A PLACE CALLED MARRIAGE? PASS THE MAP HONEY

image via NBC News

Only a wedding cartographer knows the road to a place called marriage.

Alain de Botton wrote “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person” for the NY Times.

As a married man with two kids, what does Alain’s wife make of his prediction?

If he’s the wrong person, is she the right one?

These are the questions that lead many couples to marriage counseling.

What’s wrong with leaving well enough alone? Let that sleeping dog lie.

Marriage is it’s own reward with it’s own penalties. Married people know this.

Alain de Botton is married and knows this. So why stir the pot?

That’s what writers do.

And you wonder why writers have such a checkered relationship pattern?

Wonder no more, Mr. and Mrs. Wrong Person.

While you’re at it, explain how you’re the right person, but do it quietly so the other person won’t hear and figure out who’s right and who’s wrong.

If you’re right, they’re wrong. That’s how it works?

From the most read piece of 2016 in The Times:

Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation.

Alain has tricky origins, Swiss and English, and lives in London with a wife and two kids.

But it’s England, which complicates complications with all their tricky ways and traditions.

A furious English person is more entertaining than other furious nationalities.

There’s something about the sputtering indignation that anyone would disagree with personal authority?

Can’t you hear it? “How DARE you disagree with me.” Add a “fat cow” or “mildew brained simpleton” for extra credit.

Add sex and humiliation to the recipe and you’ve got your average everyday English attitude, which the rest of us know little about. Thankfully.

Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities.

When anyone from England starts discussing ‘complexities’ they’re talking about their mother.

With men or women, it goes straight to Mummy.

Women talking about their mothers I understand; men, not so much.

What’s up with English fathers?

I asked an Englishman about his father’s influence, what they talked about. He was an old man at the time and said, “I don’t remember my father ever speaking to me.”

You know his momma did some talking, enough for two or three people.

Fathers take note.

Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us.

What’s more enlightening than someone explaining why you’re the biggest jerk they’ve ever met?

Call it day and move on.

You hear about your flaws and immediately attack the other person’s flaws? Is that how it works?

Call it a day and move on.

Friends that don’t care enough to rag you down on topics well ragged?

Those are real friends, not therapists.

One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.

And we are really quite easy to live with.

Really. Quite easy.

Now find someone to agree with that sincere impression.