You Have No Idea How Hard You Are to Live With
Friends want a pleasant evening, parents love you too much, and ex-lovers just leave.
The School of Life · Why You Will Marry the Wrong PersonAlain de Botton, a philosopher addressing an audience about marriage, starts with an uncomfortable admission. Most of us will not find the right person, he argues, because we have never properly met the other person joining the marriage: ourselves.
"We are basically psychologically quite strange," he says. He does not mean dangerous, just difficult. To be human, in his telling, is to be hard to live with, and to take a very long time to understand how.
The reason, he argues, is a wall of silence. Our friends could tell us what is wrong with us, and a stranger might spot our flaws after 10 minutes. But friends "just want a pleasant evening out," he says, so they say nothing. That knowledge stays out in the world and never gets inside us.
Parents are no help either. They have watched us since the crib and can see what is wrong, he says, but they love us too much to tell us. They would rather be sweet.
Ex-lovers know the most, and tell the least. He recalls the familiar goodbye speech about needing more space, being attracted to travel, and getting "interested in the culture of Southeast Asia." That, he says, is nonsense. They thought plenty was wrong with you, but they were already on their way out, so why would they bother to explain?
So we walk toward marriage, he argues, with a very "low sense of what is actually wrong with us." Others often see it more clearly than we do. As he puts it, we "will not manage to find the right person but we will probably" manage to find a "good enough person," and that is success.
Questions people ask
Why don't exes just tell us what was wrong?
In his account, they know but have no reason to do the hard work of explaining when they are already leaving. It is easier to offer a vague excuse about needing space or wanting to travel. Telling the truth would take time and risk a fight, with no benefit to them.
What does he mean by a good enough person?
He means someone who is not perfect and not exactly right, but suitable enough to build a life with. The point in his talk is that expecting the right person sets you up for disappointment. Finding a good enough person is what he calls success.
Are we really strangers to ourselves?
In his argument, yes in one specific way: we are slow to grasp how hard we are to live with. Friends, parents, and former partners can often see the difficult parts more clearly than we can. So we enter marriage without a full picture of our own strangeness.