The Course of Love by Alain de Botton

BATB score: 9/10 💙❤️💙❤️

Thank you Alain de Botton for writing about the philosophy behind marriages. A very honest and important book about how there can only be a 'good enough' marriage that you have to seriously work for every day; reality is so not 'they lived happily ever after'.

Best to: "that love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm"

BATB lingering thought: the appropriate wedding vows is rather "that I will talk through my feelings when I feel hurt, that I will want to know and come to terms with your mind in all its weird byways, that I will endure the disappointments of marriage with bravery and stoic reserve, and that I will go to marriage therapy with you."

Best for: post-honeymoon couples - optimal time to relate and to read this book; how every marriage worst case scenarios begin with small humiliations and let-downs; and how you need to pick it up and fix it (extreme ownership!)

Best as: a constructive wedding gift with impactful positive implications yet the newly weds may not have appreciated it then and there so may be get them some cash (to pay off the wedding) along with the book

Best quotes: “There is no one more likely to destroy us than the person we marry.”

“Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.”

“The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste, but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and grace.”

"In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the altar, a couple would speak thus: "We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, fro we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.”