Have I Chosen the Wrong Person? On Marriage, Doubt, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves
As usual, I have more than a few tabs open.
Coffee in hand on this cool autumn morning, I’m moving between preparing for the week ahead, revisiting my clinical notes, and indulging in a little extracurricular reading and, admittedly, distraction.
Somewhere between the tabs, I came across an essay in The New York Times by Alain de Botton, titled Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.
It did not strike me as political but it still struck me as provocative.
I read the title again: Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.
It was a little unsettling. . It brought to mind the couples I work with and the ambivalence they grapple with. It also called up those quiet, creeping doubts that can occasionally find their way in my own relationships.
Did I get this wrong? Is this what love is supposed to feel like? Have I chosen the wrong person?
I know that place not only from my work with couples, but from my own marriage.
There have been moments when my husband and I have felt far from one another. Moments when a conversation went badly, when one of us was tired or distracted, when the ordinary pressures of life seemed to take up all the space between us.
In those moments, the relationship can feel unfamiliar.
That may be one of the more complicated truths about marriage: sometimes the relationship becomes a place where our oldest fears, expectations, and stories come to visit.
When a Passing Thought Becomes a Convincing Story
So much of what we do in therapy involves learning to observe our thoughts rather than simply believe them. To question them, challenge them, and bring some order to the disorderly chaos of our minds before it leads us astray.
Relationships are particularly fertile ground for this kind of mental wandering.
I know how quickly it can happen. A disappointing conversation, an evening of emotional distance, another disagreement about the same old issue. Perhaps my husband has been distracted, less affectionate, or simply less available than I had hoped.
At first, the thought is relatively small:
I feel disconnected tonight.
But the mind rarely leaves it there.
In a matter of seconds it can become:
We’ve grown apart.
Then:
Perhaps we were never compatible.
And before long, we may find ourselves questioning the very foundation of a relationship that, only days earlier, felt reasonably secure.
This is not to suggest that such thoughts are always unfounded. Sometimes they are telling us something important. Sometimes disconnection is a sign that a conversation needs to happen, a pattern needs to change, or a deeper injury needs attention.
I have had to learn this in my own marriage: a difficult moment is not always a definitive statement about the relationship. Sometimes it is simply a difficult moment.
One of the more difficult things we learn in therapy is how to sit with uncertainty long enough to understand it, rather than rushing to resolve it.
At Union Station Therapy this distinction is especially relevant in couples work. The thoughts we bring into our relationships can be powerful, persuasive, and deeply familiar. But their intensity doesn’t always make them accurate.
Sometimes we need to examine the story before deciding whether to believe it.
The Disillusionment That Quietly Settles Into Marriage
What I find particularly interesting about de Botton’s essay is that it challenges our expectations of romantic love itself.
We enter relationships with ideas about what love should feel like. Some are conscious, others less so.
We imagine being understood, feeling chosen, experiencing affection and companionship. We hope to find someone who makes the ordinary difficulties of life a little easier to bear.
And why wouldn’t we?
But somewhere along the way, the person who once seemed endlessly fascinating becomes familiar. The romantic excitement of possibility gives way to the practical realities of daily life.
There are bills to pay, schedules to coordinate, children to raise, aging parents to consider, and a hundred mundane decisions that have little resemblance to the early days of romance.
The person who once seemed mysterious becomes the person whose habits we know by heart. We know how they take their coffee, how they respond when they are stressed, which stories they tell repeatedly, and what they are likely to say before they say it.
There is comfort in that kind of knowing.
But there can also be moments when familiarity feels like a loss.
The partner who once appeared wonderfully spontaneous might now seem unreliable. The person whose steadiness initially felt reassuring may occasionally seem predictable or dull.
And perhaps what unsettles us isn’t necessarily that our partner has changed so dramatically, but that our experience of love has changed.
We begin measuring the relationship we have against the relationship we imagined.
That comparison can be quietly corrosive.
In my own marriage, I have noticed how easy it is to romanticize what is absent. When life feels repetitive, I can find myself longing for more excitement. When we are busy, I may long for more connection. When we disagree, I may remember the ease of our early relationship.
We can find ourselves longing for something without being entirely sure what it is.
The difficulty is that certainty itself tends to change over the course of a long relationship.
De Botton suggests that we often enter love with limited self-awareness, not yet fully acquainted with our own complexities, let alone those of another person. There is something rather humbling in that observation.
We spend so much time attempting to determine whether another person is right for us, sometimes without fully understanding what we ourselves bring into a relationship.
And perhaps, as time passes, some of what we call incompatibility is actually the uncomfortable process of getting to know both people more honestly.
What If Love Cannot Protect Us From Loneliness?
The essay also reminded me of something the couples therapist Terry Real wrote:
“The paradox of real love is that our capacity to sustain intimacy rests on our capacity to tolerate aloneness inside the relationship.”
I find this profoundly true.
There is a peculiar loneliness that can exist even within an otherwise loving relationship.
I have felt it in my own marriage. We can share a home, a bed, meals, responsibilities, memories, and years of history, and still encounter moments when one of us feels fundamentally alone.
My husband may not understand a particular fear. He may respond inadequately to something that matters enormously to me. He may be preoccupied with his own thoughts, needs, or struggles at precisely the moment I wish he could turn toward mine.
And in those moments, the question can quietly emerge:
If this is the person who knows me best, why do I still feel so alone?
It is a painful question, but not necessarily an indictment.
Perhaps we have placed an impossible expectation on intimate relationships when we assume that genuine love should eliminate our experience of separateness.
No matter how close two people become, they remain two distinct human beings, each with their own internal world.
Marriage does not erase loneliness. It does not remove the need to know ourselves, soothe ourselves, or make meaning of our own experiences.
The ability to tolerate that separateness, without interpreting every moment of loneliness as abandonment or failure, may be an important part of sustaining intimacy.
Of course, there is a meaningful difference between the occasional loneliness inherent in being human and the persistent emotional isolation that can develop when a relationship has become chronically neglectful or unsafe.
Not every experience of loneliness is something we should simply learn to tolerate. Some experiences are invitations to have difficult conversations, ask for change, or reconsider what is happening between us.
But I think Real’s observation offers us something valuable: even the closest love cannot entirely relieve us of the responsibility of being with ourselves.
Are We Looking for Happiness, or Something Familiar?
Further into his essay, de Botton makes another interesting observation:
“What we really seek is familiarity.”
This is one of the more psychologically interesting aspects of his argument.
We tend to imagine that we’re consciously choosing partners who will make us happy. Yet the patterns that draw us toward particular people are often considerably more complicated.
Our histories shape what feels familiar, desirable, reassuring, or even exciting.
The emotional atmosphere in which we grew up can influence what we expect from closeness, how comfortable we are expressing needs, and how we respond when another person disappoints us.
For some, emotional steadiness feels comforting. For others, particularly those accustomed to less predictable relationships, that same steadiness may initially feel unfamiliar.
We may discover that we’re drawn toward patterns we recognize, even when those patterns don’t particularly serve us.
This idea feels especially personal to me because, in my own marriage, I have come to recognize how powerful familiarity can be.
Sometimes my husband and I can move through a familiar pattern without even realizing it. One of us reaches for connection, the other becomes overwhelmed. One asks for reassurance, the other becomes defensive. One pursues a conversation, the other withdraws.
The details change, but the emotional choreography can feel remarkably familiar.
And yet, familiarity is not always the same as destiny.
A familiar place can be comforting. It can also be a place where we repeat old patterns simply because we know the way.
This doesn’t mean we’re destined to repeat our histories, or that attraction can be reduced to childhood experiences. Human relationships are far too complex for that.
But it does raise a worthwhile question:
How much of what I believe about love comes from the relationship in front of me, and how much comes from what I’ve learned to expect?
Sometimes the answer is more revealing than we anticipate.
And it’s part of why learning about ourselves is so central to learning how to love another person.
Is Compatibility Something We Find, or Something We Create?
One of my favourite lines from the essay is this:
“Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.”
There’s something both liberating and rather heartening in that idea.
We speak about compatibility as though it were a fixed quality, something two people either possess or lack.
And certainly, some differences matter enormously. Values, life goals, emotional availability, and the ability to treat one another with respect are not trivial considerations.
But many of the differences that trouble couples are less dramatic.
One person enjoys socializing; the other prefers quiet evenings. One needs conversation to process feelings; the other needs time alone. One values spontaneity; the other finds comfort in routine.
At first, these differences may seem charming. Over time, they can become sources of irritation.
In my marriage, I have had to learn that the things I once found endearing can occasionally become the very things that frustrate me. The differences that made us interesting to one another can also become the places where we misunderstand one another.
We begin wishing our partner were a little more like us, or perhaps a little more like the person we thought we’d chosen.
But what if compatibility isn’t always about finding someone whose preferences naturally align with ours?
What if, in many ordinary matters, it emerges through our willingness to understand differences, negotiate them, and make room for one another?
De Botton later describes the importance of being able to “tolerate differences with generosity.”
I particularly appreciate the word generosity.
It’s one thing to acknowledge that our partner is different from us. It’s another to resist the temptation to interpret those differences as deficiencies that need correcting.
And that distinction becomes especially important in long-term relationships, where we have ample opportunity to become experts in one another’s shortcomings.
Perhaps compatibility is not always something we discover fully formed at the beginning. Perhaps some of it is built through the ongoing, sometimes unglamorous work of understanding another human being.
Sometimes compatibility looks less like effortless agreement and more like learning how to return to one another after a disagreement.
Sometimes it looks like softening. Sometimes it looks like apologizing. Sometimes it looks like staying curious about the person we think we already know.
When Relationship Doubts Deserve More Than Reassurance
I do want to make an important distinction here.
These reflections concern the ordinary ambivalence, disappointments, and periods of disillusionment that can emerge over the course of a marriage or long-term relationship.
They should not be confused with significant relational injuries such as infidelity, abuse, coercion, persistent dishonesty, or serious breaches of trust.
Those experiences are different matters altogether.
They require attention, accountability, and, at times, difficult decisions about safety, boundaries, and whether the relationship can or should continue.
The capacity to accept human imperfection should never be mistaken for an obligation to tolerate harmful behaviour.
Nor should the idea that compatibility can be cultivated become an argument that every relationship must be preserved.
Sometimes our doubts are influenced by unrealistic expectations, familiar fears, or temporary disconnection. Sometimes they are entirely reasonable responses to circumstances that need to change.
The work lies partly in learning to distinguish between the two.
And this is where therapy can be particularly valuable.
Not to persuade someone to stay. Not to persuade someone to leave. But to help bring greater clarity to what is actually happening.
To examine the patterns we repeat, the assumptions we make, the needs we struggle to express, and the ways we respond when intimacy becomes difficult.
At Union Station Therapy, our work with couples includes both the quieter difficulties of long-term relationships and more serious challenges, such as betrayal, persistent conflict, and uncertainty about whether to remain together.
Those situations require different conversations, but they share a need for thoughtful examination rather than hasty conclusions.
So, Have I Chosen the Wrong Person?
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of de Botton’s essay is that it offers no comforting fantasy about finding someone who will never disappoint us.
Instead, it challenges the assumption that disappointment automatically means we’ve chosen incorrectly.
And I think that is worth sitting with.
I have had moments in my marriage when I felt disappointed, misunderstood, or far away from the person I love. I have had moments when the ordinary work of being married felt less romantic than I had imagined.
But those moments have also taught me something.
A familiar place is not necessarily a wrong place.
Sometimes familiarity means we have become bored or disconnected and need to pay attention. Sometimes it means we are standing in an old emotional landscape, repeating a pattern we have not yet learned to change.
And sometimes familiarity is simply the quiet comfort of being known.
We are, after all, imperfect people attempting to build lives alongside other imperfect people.
There will be moments when we misunderstand one another, when affection feels distant, when disappointment is more readily available than gratitude.
There may be seasons when the relationship feels less like the great romance we imagined and more like the ordinary, sometimes exhausting business of living.
Some of those seasons call for patience. Others call for honest conversations, meaningful change, or professional help.
But not every passing doubt needs to become a verdict on the relationship.
Perhaps one of the more mature expressions of love is developing the capacity to remain curious when certainty gives way to ambiguity.
To resist the urge to make permanent judgments from temporary emotional states.
To recognize that loving another person does not always mean liking every part of them, agreeing with them, or feeling connected to them at every moment.
And perhaps most importantly, to recognize that our own minds, however persuasive, are not always the most reliable interpreters of our experiences.
Which brings me back to my morning coffee, the many open tabs, and an essay that interrupted my preparations for the week.
I found it rather heartening.
Not because it offers reassurance that every relationship is the right relationship, but because it reminds us how much of loving well may involve understanding ourselves, our expectations, and the stories we tell about the people closest to us.
Sometimes the question isn’t simply whether we’ve chosen the right person, but whether we’ve learned how to understand the person we’ve chosen.
And, of course, ourselves.
Perhaps the question is also whether we can learn to see familiarity differently—not only as a place where old wounds are repeated, but as a place where new choices can be made.
A Little Food for Thought
I’d be genuinely curious to hear what you make of de Botton’s perspective.
Does it resonate with you? Does it challenge something you believe about marriage and compatibility? Or does it leave you with an entirely different perspective?
Perhaps it’s a question worth considering over your own morning coffee:
What feels familiar in my relationship? And is that familiarity comforting, limiting, or asking for my attention?
I'd love to here from you, send a reflection or question through my "video ask" by clicking on the homepage video.
Alena
Clinical Director
Union Station Therapy | Austin, Texas
At Union Station Therapy, we offer couples therapy and marriage counseling in Austin, Texas, including support for couples navigating relationship ambivalence, communication difficulties, emotional distance, and marital crises.
Inspired by Alain de Botton’s essay, Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,
published in The New York Times, May 28, 2016.
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