Quote: How Fiction Ruined Love

"Films like When Harry Met Sally . . .  (1989) and Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) are typical in centering the action entirely on the run-up to the start of a relationship. But for most of us, our life’s problem isn’t finding a partner (that’s just one very important and at points thrilling phase), it is tolerating the candidate one eventually finds, and being tolerated by them, over time. A wiser culture than ours would recognize that the start of a relationship is not the high point that romantic art assumes; it is merely the first step of a far longer, more ambivalent and yet quietly audacious journey on which we should direct our intelligence and scrutiny."

— Alain de Botton