If you decide to get in a relationship with someone, it’s good to make sure that you understand how each other will react when things start to go wrong. 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 tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition. (My emphasis.) If you feel that you’re ready for a new relationship, don’t be afraid of what it will bring, just be careful. Marriage doesn’t freeze the moment at all. That moment was dependent on the fact that you had only known each other for a bit, that you weren’t working, that you were staying in a beautiful hotel near the Grand Canal, that you’d had a pleasant afternoon in the Guggenheim museum, that you’d just had a chocolate gelato…

There wasn’t a single moment where I was emotionally secure but there were many moments where I felt deeply lonely.

7) You’ll learn how to trust

Candidly, I knew my flaws were there, but I didn’t know exactly what to do about them. So I worked especially hard to cover up my imperfections. Amazingly, it didn’t take long for Greg to begin to “help me” display these issues in our relationship. Of course, I had the same effect on him — he had issues, too. We all do. Working with the truth It boils down to this — we must make an effort to make it work, but to expect someone to fill our every need and satisfy us on every possible level will lead to getting disappointed for sure. 5) You’ll learn to be happy on your own

The right ones feels unfamiliar and alien, almost oppressive. Not because they are wrong, but precisely because they are too well-balanced, too right. 4. Being Single Is so Awful We have a desperate and fateful urge to try to make nice things permanent. We want to own the car we like, we want to live in the country we enjoyed as a tourist. And we want to marry the person we are having a terrific time with. Alain de Botton ( 1969 – ) penned an astute essay in the New York Times titled: “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.” De Botton is a Swiss-born British author who co-founded The School of Life in 2008. His books discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, emphasizing philosophy’s relevance to everyday life and offering sound practical advice. His published works include: On Love: A Novel, which has sold more than two million copies, and his newest book, The Course of Love. His other books include: We mustn’t abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning. It takes a lot of time and work to be able to accept that you will be making mistakes, and lots of them during your lifetime, and that is completely okay.

10) You’ll learn to be yourself

The problem with this is that we will always be disappointed in other people’s mistakes because we are so used to being disappointed by ourselves. This “philosophy of pessimism … relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage.” That another person can’t save us from ourselves is not surprising, but should be expected. Still, some people are better for us than others. Who are they? But statistically, marrying too early and marrying based on romantic feelings provide some of the worst outcomes for marriage. Instead of using our feelings as our only guide, we should be using divorce statistics to help us understand the most common reason marriages fail and then actively take steps to prevent it. That’s because a raw statistical chance of one in two of failing at marriage seems wholly acceptable, given that – when one is in love – one feels one has already beaten far more extraordinary odds. The beloved feels like around one in a million. With such a winning streak, the gamble of marrying a person seem entirely containable. If you’ve been with someone you thought would make your life complete and they don’t, then it’s time to figure out what it is that you want, what makes you happy, and where your true happiness lies.

We need to know the intimate functioning of the psyche of the person we’re planning to marry. We need to know their attitudes to, and stance on, authority, humiliation, introspection, sexual intimacy, money, children, ageing, fidelity and 100 things besides. If you’re not sure about what it is that makes someone a trustworthy person, then it’s best that you wait to get married or have children with them until you learn to assess people well. 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.In a wiser society, prospective partners would put each other through detailed psychological questionnaires and send themselves off to be assessed at length by teams of psychologists. By 2100, this will no longer sound like a joke. The mystery will be why it took humanity so long to get to this point. Presently, we marry without any information. We almost never read books specifically on the subject, we never spend more than a short time with children, and we don’t rigorously interrogate other married couples or speak with any sincerity to divorced ones. We go into it without any insightful reasons as to why marriages fail. The School of Life (з якою мене познайомила моя bestie в Амстердамі) є ще багато класних життєвих "трактатів", тому зверніть увагу. Indeed , marriage tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a suburban house, with a long commute and maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerged. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.