The following is part of a transcript of an interview from the radio show, This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass. Originally aired on June 24, 2016, Mr. Glass interviews Alain De Botton, author of many books and articles including, “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person”, and “How We End Up Marrying the Wrong Person”. Mr. De Botton has many interesting thoughts about marriage; harsh realities about marriage that, I think, would help all of us struggling with our primary relationships.
Prologue.
Ira Glass
Well, it’s June. Weddings everywhere, brides in white, little three-year-old nieces sent waddling down aisles throwing rose petals, vows that go on, perhaps a bit too long.
Ira Glass
And how many of these happy couples are actually, underneath all of it, mismatched?
Alain De Botton
A huge number. It’s frightening going to weddings.
Ira Glass
Meet Alain de Botton, author of articles with titles like “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person”, and “How We End Up Marrying the Wrong Person”, and two books about love. I was interested in talking to him because our radio show today is about making wrong choices. And he believes that when it comes to making the single most important decision many of us ever make in our lives, it is incredibly easy to screw it up– much easier than we generally acknowledge.
Alain De Botton
You know, some of the reason why we marry the wrong people is that we don’t really understand ourselves. I mean, sometimes I say to people, do you think you’re easy to live with? People who are single. And the ones who say, yeah, yeah, I’m pretty easy to live with, it’s just a question of finding the right person, massive alarm bell rings in my mind.
Ira Glass
He says the problem is that it is not until we are actually married that we’re in a situation where all the ways that we are hard to live with are truly revealed. All of our neuroses and flaws, all the tiny little things that vaguely remind us of our childhoods, and thus trigger peculiar and inappropriate behavior towards those we live with, that’s what gets revealed by the marriage itself. Even if you lived together before marriage, he says, it’s not the same. It doesn’t give you that self-knowledge.
Alain De Botton
And so we go into marriage unable to convey that knowledge to a partner. We don’t understand them. They don’t understand us. We don’t understand what marriage is. Let’s stress that.
Ira Glass
So what would you say to all the people getting married this month? What would you tell them?
Alain De Botton
Be incredibly forgiving for the weird behavior that’s going to start coming out. You will be very unhappy in lots of ways. Your partner will fail to understand you.
If you’re understood in maybe, I don’t know, 60% of your soul by your partner, that’s fantastic. Don’t expect that it’s going to be 100%. Of course you will be lonely.
You will often be in despair. You will sometimes think it’s the worst decision in your life. That’s fine. That’s not a sign your marriage has gone wrong.
It’s a sign that it’s normal, it’s on track. And many of the hopes that took you into the marriage will have to die in order for the marriage to continue. That some of the headiness and expectations will have to die.
[LAUGHTER]
Most of all–
Ira Glass
I’m laughing because this is so dark.
Alain De Botton
It’s very dark. But in love, darkness is a real friend of relationships. Because so many of the problems of love come from unwarranted optimism. And so we need to be dark about so many things.
Ira Glass
OK, I’m going to stop the tape right there and come in to say, I know he’s going on a little bit here. And by the way, mazel tov to everybody getting married this month. But I’m a married person. And OK, just speaking for myself, I find this tear that he’s on to be one of the most accurate descriptions of marriage I’ve ever heard– no judging please– and also, in its own way, kind of hopeful. But we’ll get to that. Anyway, back to the tape.
Alain De Botton
Let me say, you’ll have noticed that I’ve got a British accent. Now, Britain doesn’t do many things well. We fail at a lot of things. But one of the things we excel at– perhaps almost on an international scale– is melancholy. We do melancholy really well. The weather helps.
And I think that there are aspects of a good marriage that should encompass a kind of melancholy, as we realize that we’re trying to do such a complex thing with someone. We are trying to find our best friend, our ideal sexual partner, our co-household manager, perhaps our co-parent. And we’re expecting that all this will miraculously go well together. Of course it can. We’re not going to be able to get it all right. There will be many areas of misunderstanding and failure. And a certain amount of sober melancholy is a real asset when heading forth into the land of love.
Ira Glass
And so to sum up, he says we choose the wrong spouse because we don’t actually understand what marriage is really going to be like. Because we do not know ourselves. And in addition, we idealize our spouse. We make hasty choices about who we’ll marry because being single can be so unpleasant. And because, rather than analyzing and thinking all those things through, instead we just follow our feelings. We go on gut. We go on instinct. Which, to Alain’s way of thinking, is obviously inadequate to the task at hand.
Alain De Botton
I mean, imagine if I said I’m going to try to land a 777 tomorrow, I’m going to touch down at San Francisco airport by intuition. Or if I said I’m going to perform quite a complicated surgical procedure this afternoon by intuition, sounds mad. Nevertheless, we accept that people are going to say, I’m going to run this major part of my life called my love life by intuition.
Ira Glass
Now, I know that we’ve all heard some of these things, OK? I think every couple now knows that it’s not going be great all the time. Every couple is told it’s going to be hard. You’re going to have to work at it.
But the radical message that Alain de Botton brings is even if you work at it, you’re not going to be that successful. It’s going to be a mix of unhappiness and happiness with way more unhappiness than you think before you get married. And a good partnership is one where both people have realistic expectations about all that.
A good partnership he writes, “Is not so much between two healthy people. There aren’t many of those on the planet. It’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening conscious accommodation between their relative insanities.” The standard question on an early dinner date he says should be simply, “And how are you crazy?”
Alain De Botton
I mean, relationships markedly improve when two people can make almost a blanket avowal– we’re both kind of crazy.
Ira Glass
You’re married, right?
Alain De Botton
I’m married.
Ira Glass
What’s your wife say about all this?
Alain De Botton
Look, she’s very funny. She’s a pessimistic realist. On our 10th wedding anniversary, she dressed in black. And she said, it was a funeral for many of her hopes. So she’s quite dark too. But we’re actually very hopeful about the course of love.
Ira Glass
And in your marriage, did you both go through a process of entering the marriage with one idea, a very idealized idea, of what marriage would be, and then you came to this other idea?
Alain De Botton
Yes. I had absolutely no idea about how to love. I hadn’t had many relationships. And I literally used to think that the only problem, the only difficulty of love was finding this person called the right person.
And they’d come into my life, and then we’d just understand one another totally. We would understand each other without needing to speak. We wouldn’t have any arguments. We wouldn’t have any arguments over money or practicalities. And I think we had a succession of crises and moments of fear, where we really thought we had married the wrong person.
Ira Glass
Is there a more general rule here? Do most of us make mistakes in other huge decisions in our lives because we don’t know ourselves?
Alain De Botton
The other area where we make major bad decisions based on a lack of self-knowledge– and it’s exactly the same principle– is work. Work and love, and the two very similar. Because in both areas, we abandon the field totally to intuition. You’re supposed to find your work by a kind of special calling, by a special pull. And in fact, in order to find a job that you can love, you have to understand so much about yourself, your own character, your own nature, let alone the world of work itself.