s____ard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?” 

Perhaps we have a latent t___ency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intim___ after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely d__ve into our complexities. Whenever c__ual relationships threaten to __veal our f__ws, we blame our partners and call it a d__ (              ). As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enl____ening us. One of the privil___s of being on our own is therefore the sincere __pression that we are really quite easy to live with. 

Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a st__b 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 h___work. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, __finitely kind gamble (r     o    t    d     ) taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, b__ding themselves to a future they cannot __ceive of and have c___fully avoided investigating.