Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person (2016)
Alain de Botton suggests marrying someone even if they are unideal and accepting their foibles, but what if instead people choose to remain single? He writes:<p>&gt; The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist)...<p>Me, I spend most of my free time consuming literature, films and music. Trying to assimilate as much of the canon as I can is what drives me; the beauty in art makes life worth living. If a person doesn&#x27;t share my tastes and isn’t willing to sit with me during all these moving and emotionally rich experiences day in and day out, then that means that they don’t share my life, and that seems like a bad foundation for any relationship. I do miss companionship, but I would rather stay single than enter into a marriage that would be an exercise in mutual frustration or force me to give up that which gives my life meaning and purpose.<p>As there is less social pressure to marry today and people now have boundless access to media, I suspect that many other people will reach the same conclusion, even if the hunger for companionship or childraising at any cost means that such insistently single people might remain a minority.