We Realize It Too Late! – Why You Will Marry The Wrong Person | Alain De Botton

1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:00

   A few years back, you put out an essay entitled, quite provocatively, "Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person." I thought we'd start off this conversation by interrogating that statement. Why is it we will marry the wrong person? Is it something to do with our own personal failures or a more widespread misunderstanding about the nature of long-term relationships?

2. ABAlain de Botton0:25

   I mean, just to explain that title, it was an ironic title, basically saying everyone's gonna be slightly wrong. Everyone, even the best person that you get together with, will be slightly wrong, and if you can accept their wrongness, you're actually much further along the way to rightness. That is, where the basis of a good relationship is to accept the humanity and the flawed nature of whoever it is that you are together with, and the insistence on a right person is a kind of deification of other human beings, which actually tends to get you into trouble. So a gracious acceptance of our flawed humanity is actually a better basis with which to approach relationships.

3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:04

   That was the most read article, I believe, on The New York Times back in twenty sixteen-

4. ABAlain de Botton1:10

   Mm

5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:10

   ... when you wrote it. What does that say about-

6. ABAlain de Botton1:14

   Yeah. I mean-

7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:14

   ... about us?

8. ABAlain de Botton1:14

   It was quite remarkable because it was also the year of, um, Trump, the year Trump got elected. [chuckles]

9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:18

   Yeah.

10. ABAlain de Botton1:18

    So more people clicked on that article than, you know, Donald Trump becomes president. Um, so it was a stri- quite a striking thing. Um, and I would say that ultimately it has to do with our loneliness around the compromises that we all endure in relationships. I think a lot of us are thinking, "Is this normal? Is, is this level of scratchiness, discomfort, complexity normal?" And the simple answer is yes. [chuckles] So if you're in a scratchy, complex relationship, welcome to relationships. I mean, there is still an enormous gap. Despite all these methods of communication-

11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:52

    Mm

12. ABAlain de Botton1:52

    ... there is still an enormous gap between what we know from the inside about what it is to be human and what is generally spoken about. There is still enormous areas of silence and therefore enormous areas where we go through the world thinking, "Is this right? Is this normal? Is this level of whatever it is normal?" And almost always the answer is yes. I mean, if you're feeling it, it's a human, um, condition. But we, we tend to... You know, the word shame comes in. We tend to experience it with a lot of shame. We think, "I can't hear an echo of what I know is inside me inside everybody else from what I'm picking up, therefore, where have I gone wrong?" And I think there's nothing more normal than to think that we have gone wrong in relationships, when in fact we are simply having relationships, and relationships will involve a lot of complexity. I mean, let me expand on, on some of the themes. Um, it's been one of the great insights of psychotherapy that when we are guided by instinct towards a certain sort of person, what's often happening is we are refinding our way to a quality of love and affection that we knew in early childhood. That what we... You know, when we fall in love, we're actually refinding love, a love that we once knew as children. It's got-

13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:14

    Mm.

14. ABAlain de Botton3:14

    It'll have some of the quality. Inevitably, it'll have some of the qualities. And, you know, occasionally this bubbles up to consciousness and people will joke and go, "Ha, you know, my partner remind me a bit of my, my mother or my father." And everybody around the table sort of laughs, and we, we think it's, it's very funny. Um, like many funny things, there's a deep truth in that.

15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:29

    Yeah.

16. ABAlain de Botton3:29

    Um, undoubtedly, there is an echo. The, the reason why it gets complicated is that for many of us, perhaps almost all of us, the love that we enjoyed in childhood was not merely an unalloyed joy, not merely, um, uh, you know, based on, uh, generosity, attunement, sympathy, all the good things in, that should be there in love. There might also have been distance, unpredictability, fear, a lack of safety, a yearning for a degree of acceptance that was never quite-

17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:57

    Mm

18. ABAlain de Botton3:57

    ... within reach. And I think that very often what happens is we then seek those things in the relationships that we pursue most avidly in adulthood. And that ultimately what we're doing in love very often is not so much searching for fulfillment as searching for a sense of familiarity, which may be the same thing, but may importantly not be the same thing if we happen to have childhoods-

19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:19

    Mm

20. ABAlain de Botton4:19

    ... where affection was not particularly linked to our flourishing.

21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:22

    Yeah. It's interesting, that was one of the most read articles on The New York Times, which of course is an American publication. Yes, it's a publication that is read all over the world.

22. ABAlain de Botton4:32

    Mm-hmm.

23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:33

    But that sort of cultural understanding of what a relationship is deeply fascinates me. So America, the sort of bastion country of the West, okay, what is it, let's say, broadly speaking in the West, we perhaps get wrong or misunderstand about relationships, which then leads us to this often constant disappointment, high divorce rates, high levels of frustration? Is it that our expectations of what a relationship is are fundamentally flawed?

24. ABAlain de Botton5:09

    Look, the United States is a very difficult country for people to understand outside it.

25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:12

    Mm.

26. ABAlain de Botton5:13

    It, it has a very particular history, and one ignores that history, uh, at one's peril. It was founded, the nation was founded by people who believed that we could make life perfectible in, in this life, and that's quite odd because for most other nations, in most other cultures, um, that's not at all the way it is. You know, if you look at Buddhist culture, Hindu culture, or the, the old European version of Christianity, which was not the American version of Christianity, it's the next world. It's the other world. That's where you can achieve perfection. In this world, it's all broken. Um, there is some, you know, the first Buddhist stricture, life is suffering. Um, you've got it all there. The, the foundation of, uh, Catholic Christianity, um, original sin, the notion of life is broken. Now, these things could be seen as too pessimistic, too extreme, et cetera, but I often think that taken in the right way, they offer us something quite unusual and something that we might need to be alive to in the modern world, which is an acceptance of our flawed nature and of the imperfect nature of, of everything, including human-to-human relationships. Now-Back to the United States. This is a country founded by people who think that human life is perfectible.

27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee6:23

    Mm.

28. ABAlain de Botton6:23

    It's an amazing ideal. It's produced, you know, moonshots, it's produced, um, artificial intelligence, produced all, you know, lots of extraordinary things that, um, a more settled view of human possibility would not countenance. This has been possible in the United States, but most people in that nation are also still struggling with the ordinary business of living and dying. Uh, that hasn't gone away. And, um, also the ordinary business of forming relationships. And it's possible that some of the beautiful perfectionism has, at the same time, bled into a kind of intolerance, which is, "What's wrong with my life? What's wrong with my partner?" Um, there's an issue. Rather than thinking, "Welcome to existence," one thinks, "Something's gone fatefully wrong with my life."

29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:12

    Yeah, it kind of goes beyond relationships, doesn't it? It's, what's wrong with my partner? What's wrong with my job?

30. ABAlain de Botton7:19

    Mm.

Episode duration: 1:57:21