Gauntlet

We’re coming to the end of an age of extreme romanticism, based on the belief that you could somehow magically fuse love and marriage together. Once you abandon that idea, then you’re into a much more flexible system. We may be getting back to a more pragmatic sense of what the family is about — things like property and children — rather than an absolute soul mate. After all, that’s a tremendously demanding idea, an idea that probably only worked for 2% of the population, who, strangely, managed to persuade the other 98% to buy into it.

— Alain de Botton