Why You Will Marry 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. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusu…

— Alain de Botton, nytimes.com

How to be good at love Marriage

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every 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 perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to t…

— Alain de Botton, nytimes.com

Love Relationships Couples Marriage

Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

— Alain de Botton, nytimes.com

Alain de Botton Love Relationships Couples Marriage

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. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness.

— Alain de Botton, nytimes.com

Relationships Loneliness Emptiness Perspective Marriage

We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness,” striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners.

— Alain de Botton, nytimes.com

Marriage Love Relationships Conflict forgiveness

Embrace a philosophy of pessimism. Every human will disappoint you, and you'll do the same to them.

— Alain de Botton, nytimes.com

Marriage Human Relationships Bad Friendship Real Friendship

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