When first looking out for a partner, the requirements we come up with are coloured by a beautiful non-specific sentimental vagueness: we’ll say we really want to find someone who is ‘kind’ or ‘fun to be with’, ‘attractive’ or ‘up for adventure…’ We Don’t Understand Ourselves © Flickr/Giuseppe Milo They tend to fall into some of the following basic categories. We ruin our lives for reasons that can be summed up in an essay. It’s all the more poignant that the reasons why people make the wrong choices are rather easy to lay out and unsurprising in their structure. Given that it is about the single costliest mistake any of us can make (it places rather large burdens on the state, employers and the next generation too), there would seem to be few issues more important than that of marrying intelligently. Otherwise intelligent people daily and blithely make the move. Academic achievement and career success seem to provide no vaccines. How do such errors happen, in our enlightened, knowledge-rich times? We can say straight off that they occur with appalling ease and regularity. Nevertheless, there are couples who display such deep-seated incompatibility, such heightened rage and disappointment, that we have to conclude that something else is at play beyond the normal scratchiness: they appear to have married the wrong person. We know that perfection is not on the cards. Anyone we might marry could, of course, be a little bit wrong for us.
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