The good news is that it doesn’t matter
June 5, 2016 5:26 PM   Subscribe

[A] hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating. Alain de Botton explains why you will marry the wrong person.
posted by gottabefunky (58 comments total) 34 users marked this as a favorite
 


Marriage is a promise to watch the person whom you most love in the entire world die, and that's the best case scenario.
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:41 PM on June 5, 2016 [54 favorites]


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.

de Botton makes lifeboats out of confectioner's sugar. Lovely at to a casual glance, made entirely of sweetness and good intentions, and they'll melt out from under you at the moment you really need them.

This idea that marriage is about finding the one human puzzle piece who happens to fit perfectly and permanently into the shape of your particular damage is the worst thing, that's true, but this article is a shrug from a disinterested third party in a frilly shirt.
posted by mhoye at 5:48 PM on June 5, 2016 [37 favorites]


This reads like a hifalutin' version of something I wrote on my Geocities blog after I got dumped for the second time in one year.
posted by The Card Cheat at 5:56 PM on June 5, 2016 [43 favorites]


"Alain de Botton specialises in a kind of humdrum potted sagacity, the kind of stuff that has all the outward appearance of insight while managing to avoid saying anything at all. This mushy nothingness can take the form of pointless tautology (‘In a meritocracy, success comes to seem earnt – but failure deserved’), excerpts from the Dictionary of Twee Vacuousness (‘Magnanimity: the one who was right does not say ‘I told you so,’ the one who was wronged does not seek vengeance’), outright untruth (‘Choosing a spouse and choosing a career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance’), inspirational pap (‘Our real motivation comes from people who don’t believe in us’), and the final spluttering descent into total incoherency (‘The end logic of our relationship to computers: sincerely asking the search engine “what should I do with the rest of my life?”‘)."

This is not nearly the best paragraph
posted by leotrotsky at 5:56 PM on June 5, 2016 [45 favorites]


his bodily strangeness ... designed by HR Giger... a tapering lizard’s egg of a cranium. ... nose has a lubricious gleam ...his deathly-white teeth seem to slide oilily against each other. His skin is faintly rubbery, and while it mostly seems to fit him there are still a few places where is bunches up or stretches out, like a cutaneous gimp suit.

You're not kidding, leotrotsky! (Will we have someone call out the male gaze in this instance?)
posted by spacewrench at 6:24 PM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


man, someone should have sent this guy to some pre-Cana counseling where they disabuse you of the romantic mythy parts of marriage right quick and a priest quizzes you on your understanding of the realities of a lifetime commitment.

I mean not that that guarantees you marry the RIGHT person, but at least disabuses you of the idea that there's a "right" person rather than many many years of work at a partnership that goes far beyond mere romanticism while you continue to develop as humans.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:24 PM on June 5, 2016 [16 favorites]


Marriage is a promise to watch the person whom you most love in the entire world die, and that's the best case scenario.

Marriage is also a promise to watch your love for the person whom you most love in the entire world potentially die before they actually die, among worst-case scenarios.
posted by limeonaire at 6:40 PM on June 5, 2016 [4 favorites]


Look we all know what marriage is actually about.

Securing the dynastic connections between your family the families behind the hills as to prevent another terrible war.
posted by The Whelk at 6:45 PM on June 5, 2016 [62 favorites]


that war was great and i will brook no discord
posted by beerperson at 6:47 PM on June 5, 2016 [20 favorites]


This reads like an actual letter I once received written by my shitty ex boyfriend who had a way with words.
posted by sockermom at 6:50 PM on June 5, 2016 [10 favorites]


I like to give Alain de Boton a little credit.
posted by Miko at 6:55 PM on June 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


My ex married yesterday. Pretty sure it has as much to do with a future attempt to regain custody as it does with finding someone who is willing to put up with untreated disorders.

Some poor 19 year old guy whose parents sent him to a cult when he admitted to suicidal thoughts just asked me if i thought marriage cured people. BIRDS NEED TWO WINGS.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 6:57 PM on June 5, 2016 [4 favorites]


Counterpoint.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 6:58 PM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Joining the chorus in general criticism, but I agree with the sentiment in this paragraph:

No one can be in an optimal frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.

I would restate this to say that you should first spend time being comfortable alone and being who you are alone before diving into marriage.

I wanted to counter his unasked question of "how are you crazy" with a quote used in my wedding:

We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.
Robert Fulghum, True Love

Then on re-discovering the correct quote, perhaps the better response comes from Deadpool:

"your crazy matches my crazy, big time."

The question doesn't have to go unasked.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:06 PM on June 5, 2016 [15 favorites]


(Tevye)
Golde, The first time I met you
Was on our wedding day
I was scared

(Golde)
I was shy

(Tevye)
I was nervous

(Golde)
So was I

(Tevye)
But my father and my mother
Said we'd learn to love each other
And now I'm asking, Golde
Do you love me?

(Golde)
I'm your wife

(Tevye)
I know...
But do you love me?

(Golde)
Do I love him?
For twenty-five years I've lived with him
Fought him, starved with him
Twenty-five years my bed is his
If that's not love, what is?

(Tevye)
Then you love me?

(Golde)
I suppose I do

(Tevye)
And I suppose I love you too

(Both)
It doesn't change a thing
But even so
After twenty-five years
It's nice to know
posted by beerperson at 7:11 PM on June 5, 2016 [16 favorites]


And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative.
The marriage of feeling has yet to prove it's any better on any of these accounts.
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.
A perspective that sees tragedy and romance as alternatives to one another. Weird. I'm totally confused by this. Is this a 19th century literature thing I'm not getting here?
posted by idiopath at 7:27 PM on June 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


He's not offering insight, he's merely describing what we all can see. He makes money doing this, I hear?
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:34 PM on June 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


This is basically the Charlotte Lucas theory of matrimony, right? And while it can lead to a comfortable living, you're still stuck with Mr. bloody Collins.
posted by web-goddess at 7:40 PM on June 5, 2016 [13 favorites]


Been working on a writing project lately, and been thinking about how hard it is to really work hard on something and then offer it up to others for their enjoyment. How it's really difficult and sometimes frightening to share a part of yourself with others in that way. Responses like this guy is getting remind me of the inevitability that I myself will get cruel responses of a similar sort at some point.

Of course, that was some pretty empty pap and the criticisms quite fair. The cost of the privilege of being published in the New York Times is that your work will get the response it deserves.
posted by Caduceus at 8:01 PM on June 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


I think you should marry the person whose farts either offend you the least or impress you the most. Because you are going to be smelling them.
posted by srboisvert at 8:24 PM on June 5, 2016 [21 favorites]


If I marry the person with the best hair is this likely to be a good metric
posted by solarion at 8:31 PM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


A noted authority asserts that certain individuals with the good hair can have a demonstrable deleterious effect on a relationship.
posted by zamboni at 9:07 PM on June 5, 2016 [19 favorites]


Jay Rayner on Alain de Botton.

This piece really is stupid. Does de Botton really not think that, for instance, how one acts after sex is not going to be known to a couple about to get married? Sure, not every couple, but I think most readers of the NYT have gotten used to the idea sex before marriage. And his grandiose deliverances about the limits of Romantic love are, well, let's just say he's no Stendhal. Nor is he, say, John Gottman.

He's too self-satisfied to develop his ideas past the first draft and too arrogant to think anyone might have thought of them before.
posted by kenko at 9:10 PM on June 5, 2016 [7 favorites]


Responses like this guy is getting remind me of the inevitability that I myself will get cruel responses of a similar sort at some point.

De Botton isn't just a "this guy", though; he's a mediocrity of wide renown who's been peddling inanity and pap for decades.

Don't worry about his sharing something of himself just to see it torn to shreds; he hasn't any substance to share in the first place.
posted by kenko at 9:12 PM on June 5, 2016 [11 favorites]


If I marry the person with the best hair is this likely to be a good metric

I saw a werewolf drinking a Pina Colada at Trader Vic's
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 9:20 PM on June 5, 2016 [8 favorites]


"The School of Life" sounds so comforting and bland, yet so sinister. It has to be a front for a coven of vampires or SPECTRE.
posted by betweenthebars at 9:25 PM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Just read Adam Phillips instead. Here's the book: Missing Out. It explains everything.
posted by mrgrimm at 9:28 PM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Reading all the criticisms of Alain de Botton I'm finding them far more annoying than his article. I didn't totally love the article, I didn't even finish it the first time when I saw it the other day, but now I feel like I should give his writing a chance.
posted by bongo_x at 10:10 PM on June 5, 2016 [5 favorites]




Sam Kriss:
de Botton isn’t really interested in changing the world. He thinks people should be a little bit more reflective, he thinks he can help people cope with the stresses of the workplace and the perils of romance, he thinks everyone should have a ‘sunlit room set with honey-coloured limestone tiles’ in which to relax – and that’s basically it. No passions, no fury, no grand and wild ideas, just a dull life with a few small pleasures and a few small worries, instantly soothed. He’s standing atop a pile of corpses and suggesting that they might be arranged more pleasingly. Alain de Botton isn’t just banal, he embraces his own banality; he tries to dress vacuousness up as significance. If the sense of the banal is the whispering reminder that there was once something important and our society has since then expended every effort in wiping it out, then de Botton’s achievement is to close up that anxious gap, to make dullness a universal with no horizon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL3AgkwbYgo&t=5m41s
posted by flabdablet at 11:19 PM on June 5, 2016 [6 favorites]


I saw a werewolf drinking a Pina Colada at Trader Vic's

I know that guy, he also likes walks in the rain but his fur stinks of dog for hours after.
posted by biffa at 12:25 AM on June 6, 2016 [2 favorites]


It's a New York Times Magazine feature. Of course it sucks.
when we can start requesting New Features from the new tech, can I put in an order for a "New York Times Magazine" warning? Preferably flashing.
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:20 AM on June 6, 2016


If you pair up while young, while both of your personalities are malleable, you get to mutually shape yourselves into a functioning dual entity. (You see pairs of 22-year-olds who meet after a few mildly drunken words are exchanged at a bar, find each other agreeable enough to go out, and soon move in together and shape their tastes in everything from interior decor to what constitutes breakfast on weekends; they make it look as easy as breathing.) Though if you leave it too long, your idiosyncrasies, scars and rough edges will make it harder to compromise and less compelling for others to accommodate you. Or, as they say, “that which doesn't kill me only makes me weirder and harder to relate to”.

Of course, having external forms of motivation (such as fame or wealth) can compensate in some cases for being otherwise challenging to like.
posted by acb at 2:19 AM on June 6, 2016 [3 favorites]


"True Love Provides a Quiet Anchorage" is an essay by Sydney J. Harris with much the same tone and a related thesis, but less "resign yourself to disappointment" and more "seek out lasting calm rather than whirlwind rexcitement" I had it read at my wedding. Since I can't find it online anymore, here's an extended sample.

......

Perhaps the one thing young people yearn to know more than any other is how they can tell when they are really in love. It is so easy to see the counterfeits when one looks back later, and so difficult to discriminate when the blood is running high and the moon is full.

Why do so many people seem to pick disappointing lovers and inadequate mates, so deliberately, so stubbornly, so obviously doomed to failure? I think it is largely because romance, like liquor, feeds on its own delusion: The more we consume, the more intoxicated and distorted our judgment becomes.

One of the best and truest tests of a real affinity – though one not congenial to the youthful passions – may have been provided by St Bernard of Clairvaux when he said, “We find rest in those we love, and we provide a resting place in ourselves for those who love us.

When the infatuation has run its course, as it always does, the feeling that remains must include repose at its core – a quality much neglected and overlooked in most romantic literature and lore. If a relationship requires constant stimulation – spats and tears and reconciliation – then it is doubtful that when the fever subsides there will be enough contentment simply to be with each other.

Marriage, of course, does not change people; it merely unmasks them. It strips off the strangeness, the glamour, the appearance of strength, the fascination of novelty, the treacherous sense of uniqueness that every couple feels at first.

Faced then with the thousand annoyances and perplexities of everyday connubiality, two persons have to rest easily within each other, or the ordinary abrasions of family life will begin to wear away the relationship, leaving but wistfulness and puzzlement and, eventually, resentment that the reality is nothing like the romance.

A resting place is what we need as we grow older. A place not to gaze at each other in mutual fascination, but to look out at the world together from the same angle of vision. A harbor, a shelter, a refuge, a source of nourishment and support. This is not what creates marriage, but this is what sustains it.
posted by OnceUponATime at 3:47 AM on June 6, 2016 [62 favorites]


Of course, having external forms of motivation (such as fame or wealth) can compensate in some cases for being otherwise challenging to like.

So all of us are basically hosed?
posted by Dip Flash at 5:33 AM on June 6, 2016 [1 favorite]


We can improve the odds against marrying the wrong person by not marrying Alain de Botton.
posted by Obscure Reference at 5:42 AM on June 6, 2016 [13 favorites]


Eh, it's not like I can get anyone to marry me anyway, but if it did, of course I'd be the wrong one.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:53 AM on June 6, 2016 [2 favorites]


We can improve the odds against marrying the wrong person by not marrying Alain de Botton.

I'm straight but would still be tempted by 1960s Alain Delon, were the choice to be limited to the theme of Alain.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:02 AM on June 6, 2016 [3 favorites]


OnceUponATime, that was the best comment ever.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 6:09 AM on June 6, 2016


It doesn't change a thing
But even so
After twenty-five years
It's nice to know


Dad, are we having pizza tonight or not, Jesus Christ
posted by clockzero at 6:44 AM on June 6, 2016 [3 favorites]


I read some other pieces on that blog, leotrotsky, and while I enjoy a good angry rant, I like the writer less and less the more I read. I had no opinion of de Botton before and found this piece, yes, a bit bland and banal. But Kriss seems more unbalanced than incisive.

Also, this piece railing against rules of "civility" online and taking feminists and liberals to task for it seems to completely ignore or be unaware of Gamergate and other shitshows where violent speech was in fact weaponized to shut up or even put women in danger by doxxing. When women use angry speech, we often receive threats or actual physical violence, as when responding to catcalls, and he seems completely unaware of that fact. Or doesn't care. Both of which undermine his somewhat incoherent point.
posted by emjaybee at 7:11 AM on June 6, 2016 [2 favorites]


I_love_bananas, Sydney J. Harris deserves the credit. I think about that essay all the time, eleven years into the marriage that began with a reading of it. Here's a cite for the essay (though I think it may also appear in other collections of his essays.)

"True Love Provides a Quiet Anchorage" in Pieces of Eight, Part III: Of the Mind and Passions (1982), p. 158
posted by OnceUponATime at 7:18 AM on June 6, 2016 [5 favorites]


Marriage is taking turns pushing the trash in the trash can down until someone gives in and takes it out.
posted by Cookiebastard at 7:33 AM on June 6, 2016 [3 favorites]


Sam Kriss is a point equidistant between Stewart Lee and Slavoj Žižek.
posted by acb at 7:44 AM on June 6, 2016


emjaybee, I agree about Sam Kriss; he has a bit of flair but it's so undirected and seemingly uninformed.
posted by kenko at 8:18 AM on June 6, 2016


I read some other pieces on that blog, leotrotsky, and while I enjoy a good angry rant, I like the writer less and less the more I read. I had no opinion of de Botton before and found this piece, yes, a bit bland and banal. But Kriss seems more unbalanced than incisive.

I'm not claiming I like the guy, just that I appreciate a thorough and brutal evisceration of the pablum de Botton is selling. As someone said in another thread on another topic:

Anonymous is like the T-rex at the end of Jurassic Park: it's not heroic, and I wouldn't want it to ever notice me, but I cheered when it took down those fucking velociraptors.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:21 AM on June 6, 2016 [1 favorite]


My sister, who got married this weekend, recommends not getting married in June even if you are getting married in a place nobody else that isn't particularly popular (the church where my parents did) with a similar reception (a forest preserve), but because ALL OF THE MARRIAGE RELATED ARTICLES will be sent to you. (She was talking about the Time magazine cover "How to Stay Married (and why)" and many others, but it probably applies here too.)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 9:02 AM on June 6, 2016 [3 favorites]


I somehow missed that this was de Botton when I read it the other day, but given (a) the timing and (b) his propensity to never actually get around to making a point on his ostensible topic, I can only assume this was supposed to be a review of The Lobster.
posted by psoas at 9:35 AM on June 6, 2016 [5 favorites]


Brutalist anti-intellectualism is so pervasive that only sickly weeds like de Botton can survive.
posted by No Robots at 10:11 AM on June 6, 2016


What's architecture got to do with it?
posted by idiopath at 10:52 AM on June 6, 2016


What's architecture got to do with it?

It was kind of a joke, because de Botton has some fascinating things to say about architecture. I would like to find a word that would cover the kind of attacks that de Botton gets. It's a weird mix of hipster smarm and ugly disdain for tall poppies.
posted by No Robots at 10:56 AM on June 6, 2016 [3 favorites]


Botton is on the David Brooks career path.

In his television series on big philosophical questions his philosopher-of-choice for love was Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer. The man who wrote this.
posted by bukvich at 2:34 PM on June 6, 2016 [2 favorites]


I realize that this will likely come across as more hipster smarm, but no way is de Botton a tall poppy.
posted by kenko at 3:33 PM on June 6, 2016 [3 favorites]


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 unusual or grounds for divorce. 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.

I laughed at this because my partner has so far exceeded every expectation I had of other human beings that I could not have been persuaded to believe it was possible before experiencing it.

De Botton is the peculiar kind of neo-Puritan who is haunted by the fear that someone somewhere is having the profound emotion he is so patently incapable of.
posted by jamjam at 4:32 PM on June 6, 2016 [5 favorites]


If you pair up while young, while both of your personalities are malleable, you get to mutually shape yourselves into a functioning dual entity...

Nah. This sometimes happens, but from my experience, youth is too young to have perfect judgement in forming perfect relationships. There are happy exceptions, but they're the lucky ones.

...though if you leave it too long, your idiosyncrasies, scars and rough edges will make it harder to compromise and less compelling for others to accommodate you


Nah. Depends on the person. When you get older you learn how to compromise better, you know better where your lines are, what's more important in your values, and what's just superficial stylistic differences.
posted by ovvl at 6:11 PM on June 6, 2016 [2 favorites]


In his television series on big philosophical questions his philosopher-of-choice for love was Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer. The man who wrote this.

Ha seriously? Of all the actually relevant reasons anyone could have for not liking de Botton and it seems there are more than enough being given in this thread, citing as a philosopher-of-choice one of the classics who is still studied and cited by everyone and also happened to hold views - surprise suprise! - on the inferiority of women almost two hundred years ago? Because that was so unusual back then, right? Because it was so unusual in the entire history of philosphy?
Come on, you can hardly pin the blame for that on de Botton or infer that that’s the reason he was picking him as his favourite unless he cited or expressed those specific views himself today. Else it’s ridiculous to even bring that up.
posted by bitteschoen at 3:33 AM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


"For a marriage to succeed, you have to be alike enough to make it work, and different enough to make it interesting."
- Frank, the cheesesteak guy at the pizza place I worked at in college.

Still the wisest words about marriage I've ever heard.
posted by prepmonkey at 10:39 AM on June 8, 2016 [3 favorites]


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