Philosophy of Pessimism in Marriage

2  things in Alain Botton's article on "Why you will marry the wrong person" interest me. He  offers many factors but I will focus on his point that people tend to look for familiarity even when logic tells them it doesn't offer happiness. He thinks that there is this tendency to "re-create, within our relationships, the feelings we know so well in childhood........thus rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right....that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don't associate being loved with feeling happy".

In one of my earlier blogs I have related how one of my child client has repeatedly asked to play the role of an abused maid in our play therapy until the fetish subsided. She was a subject of child abuse. I had the inkling that it was an obsessive compulsive syndrome. My understanding of the syndrome then was the urge to re-create a similar situation with the hope that "this time round" they (the affected) can do it right and win back the love they deserved. Alain Botton in this article offers another perspective that for some people being loved may not equate to being happy. I really got to think about this but I guess both reasonings are possible given that the mind is such an unfathomable thing and every individual's mind is unique.

Now onto onto the brighter side of the article and something which I can relate. Botton encourages people to forgo wishful romanticism for " a tragic awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us-and we will (without malice) do the same", what he calls a philosophy of pessimism. The person who can "negotiate differences in taste intelligently" , the "person who is good at disagreement" is the most compatible for us.

I remember reading about a couple in their 80s when asked about the key to a long lasting marriage remarked that the only secret is to have low expectations. Now I think that is exactly how my husband manages to live with me. I on the other hand still entertain hope that I can nag and scold him into dropping his irritating habits. So when will I learn to give up hope and adopt Botton's "philosophy of pessimism". Don't tell me I have already fallen into the trap thinking that to Love someone is to make HIM Miserable! LOL