Why You Will Marry The Wrong Person

The following are quotes I have selected from a recent article in the Sunday New York Times: Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person, by Alain De Botton. Read the quotes and think about them. Do you agree with any of them? Have a conversation with your spouse, significant other or close friend about the quotes. The quotes:

• 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.

• For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons, (which were) 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 .

• 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 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.