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C'est tellement simple, l'amour. Jacques Prévert

Profound Truths of Marriage (and Human Nature)

Through a Scottish couple, Rabih and Kirsten, de Botton dissects love and marriage. From the seeds of love planted when we are teens to dating to wedding to kids then through adultery and counseling for anxious and avoidant attachment arising from childhoods in which each lost a parent young, de Botton tells their story which he mixes with profound truths about human nature and the mountainous terrain each of us face in a marriage.

This book hit close to home (probably too close) on so many things I recognize. The novel made me appreciate even more the appreciate the sacrifices made and pains endured by those passing the 15-20 year anniversary, often after having undergone counseling and/or worked through problems suffered by spouses in virtually all marriages.

If I shared all the quotes I highlighted while reading this book (at least half the book), I'd violate the "fair use" exceptions to copyright laws. Plus, I'd bore you. Thus I've pared it down to the very best of the bunch.

Notions of Marriage: Past and Present; Explosion of Divorces
"For most of recorded history, people stayed married because they were keen to fit in with the expectations of society, had a few assets to protect, and wanted to maintain the unity of their families. Then gradually another, very different standard took hold: couples were to remain together, ran the thought, only so long as certain feelings still obtained between them—feelings of authentic enthusiasm, desire, and fulfillment. In this new Romantic order, spouses could be justified in parting ways if the marital routine had become deadening, if the children were getting on their nerves, if sex was no longer enticing, or if either party had lately been feeling a little unhappy every now and then."

We Don't Really Need to Always be Fully Understood
"Love begins with the experience of being understood in highly supportive and uncommon ways. They grasp the lonely parts of us; we don’t have to explain why we find a particular joke so funny; we hate the same people; we both want to try that rather specialized sexual scenario. It cannot continue. When we run up against the reasonable limits of our lovers�� capacities for understanding, we mustn’t blame them for dereliction. They were not tragically inept. They couldn’t fully fathom who we were—and we did likewise. Which is normal. No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else."

Love; Being Loved will usually Follow
"We speak of 'love' as if it were a single, undifferentiated thing, but it comprises two very different modes: being loved and loving. We should marry when we are ready to do the latter and have become aware of our unnatural—and dangerous—fixation on the former. We start out knowing only about 'being loved.' It comes to seem, quite wrongly, the norm. To the child, it feels as if the parent were just spontaneously on hand to comfort, guide, entertain, feed, and clear up while remaining almost constantly warm and cheerful. We take this idea of love with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret corner of our mind, we picture a lover who will anticipate our needs, read our hearts, act selflessly, and make everything better. It sounds 'romantic,' yet it is a blueprint for disaster."

Compatibility in Marriage is an Achievement, Not a Precondition
"The Romantic vision of marriage stresses the importance of finding the 'right' person, which is taken to mean someone in sympathy with the raft of our interests and values. There is no such person over the long term. We are too varied and peculiar. There cannot be lasting congruence. The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and good grace."

"Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the 'right' person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition."


Real Life Ain't a Hollywood Love Story [probably the most simple truth in the book about the human condition under the strains of matrimony, one so often and easily forgotten in the day to day of life]

"By the standards of most love stories, our own real relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory. No wonder separation and divorce so often appear inevitable. But we should be careful not to judge our relationships by the expectations imposed on us by a frequently misleading aesthetic medium."

"The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. The best cure for love [in the movie or film sense] is to get to know them better."