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.
Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person -
By ALAIN de BOTTONMAY 28, 2016
IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us.
Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton) is the author of the novel “The Course of Love.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 29, 2016, on Page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.
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 — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign.
The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person.
We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.
And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.
The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against
that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.
