The Course of Love

by Alain de Botton

The marriage of reason was not, from any sincere perspective, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish, exploitative and abusive. Which is why what has replaced it – the marriage of feeling – has largely been spared the need to account for itself. What matters is that two people wish desperately for it to happen, are drawn to one another by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. The modern age appears to have had enough of ‘reasons’, those catalysts of misery, those accountants’ demands. Indeed the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six weeks since they met; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it may actually be deemed to be, for apparent ‘recklessness’ is taken as a counterweight to all the errors and tragedies vouchsafed by the so-called sensible unions of old. The prestige of instinct is the legacy of a collective traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable ‘reason’.