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Home » Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person: Alain de Botton (Transcript)

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person: Alain de Botton (Transcript)

Alain de Botton

This is the full transcript of British-Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton’s talk titled “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.”

 

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TRANSCRIPT: 

I have been asked to talk to you today about an essay that I wrote for “The New York Times” last year which went under a rather dramatic heading. It was called, “Why you will marry the wrong person

And perhaps we can just begin — we’re among friends — by just asking how many of you in the room do feel on balance that you have married the wrong person? I mean, where are my friends? Yeah, a lady there, a couple people there. Five, ten I see 30 people in the room, and so we always have to triple that.

So there’s a pretty hefty majority. But I’m here to give counsel and to give consolation for this situation. You know, there’s a lot of anger around our love lives privately held. But a lot of us go around feeling quite enraged, angry privately, about the way that our love lives have gone.

My task today is to turn that anger into sadness. If we manage to turn rage into grief, we will have made psychological progress. And this is the task today.

What lies behind rage very often is an unusual quality because we tend to think that very angry people are sort of dark and pessimistic characters. Absolutely not. Scratch the surface of any regularly angry person and you will find a wild optimist. It is, in fact, hope that drives rage.

Think of the person who screams every time they can’t find their house keys or every time they get stuck in traffic. These unfortunate characters are evincing a curious but reckless faith in a world in which keys never go astray, the roads to mysteriously traffic-free.