Compatibility Is Built, Not Found
A good enough partner beats a perfect one, because perfection leaves you alone.
The School of Life · Why You Will Marry the Wrong PersonAlain de Botton, speaking to an audience gathered to hear why they will marry the wrong person, had spent most of his talk explaining how strange people are to live with, and how little they understand themselves. Then he turned to relief.
No one will "manage to find the right person," Alain de Botton argued, but we will probably all "manage to find a good enough person," and that is success. He put the larger point this way: “Compatibility is an achievement of love.”
He meant that compatibility is not what you need at the outset, but something that grows through love. He borrowed the phrase “good enough” from Donald Winnicott, an English psychoanalyst who used it to reassure worried parents that they did not have to be perfect parents to raise children well.
De Botton argued that the same standard should apply to marriage, because none of us are perfect. Demanding perfection, he said, leads only to loneliness, since you cannot have both perfection and company. To be with another person is to negotiate imperfection every day, because everyone is incompatible in some way, and love is the work of accommodating those mismatches with grace.
That is why he described compromise as noble, not shameful. Admitting you compromised in choosing a partner can sound like defeat, a confession that you could not do better. He treated it as honesty. Staying together for the children, he called it a wonderful reason to stay, asking why else would you stay.
Questions people ask
What does a “good enough” marriage actually look like day to day?
It means a partner who is kind, reliable, and willing to work through problems, even if they annoy you, disappoint you, and fall short in important ways. Psychologists often describe it as a relationship that is secure and caring most of the time, not flawless all of the time.
How do you build compatibility if you do not start with it?
Much of it is ordinary repair work: explaining what hurt you without humiliation, listening without defensiveness, and changing how you react when your partner is distant or difficult. Couples researchers find that successful partners do not avoid conflict, they return to it calmly and make small adjustments.
Is staying together for the children really good for the children?
It can be, if the home is reasonably calm, respectful, and loving, even if the romance has cooled. Children tend to suffer more from high conflict, contempt, and instability than from parents who stay together in a low warmth but cooperative partnership.