This tiny volume–three essays, 69 short pages–hardly counts as a book. Sometimes, though, that’s all the time someone might have available. The authorship of Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person is credited to a collective, The School of Life, which is the brainchild of British philosopher Alain de Botton. De Botton has a M.Phil. from King’s College, London, and started a Ph.D. at Harvard, but he quit to write books for the general public, or so his Wikipedia profile tells me. The School of Life is his vehicle for reaching that broader audience; it’s an entrepreneurial venture that provides articles that discuss various issues to subscribers. Writers are trying to find ways to earn a living, and maybe de Botton’s method is more profitable than a Substack or relying on revenue from books. He has published a lot of books, some of which seem to be short ones like Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person, and others longer and more thorough. The School of Life seems to be a collective venture, with anonymous co-writers following de Botton’s direction. I say “seems” because it’s hard to tell who wrote this book. The title essay, or at least a shorter version of it, was published in the New York Times in 2016, and became that newspaper’s most-downloaded article of that year; I ran across a mention of it somewhere and, curious, decided to get a copy.

Of the three essays, “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person” is the most successful. It’s a funny and poignant look at long-term relationships. Half of marriages end in divorce, and who knows how many other forms of coupling fall apart. De Botton sets out to explain why that is. The first reason is that we don’t know ourselves. In particular, we don’t understand our own particular craziness. “A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren’t many of these on the planet),” he writes, “it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening accommodation between their relative insanities.” Nor do we understand other people. We enter into marriage without knowing the attitudes of our potential mates towards things like introspection, sexual intimacy, money, fidelity, and “a hundred things besides.” Without that knowledge, we go by physical attractiveness, and that’s not enough for two people to build a life together. We aren’t used to being happy, either. What we learned about love in our families of origin might’ve been tainted by abandonment and humiliation, and since that’s what we believe love to be, we end up choosing people who will cause us more suffering. “We marry the wrong people because the right ones feel wrong–undeserved,” de Botton argues. “We marry wrongly because we have no experience of health and because we don’t–whatever we may say–ultimately associate being loved with being satisfied.” We also marry because being single is awful, and being tired of being alone causes us to choose the wrong person out of desperation.

All three essays argue that, historically, when the Marriage of Reason–marriage as a kind of business contract rather than a love match–was replaced by the Marriage of Instinct or Feeling, the Romantic marriage based on love, we merely changed one source of misery for another. Instead of either of those forms of coupling, we ought to develop a Marriage of Psychology, in which aspiring partners would submit to a process of examination, learn about “the daunting complexities of our respective psyches,” discovering how our potential partners are mad, how we can remain friends, how we can “accommodate our competing needs for extracurricular sex on the one hand and loyalty on the other.”

We also need to understand that happiness is fleeting and inconstant, and accept its impermanence. We need to realize that we’re not special–that most marriages are unhappy, at least sometimes, and ours will almost certainly be, too. Marriage can’t “end love’s painful rule over our lives”: “there is as much doubt, hope, fear, rejection and betrayal inside a marriage as there is outside of one.” A psychological marriage, one that accepts this bleak picture, is the only solution to the conundrum of long-term relationships.

The second essay, “When Is One Ready to Get Married?,” continues the rejection of Romantic marriage we see in the first essay, but instead of proposing the psychological marriage as the solution, it suggests that a marriage based on Classical principles would make more sense. So, we are ready for marriage when we give up on perfection; when we realize we won’t ever be perfectly understood; when we realize we’re crazy and in what way; when we’re ready to love rather than be loved; when we’re ready to take on administrative tasks, since running a household with someone is similar to running a business; when we understand that sex and love both belong and don’t belong together, a paradox that must be mastered, since over our lives we may “be called upon to demonstrate both capacities”; when we are happy to be taught and are also calm about teaching; and, finally, when we realize that we’re not that compatible with our partners. Marriage is not intuitive; it is a skill, and it requires practice and instruction.

The last essay, “How Love Stories Ruin Our Love Lives,” argues that while fiction can teach us important lessons about love, the wrong kinds of stories–Romantic rather than Classical–mislead us. The Romantic plot is about finding a partner, for instance; the Classical plot is about tolerating a partner, and being tolerated by them, over a long period of time. The Romantic story ignores the overwhelming importance of work; the Classical story does not. The Romantic story forgets about children; the Classical story understands that children can create “unbearable strains” between a couple, and those strains are also love. The Romantic story doesn’t consider practicalities; the Classical story emphasizes things like laundry and other household tasks. The Romantic story teaches that love and sex belong together; the Classical story “knows that long-term love may not set up the best preconditions for sex,” and that sexual problems don’t necessarily indicate that a relationship is failing. The Romantic story thinks that harmony between the protagonists is fundamental to a successful relationship; the Classical story accepts that relationships include misunderstandings, secrets, loneliness, and compromises. Again, love is a skill we need to learn, not an instinct. “The Romantic novel is deeply unhelpful,” the essay concludes. “By its standards, our own relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory.” We would be better off if we told ourselves “more accurate stories about the progress of relationships, stories that normalise troubles and show us an intelligent, helpful path through them.”

You might think all of this feels rather bloodless and overly rational, as if Spock had become a couple’s counsellor (when he’s not experiencing pon farr, that is). Or you might think about your relationship(s) and realize that the arguments this little book makes contain a lot of sense. I think there’s a lot of sense here, but I also think it might be almost impossible to put much of what’s advocated here into practice. That’s okay. I’m curious about de Botton’s other writing–he’s published dozens of books, translated into dozens of languages, according to Goodreads–and I might dip into them in the future. I’m curious about How Proust Can Change Your Life, for instance. Maybe it would encourage me to take the shrink wrap off my multivolume edition of In Search of Lost Time (I think I have the one with the new title, not the one called Remembrance of Things Past). That would fill a gaping hole in my education.