Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person
If you would be loved, love.
A quick update before we begin- I’m in the final stages of editing The Stoic Manual: Meditations on the Art of Living, a collection of 150 Stoic meditations on living well. It’ll be released soon and included free for all Annual and Lifetime members.
Welcome! The Stoics were deeply concerned with how we live with other people. Marriage is one of the hardest places to practice judgement, patience, duty, and self-discipline. This essay explores what Stoic philosophy can teach us about how we’ll love an imperfect person than the versions of them we created in our minds, become disenchanted and decide what we owe them as both they and we continue to change.
Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person
“Each striving to outdo the other in devotion, the marriage is ideal and worthy of envy, for such a union is beautiful.”- Musonius Rufus, On the Chief End of Marriage
“Consider not what he does, but what you are to do to keep your own faculty of choice conformable to nature.”- Epictetus, Enchiridion 30
The greatest chronicler of marriage in world literature died after leaving his own.
In the autumn of 1910, Leo Tolstoy, eighty-two years old and among the most famous men alive, slipped out of his house before dawn and…