Full transcript
0:00My name is Alain de Botton. I'm a philosopher, psychotherapist and founder of the School of
0:05Life. Chapter 1 - Our Destructive Romantic Culture We know in theory that love matters a lot. It's in
0:17every pop song, it's the center of most religions. We sometimes lose sight of what that word actually
0:25means. It's really about connection. And it is one of the most beautiful and one of the most
0:30complicated of all phenomena. Even though we think we've been around on this planet for a long time
0:36trying to figure things out, I'd say we were still at the dawn collectively of making sense of this
0:42phenomenon we call love. And it's no surprise that most people will go to their deathbeds thinking,
0:50not quite sure I figured that side of life out. At least many of us will still be grappling with
0:57some of the complexities of love by the time time runs out on us. The most central kind of
1:03love that people are obsessed about, concerned about, is romantic love. That is the intimate
1:10connection between two human beings who have a sexual contact. It's worth saying that there are
1:16other forms of love. We can love our children, we can love animals, we can love ideas, we can
1:24love tables, chairs, clouds, all sorts of things. We are capable of many forms of love, but I'd say
1:30that when people sing about love and when they cry about love, it tends to be the love of one very
1:38special person we tend to call our soulmate, our partner. It used to be the case that when people
1:44found partners, they would do so according to fairly pragmatic considerations. In most nations
1:50and most parts of the world, for most of history, couples were formed not by the individuals
1:56themselves, but by the wider society, families, the village, the court. There were, if you like,
2:03dynastic marriages. You would get together with somebody because they had a plow and you had an
2:09ox and it seemed like a good match, or you were the Duke of Brabant and they were the Princess
2:14of Naples and that was seen as a wonderful union. So you got together for reasons that were nothing
2:21to do with emotional compatibility. There were a lot of tears, there was sadness, there was
2:26loneliness, but it didn't seem to matter because relationships were seen to be about something
2:31else. There was then a momentous change that occurs in, towards the end of the 18th century,
2:38starting in Britain, France, Germany, parts of Italy, a revolution in feeling that we now know
2:46as romanticism. And one of the central tenets of romanticism is that each individual should
2:52be left to decide on their partner by their own, the movements of their own heart. They
2:58should be left to decide for themselves. It's a beautiful idea, it's a very liberating idea,
3:05it should make a lot of sense. And we have been in the romantic age now for, you know, 200 years,
3:13perhaps shorter, perhaps a little longer, that kind of time period. And let's put it plainly,
3:18it's been a disaster. We're not any appreciably happier now in a romantic culture than we were
3:27in a dynastic culture, where marriages were made for dynastic reasons. Why? Because we have failed
3:34collectively to focus with enough intent on the difficulties that couples will have when they
3:40choose each other according to the movements of their own heart. Look, I think a really
3:45key prejudice of the romantic worldview is that if love is working well, it should be following
3:54instinct. There's been an enormous veneration, it must be worship of instinct. Love is described as
4:00a special feeling, not an asset of ideas, not a sense of rationally observable principles,
4:05but a feeling. You either have the feeling or you don't. You must be guided by your feeling.
4:10There's even a prejudice against language. You know, true lovers shouldn't talk too much. They
4:14should just feel the flattering of their own hearts. That's why music has a huge prestige,
4:20higher than philosophy. When we're in love, we don't want to read philosophical tracks,
4:24we want to hear love songs. That is to do with our sense that emotion should be guiding us,
4:30not reason. Reason is the enemy in the romantic worldview of truly happy relationships. If we
4:37follow reason, that's cold, it may be calculating, it's unromantic. And, you know, there are so many
4:44things that are considered unromantic. And I would love to train our audience. But every
4:50time something seems unromantic, question it. Is it truly unromantic if we define romanticism as
4:58the pursuit of a workable relationship? On that basis, is it unromantic to talk about money?
5:04Is it unromantic to think long and hard about childhood patterns of psychological
5:10development? Is it anti-romantic to spend a lot of time thinking about families and friends and
5:18compatibility at that level? All these things, in my view, belong to a truly adequate way of
5:24surveying whether a couple should be together. But I'm also aware that nowadays these things
5:28are considered very unromantic. To live in a romantic culture means to live in a culture that
5:35has a set of ideas about how good couples should form. They should be formed by instinct, that
5:40everybody has a soulmate, that you'll recognise your soulmate by a special, flattery feeling,
5:45that you shouldn't be asked to account for that feeling. You should simply go for it and marry in
5:50Vegas in two weeks if that's what seizes you. And that you should be able to communicate deeply with
5:57your partner without using language. Through that special medium of the heart, through the silence.
6:02Also that you shouldn't criticise your partner, that true partners should love each other for who
6:09they really are. Which means no desire to grow or change. You just accept someone. Couples in
6:16romantic culture will sometimes complain, "You're trying to change me." And this is seen as really
6:22offensive. It's like, "What? You complain to your friends. My partner's trying to change me." "Oh,
6:27what an awful person. It must be awful. You must get out immediately." If you went to an ancient
6:33Greek, if you went to Athens in 400 BC, and you said to an ancient Greek, "What is love? And where
6:40is the role of criticism?" They would say, "Love is a process of education. It's the education of
6:46emotion." And lovers should of course be able to pick each other up for things that they don't spot
6:53in one another. The whole process should be trying to develop into the best version of themselves,
6:58rather than simply staying stuck in an admiration for who they are today. The whole process should
7:04be dynamic. Become who you could be, not worship who you happen to be right now. All of this sounds
7:10very strange in romantic culture, which is why relationships are so difficult in our time. Let's
7:18remember that a person's life satisfaction is determined by up to around 70% by the
7:27quality of their personal relationships. A Martian hearing that statistic, visiting planet Earth,
7:33would think, "Well, clearly Earthlings, given the enormous role of love, will be spending 70%
7:38of their money and 70% of their educational time working out how on Earth this business
7:42of love works. Is that true?" We spend hardly any time rationally thinking about it. None of
7:49us are made to sit through classes in attachment theory, classes in apology, classes in listening,
7:55classes in communication. No, you know, physics is important, geography is important, don't get
8:00me wrong. But is there no time for this, given its role in our lives? Do we really want to leave this
8:06to chance? And the answer is yes. And why? Because we live in a romantic culture that sees something
8:12adverse in planning and thinking and reflecting too hard on the business of love. It's very
8:20deleterious and it's been a serious problem for humanity. One of the most powerful disseminators
8:25of romantic culture is art. And by art I mean all the leading artistic media. Film, definitely. You
8:33know, if you were learning about love from films, you would be very confused. And that's why many
8:38of us are confused, because films, and I include that television shows and other narrative forms,
8:44these things are hugely misleading. They simply do not show what a real relationship is like. I mean,
8:52probably you can count on one hand that the number of films that have accurately shown love,
8:58I think one of the most accurate representations of love is Richard Linklater's Before Trilogy,
9:02which ended up with Before Midnight. It's a wonderful reckoning really with the real
9:07complexities of love. But you know, most films are not that. Most films are blithe, are superficial,
9:14are not modest enough in showing us what's really going on between couples. It's also
9:18intimidated through music. And music constantly gives us little miniature stories about how love
9:25works. And you know, the music is terrific, but it's not accurate to what's going on. And
9:30it presses the wrong buttons. Poetry, no one really reads poetry nowadays. If they did,
9:36the problem exists in poetry too. So we have so much media around, and yet we're still so
9:43much strangers to ourselves. I would say that the single greatest, most misleading disseminator of
9:48ideas on love is culture and art. The problem is very heavily located there. Chapter 2 - Lessons on
10:00Love from Psychotherapy I think we need to split history into phases. The phase of the dynastic
10:07relationship where people would get together for dynastic and financial and family reasons.
10:13That ended. That's behind us. Then we moved into the Romantic Age, and that caused a lot
10:18of problems and it lasted 250 years or so. We need to draw a line under that. We need to move
10:23towards something that I call the therapeutic age. The age of the therapeutic relationship. What on
10:30earth is a therapeutic relationship? Let me try and explain. A therapeutic relationship begins
10:37with the insights of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy has been with us for 120 years or so. It is the
10:44most sophisticated understanding of how human beings function emotionally. It's based on the
10:50insights of Sigmund Freud and all those who come after him. It is not going away. Some people say,
10:56"Oh, that's... isn't that old hat? Wasn't Freud proved wrong?" Sorry, no, he wasn't. I mean,
11:02of course, many, many areas of Freudian thought are wrong, but the fundamental insight that we
11:06have and unconscious, that how we love as adults was shaped by our childhoods, that there are
11:11defences that we put in place to protect ourselves as children that cause difficulties for us as
11:16adults. This is indisputably true. And that's not going anywhere. All of us are the result of a
11:23very slow and long process of emotional education that took place between the ages of zero and ten.
11:30This is extremely hard to perceive. Most of us are like, "I never went to an emotional education
11:36school. I just grew up, you know, my parents lived in Idaho or Milton Keynes or Frankfurt
11:40or Yokohama." There's no sense that we've learned anything in particular. But my goodness, we have.
11:47All of us reach adulthood having learned very complicated languages of love and relationships.
11:54Languages that tell us whether a human being can be trusted, whether we are worth something,
11:59whether communication is good, what happens when somebody is angry, what happens when we are shy,
12:04what happens when we sulk, how do we tell someone something important? All of these things will have
12:09been imbibed in us. Let me give you a metaphor. Very few of us, I'd say none of us, remember
12:15what it was like to learn language, to learn to speak. And yet, most of us know how to speak.
12:22But it went in invisibly. While we were in the kitchen drawing butter cups or in the garden doing
12:27handstands, all of us will have learned incredibly complex patterns of language, of grammar. We have
12:34learned about the pluperfect. We have learned about the subjunctive without even knowing such
12:38things exist. We have learned tens of thousands of words and all sorts of ways of expressing
12:43ourselves without knowing a thing. I want to say that a similar process goes on at the level of
12:49emotional language. In the same ways we learn a grammatical language, we learn an emotional
12:54language. As I say, a language about trust, about kindness, about communication, about self-worth,
13:00about dialogue, etc. All these things that we take with us into adulthood, we learned,
13:06and we learned from one place in particular, our families of origin, our mother and our father, or
13:13whoever our caregivers happen to be. These people are immensely, immensely important in shaping our
13:20emotional grammar. In the same way as they shaped our linguistic grammar, I mean anyone who's had a
13:26parent with a regional accent of one kind or another will know that that sticks. You will
13:31pick up that regional accent from your parents and you will, in my stick with you, all of your life.
13:35Same thing goes on with, as it were, the regional accents of emotional intelligence. You may speak
13:41a regional accent where every man is extremely frightening, or every woman has a tendency towards
13:47alcoholism, or everyone who is kind is also slightly sadistic, or everyone who you depend
13:53on is also depressed. Now these are all very, very difficult languages to have been exposed to and to
13:59pick up on. Many of us, sadly, have come through childhood with suboptimal language acquisition,
14:06emotional acquisition, if you like, and we take that into adulthood unconsciously. We have no
14:12clue where we've come from, and because we don't know where we've come from, we don't know how to
14:17plot a sensible course. And I'm going to mention something very important, which is attachment
14:22theory. One of the most useful tools for working out why relationships work and why they don't was
14:29formulated by two researchers of near-genus, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, two researchers working
14:35in the United Kingdom in the 1950s. They had been very marked by a phenomenon that took place in
14:42the 40s during the Second World War. In the Second World War, huge numbers of children were separated
14:48from their parents at a young age and were sent to families outside London to escape the German
14:54bombing of British cities. What researchers soon realized was that this was a catastrophe for the
15:01children. The children began to exhibit extremely distressed behavior. They would wet the bed, they
15:07would get very angry, they would not be able to eat. They would be in states of almost cataclysmic
15:13meltdown. Why was this? Materially, they were well looked after. Psychologically, emotionally,
15:19they were bereft. And researchers, this is one of the most moving stories in the history of
15:24the Second World War, researchers realized that if this carried on, this would do more damage for the
15:32next generation than any number of war dead, that the risks of German bombs were actually smaller
15:40than the risks of ruptured emotional attachment. And on that basis, these psychological researchers
15:46wrote to the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office and got the children transferred back into
15:52their homes in the cities of the United Kingdom. And thereby a great tragedy was averted. So that
15:59after the height of the crisis, children were returned to their birth families and looked after
16:04again by their closest figures of attachment. Why are we talking about this? Because this was the
16:09birth of attachment theory. From watching how children were around their close caregivers in
16:15childhood, it was discovered that all of us are, in a sense, tethered to a story that we
16:23first have in childhood around our caregivers. And the researchers in attachment theory began
16:29to divide human beings into categories, highlighting their characteristic ways
16:35of behaving around relationships. To give you a few of the categories, they identified something
16:41that we now know as avoidant attachment. Avoidant attachment is a way of relating to
16:48a troublesome and troubling caregiver who in some ways lets you down. And by the way, caregivers,
16:55it's estimated let down around 50% of children. So around half of the population of any nation
17:03you care to mention has got children wandering around with attachment wounds. It's an important
17:08statistic to bear in mind when you go on a date. You know, 50% chance you've got somebody with an
17:14attachment wound. That's not the end of the story. We can work with attachment wounds,
17:18but we need to know that those attachment wounds are there. That's how we're going to try and solve
17:23the problem by knowing that the problem is there. An avoidantly attached person is somebody who
17:28responds to the insecurities in their relationship with their caregiver by essentially moving away,
17:34by pushing away intimacy. The classic sentence that an avoidantly attached person will say
17:40to their partner after a few beautiful weeks, a few mini breaks, a few lovely times, they'll go,
17:46"This is feeling a bit too intense," and then they will withdraw in some way. They'll start
17:51causing a problem. They'll say, "Oh, I need to spend a weekend with my friends or my mother
17:56really wants to see me." They'll pull away from a relationship because it's getting too intense. And
18:01really what they mean is, "I'm so afraid of love, and the way that I deal with my fear of love is
18:08to pull away." So that is avoidant attachment, and we see it all over the place. Some of your viewers
18:14will be avoidantly attached. Some of your viewers will have recognized this with a partner that they
18:20had. It's not that the avoidantly attached person doesn't want love. They want love. They're just
18:25terrified of it. Why are they terrified of it? Because it didn't go well for them in childhood.
18:32And this is something that we need to really keep in mind. We've got a culture that thinks that
18:36everybody's looking for love. They're not. They're ostensibly looking for love, but they're just as
18:43busy pushing love away when it comes, running away from it, and making sure it doesn't succeed. Why?
18:50Because love is a threat. If you have grown up in an environment where love was not possible, where
18:57relationships between caregivers and children were not safe, you will have defended yourself
19:03against the risks of disappointment. You will have insulated yourself. And then when love comes your
19:09way in adulthood, what you will do against your knowledge, against your conscious knowledge,
19:14is make sure that love does not succeed. You will sabotage your own chances of a successful
19:21relationship. Let me give you a metaphor. Imagine that you've grown up in a prison camp. You
19:26were never fed, or the diet was very meager. You didn't have much food. And then suddenly, one day,
19:33the prison gates are opened, and you get to go to a banquet, and you get to eat anything you
19:38like. And what might be the response? Panic. You might make yourself sick. You might try and eat
19:44the food. You might even kill you, or threaten to kill you, because why? You cannot metabolize
19:50the goodness on offer, because you have learned to function with an emotionally restricted diet,
19:58an emotionally restricted diet where you've made do with very little. And so when there's a lot
20:06suddenly on offer, you panic, and you think this is too intense. You think that somebody who has
20:12been going with almost no food will think it's far too intense to eat a rich chocolate cake.
20:17And sometimes healthy love is like a rich chocolate cake, which we cannot bear. And
20:23some of your viewers will know the phenomenon whereby you offer somebody love. You love them,
20:29you feel that you want to give them a good life, you want to be a good partner to them,
20:33and they sort of accept it, and then suddenly they run away. And if there's a dynamite under it,
20:38this is a very common occurrence. What's going on? It's not that it's too bad,
20:43it's too good. And for some of us who had to get used to very poor relationships, the greatest
20:49threat is not a bad relationship. That's fine. It's a good relationship. And you get patterns,
20:55horrific patterns, where people have had an unstable and violent father, let's say, uncaring
21:03and absent mother, and you think that these people are going to get to adulthood, and they're really
21:09going to make it up for themselves. They're going to find the love they yearn for, and they're going
21:13to make it work. And what happens to them? Maybe a nice lover comes along. Someone kind offers them a
21:20home, as it were, an emotional home. And maybe at the beginning they can bear it. It's easier at the
21:28beginning. But then the problem starts setting in when it really becomes clear that love may work.
21:35That's when the traumatised attachment lover gets their sticks of dynamite out and starts
21:41to blow the foundations of the house up so that they can return to the suffering that feels more
21:47familiar. What you need to understand is that in love we don't look for what will make us happy.
21:53Absolutely not. We look for what feels familiar. For some people, happiness and familiarity are
22:00one. But for many of us, they are not. For many of us, what is most familiar is a sense of not being
22:07loved properly, a sense of not being sure where we stand, a sense that someone may threaten us,
22:12a sense that someone may abandon us. That is our true home. And if that's our true home, we will
22:19be guided with a kind of honing instinct to refine that, which is why you find again and again that
22:26the children of alcoholics do not head for sober partners. They head for people who are struggling
22:32with alcohol. Why the offspring of violent parents do not head for calm and kind partners. They head
22:39for people who are struggling with their temper. Now, what do we do about this? One optimistic
22:46story is to be found in the work of Sigmund Freud, who in many ways everything returns to him. He
22:52observed something which he called the repetition compulsion. He observed that human beings are not
22:57guided by a search for pleasure. They are guided by a search to repeat patterns, a repetition
23:03compulsion often of pain. And he proposed an ingenious and I think optimistic answer to this.
23:10He argued that what many of us are doing when we repeat traumatic experiences, for example,
23:16getting back together with a violent partner or an alcoholic partner, what we're really doing
23:21there is not simply suffering at infinite for no reason. What we're trying to do is to master a
23:28challenge that we couldn't master in childhood and we're trying to master it with the resources of
23:33adulthood. In other words, we're trying to get the alcoholic partner to stop drinking in a way that
23:38we couldn't when we were children. We're trying to get the distance emotionally and communicative
23:44partner to start to talk in the way that our mother or father didn't. We're trying to make
23:49it up in the present. And Freud realized that for many of us we wouldn't find the kind of excitement
23:56that we need until we locate a partner who does suggest that they suffer from the very problem
24:02that our crucial caregiver suffered from. Until we find a little bit of an echo of the original
24:06suffering. But the optimistic story is perhaps we can work with them in the relationship to heal
24:13the pain. It's a very optimistic story. It works sometimes and sometimes we may need to cut our
24:18losses. You know, love is not always about keeping going. Love is also sometimes about knowing that
24:24you are in a pattern and that pattern is driving you to destruction. And when that happens,
24:29it's also important to save, to know how to save yourself from shore destruction. Chapter 3 - The
24:38Playbook for a Successful Relationship First of all, the idea of a playbook sounds strange. The
24:43idea of a playbook that you need to create to get in a relationship sounds really odd. You think,
24:49I don't need a playbook. I just need to head on in there, get a dating app and off I go and a
24:53nice new pair of clothes. But isn't it interesting and wouldn't it be lovely to have a playbook that
24:59would be trying to guide you to acquire the knowledge that you need for love? So the idea
25:06that love is a skill rather than an emotion is a strange one, but I think an absolutely essential
25:12one in the world view that I'm positing. You know, if somebody said, I'm going to climb Mount Everest
25:17or K2, you would say, OK, how have you prepared for this? And you'd be expecting them to show up
25:23with ropes, with training programs, with oxygen, with specially prepared packs of food. You can get
25:29the metaphor. We walk into the mountain of love without sufficient preparation and equipment. And
25:36then we're surprised that we routinely tumble off the mountain and we blame the other person. We say
25:42we didn't match the right person. We haven't found our person. We go back on the dating app and we go
25:48ever further to try and find the right person. Don't get me wrong. Dating apps have their role.
25:53Sometimes we need to scan and see who's out there and find a person who halfway meets us where we
25:59want to be. But once you've found a more or less suitable person, that's when the work begins.
26:05And the work is to turn a stranger into somebody that you can understand and who
26:10can understand you without bottling it, without panicking, without throwing them in the bin,
26:15without saying we can't work this out if after five weeks in a pleasant mini break in Copenhagen
26:21we suddenly have a conflict. No, the point is you need to stay where you are and try and figure it
26:26out. But most people give up too soon. They say we can't possibly do this. And they run for the
26:31hills, go back on the dating app and find the next person with whom they will then try out an
26:36equally unfulfilling attempt to match their heart with strangers. What we need to do is to start to
26:42create right people rather than search for them. And what does that mean to create a right person?
26:48It means to work on yourself psychologically and therapeutically so that you understand your script
26:54from childhood and do not simply play it out onto innocent person after innocent person, that you
27:00take responsibility for the problems that you are bringing into a relationship. At the School
27:06of Life which I founded, an institution that is dedicated to emotional growth and development,
27:11we tell our people that when they honour date with somebody, among the first questions is to
27:16ask people playfully, "How are you crazy?" What does that mean? How are you crazy? Why
27:20is everybody crazy? They're not necessarily crazy. Well, all of us have stuff that we need
27:25to be on top of. And if your person at dinner says to you, "Yeah, I get the question. Yeah,
27:30I've got my crazy. And my crazy is this. My crazy is that. My father, my mother." This is turning
27:36out to be a safe person. If the person goes, "How do you mean I can't possibly answer that question?
27:41That's rude. You think I'm not right or imperfect. Run for the hills. Drop it right there and then."
27:47I'm exaggerating, but this is probably not a person you should be hanging out with because
27:51none of us need or can have perfect partners. But what we can have and must search for and must try
27:58to become is people who know enough about their patterns to be able to warn their prospective
28:06partners of what's going on and take averting action. The beginning of therapeutic relationships
28:12is to know that two people, when entering a couple, are not entering without a lot of history.
28:21It is essential that couples learn as much as possible about that history so that they are
28:28ready for the challenges and perplexities of love. A therapeutic relationship requires that
28:33each partner get on top of their dynamics, that date back to childhood, and are able to discuss
28:40them with relative grace, patience, and insight with their partner so that when problems arise and
28:47they will, they can adopt a therapeutic language. It is therapeutic to say, for example, when there
28:54is a conflict, "I hear your point of view. It may not be mine, but I hear that it's yours." It
29:01is not therapeutic to say, "You're wrong. You're an idiot, and you're just like your mother." Or,
29:06indeed, like your father. This is not therapeutic. I'm kidding, but I'm making a very serious point.
29:11Indeed, we do not tend to talk to each other in therapeutically informed language. We shout,
29:16we scream, we blame, we shape-shift, we don't take responsibility. We do all sorts of things
29:22that doom us in relationships. Then we stand back and we say, "We're surprised. We are a
29:27society that is obsessed with finding the right person without pausing to think, 'How do I become
29:34the right person? How do I work on myself?' Understanding that cannot be done simply,
29:39and this is paradoxical, by being on your own. This is another unbelievable mystery. You can't
29:45understand yourself just by being with yourself. You need other people. Why is that? It's like, why
29:52do you need a mirror to see the back of your head? Because we don't have eyes there. We need someone
29:57to help us to see the things that are really hard for us to see. And psychotherapy gives us
30:03a forum in which we can come, tell the therapist about what's going on in our lives, explain what
30:10happened last Monday, explain what happened when we took that trip to New York or Buffalo, wherever
30:16it is, what happened, and then slowly pattern recognition sets in. The therapist is able to go,
30:22"It's funny. In that last relationship you did this, this new relationship you're doing that,
30:27and you mentioned that your parent did something that sounds kind of similar." So I wonder what's
30:33going on, and then slowly insight comes. We start to put the pieces together. We think, "I'm up to
30:38something. I'm doing something." And that way is liberation. We can start to break the unconscious
30:44stories that we're living. Psychotherapy works with this concept known as "defences" or "defense
30:50mechanisms." In other words, these are tools that our minds adopt to try and shield themselves from
30:57accurate knowledge of their own workings. It's going to sound really odd, like, why don't we
31:01just embrace self-knowledge with open arms? Why do we need to run away from it? The answer is that
31:07knowledge of ourselves is frightening. It's really awful to have to learn certain things. It may make
31:14us very anxious. It may make us so sorrowful. It may panic us, and so we push away unwelcome
31:22information. I think that we still perhaps can't quite bear how complicated we are. You know,
31:28we're very squeamish creatures. We don't like to sit with ourselves. We don't like to sit with our
31:33emotions. Self-knowledge remains an enormously elusive goal. You know, I think it is the most
31:40important goal of life. To understand oneself is literally the meaning of life. The ancient Greeks
31:48knew this, "Know thyself" was the most important command in ancient Greek culture and philosophy.
31:53"Know thyself" - the most important thing you could do. If you said nowadays, you know,
31:58in a conversation with friends or colleagues, "What's your goal? Where are you trying to get
32:02to next year? What are you trying to do?" You know, say, "Know thyself." People would go,
32:06"That's a strange person there. We don't know about this person." It's not an acceptable goal.
32:13We know that it's good to make money. We know that it's good to travel to foreign countries, to learn
32:18how to fry garlic and to learn salsa. It's not particularly esteemed to know yourself. And that's
32:26why we wander around strangers to ourselves and therefore enormously confusing. And let's put it
32:32frankly, dangerous to other people. Because a person who doesn't understand themselves,
32:36you know, if confronted with their behavior will go, "It wasn't me. I didn't do it." Or,
32:41"I can't think." Or, you know, "Ask me tomorrow." They can't account for themselves. They don't know
32:46why they do the stuff they do. They will simply, in a relationship, for example, bail out of a
32:51relationship going, "You know, it's getting too intense." And why? They don't know. They
32:55don't understand what they themselves are doing. Even though, you know, they may have spent five
33:00years learning, you know, Spanish. They may have taken an advanced degree in Japanese. They may be,
33:05you know, very active in all sorts of ways. They may have learned pottery. They may be
33:09holding down a great job in marketing something. But the point is they will not have learned the
33:15really true constituents of emotional functioning because they've been able to get away with it.
33:20And part of the playbook of becoming a better lover is to dial down your defense mechanisms,
33:26to observe them. A typical defense mechanism is to push responsibility onto other people, to say it's
33:32your fault. For example, someone tries to tell you something about yourself. Someone says, "I think
33:37that you, you know, you're a little bit this when that happens." You know, and rather than going,
33:42"Thank you. Let me think about that." You go, "Why are you being rude?" Or, "This is not a good time
33:47for me." Or, "I can't absorb this now." In other words, you push away information that might have
33:52helped you. Not because it's false, but because it's difficult to absorb. And that's often what
33:59happens to us. All of us, all of us are involved in defense mechanisms. All of us can't quite bear
34:05the full truth about ourselves. It helps us to go to psychotherapy. I know that, you know, AIs,
34:11you know, deliver some aspects of therapy. It can be good at points. The good thing about a real
34:17human being is that they are not guided just by you. They've got their own independent judgment.
34:22And also, you're in a relationship with them. And that relationship is part of what heals you,
34:27because the relationship with the therapist is a harbinger of the relationship that you can then
34:33take out into the world, a relationship of trust and mutual understanding. This is something that
34:38AIs not going to be able to replace anytime soon. So we need to understand ourselves. We
34:43need to understand the past. And then we need a certain spirit. One of the things that we need
34:47in that playbook of love is a good sense of humor. That could sound superfluous, like what on earth,
34:51you know, why do we need a sense of humor? Well, a sense of humor is a modesty about our capacity to
34:56understand anything. And if we can signal to our partners that, you know, we're a little stupid.
35:02We don't get it. We don't have all the answers. That is a wonderful emollient. It's a wonderful
35:08lubricant to love, because it just dials down the temperature. If your partner is able to say, "Ah,
35:15I may not have understood this. I may not be getting it. That's brilliant." And if they can
35:19make a little joke too, that's great. You know, if two people can learn to see each other as idiots,
35:24but lovable idiots, that's a beautiful moment in love. It could sound negative. It's not. It's not.
35:30It's the most generous thing you can do. We are two blind people helping each other to find a way
35:37forward. If that's the spirit in which we can enter love, that is a spirit of generosity, a
35:42spirit of mutual forgiveness. Too often we get on our high horses. This is the way it is. I know the
35:47answer. This is what I think. That is not a friend of love. So we need, if you like, a modesty,
35:54a humorous modesty. Let me give you another idea. Another thing that we need in order to make love
36:00work is a certain degree of pessimism. You know, optimism is the enemy of love. If we think that
36:07we will have a perfect love story, a love story with no ruffles in it, with no kinks in it, no,
36:14it's not going to happen. We need to accept that even a really good relationship has constant
36:20moments of crisis. And that's okay. The problem is not crisis. The problem is how do we repair
36:25crises? Can we repair them with forgiveness, with understanding, and most of all with curiosity? Can
36:31we get curious about why we had a bust up? Can we be searching for why our attachment patterns are
36:38not compatible? Can we get interested in why we're difficult to love, and that way will become easier
36:45to love? So pessimism is not an enemy of love. Knowing that there is no such thing as the right
36:52person actually helps you to find a good enough person. You know, a few years ago I wrote an
36:59essay that went viral. I wrote it for the New York Times. It was called "Why You Will Marry The Wrong
37:05Person". Why did that essay go viral? I think it went viral because people all feel... Sorry,
37:12let me correct that. Not all people, but many, many people feel that they have married the wrong
37:17person. And they panic about this and they feel so ashamed. So here's an essay in the New York
37:22Times that says, "Yeah, we're all going to marry the wrong person." And you know what? It's okay.
37:28You don't need to marry the right person. You need to marry a good enough person. You know,
37:33compatibility is not a precondition of love. Compatibility is the fruit of love. If we get
37:41together with someone and we find that there are differences, right? They have one kind
37:46of attachment style. We have another. They like golf. We like tennis. They like the curtains to
37:50be green. We like the curtains to be yellow. Whatever it is. Too often in modern romantic
37:55dating culture, the answer is get out. Just get out. Find someone else. Find someone better. And
38:00that's why all the technological tools are all about putting new people in front of you. Of
38:07course, sometimes you need to find new people. But as much as finding new people, what you need
38:11to do is to learn to live with the people who are in front of you. With the people that you've
38:15found. Many of us have already found a good enough partner. And yet we throw them in the bin because
38:21we are taught by romantic culture that we can always find a perfect person with whom it will
38:27click immediately. And this is such a destructive idea. If you think, you know what? The work starts
38:33here. The work starts when you have a problem. Then you roll up your sleeves and you think,
38:38OK, well, I know that I, you know, broadly think this person is a nice person. Now we're going to
38:42work at making sure that it can work. And so we're going to talk and we're going to take this problem
38:48apart. We're going to become like engineers who've got a malfunctioning machine. We're
38:52going to sort it out. This sounds unromantic, doesn't it? Imagine saying, in order to make
38:58my relationship work every evening, I've talked for an hour in really patient ways. You think,
39:03oh my God, go to Vegas, find someone easier. Well, good luck to you. Maybe you'll find that person.
39:09But for some of us, especially some of us who've come through difficult relationships, difficult
39:12relationships in our past, we may need to go and do that kind of excavation. Maybe that's fine.
39:18I think that a good enough person is someone who will engage with the business of working towards
39:26compatibility. That they won't assume that you are wrong just because there are problems. They
39:31will know how to repair crises. They will know how to be curious. They will know how to listen. They
39:37will know how to be patient. That is compatible with all sorts of problems. Sexual problems,
39:41relational problems, administrative problems. Doesn't matter. You can work through them. So the
39:46wrong person is someone who stonewalls, who always blames you, who blanks out, who says, it's not my
39:52responsibility, or, you know, it was easier with my ex and, you know, why are you so difficult,
39:58etc. These people are trouble because they are refusing the work of love. So it doesn't
40:03matter if you have many, many difficulties. That's okay. The problem is your attitude
40:07to the difficulties. And the solution is an attitude of indulgence, of curiosity,
40:13and of calm consideration of the flaws that unite us all. We are all mad monkeys. And so long as
40:20we've been kind towards the mad monkey and all of us, we'll be okay. One of the real problems, and,
40:26you know, there's simply no solution, but we need to accept that there's a real problem, is how long
40:31it takes to work out who we are as lovers, as people interested in relationships, who we are.
40:40It takes so long, and it takes especially long to try and change our patterns. You know, if we are
40:45somebody who sabotages relationships every time that love comes along, how long is that going to
40:50take to unwind this? Well, it takes insight, but then it takes, as it were, work, true work. And
40:56sometimes people go to therapy for six sessions or 12 sessions, and they go, "I haven't changed.
41:01Therapy doesn't work." And let's come back to my earlier example about language. Imagine that you
41:07decided middle age as an English speaker to pick up Korean or Finnish, and you went to six lessons,
41:14and you tried to learn Finnish and Korean. And by the end of six lessons, you could barely ask for,
41:18you know, barely say your own name or say hello. And then you blamed it on the whole process,
41:22and you said, "I'm not learning this language. It's rubbish." People would say, "You're being
41:26too impatient." And I think that some of the same holds true for rewiring our emotional
41:31language. We can't pick this up in six sessions of 50 minutes. It takes a long time. A pattern
41:36that was laid down over decades is going to take many, many years to figure it out. It's, I mean,
41:43believe me, it's bad news. I wish it weren't so. Can we do anything in the meantime? Yes, of course
41:49we can. We can be learning and walking. We don't have to pause and just sit by the roadside. We can
41:55be starting on the path of relationships. We can start from a relatively young age,
41:59but we need to be doing the work alongside, and we need to be able to at least do the first thing,
42:06which is to say, "I'm learning. I'm a learner." There's a real difference between someone who
42:11goes, "I know it all," and someone who knows that they are still learning. When Socrates, the
42:16ancient Greek philosopher, was asked why he was the wisest person in antiquity, he said, "Because
42:20I know what I don't know." In other words, that the birth of true wisdom is associated with the
42:26knowledge of your ignorance. I think that's the best way we can proceed also in relation to our
42:32love lives. There are lots of questions that we could learn to ask ourselves and our partners in
42:37order to try and find a better relationship. One of them is this. When I get close to you,
42:43how does that feel? To open up a window onto some of the complexities that occur when somebody gets
42:50close. If I love you, what part of you might worry? That's a good question. Does any part of
43:00you worry? Another really useful question is how do I respond when someone is trying to communicate
43:09something to me? Do I stonewall or do I accept? Am I able to pause and think the issue might
43:18be with me? Or do I always have to go, "I can't answer that. It's the other person. You're being
43:23unfair. You're putting me under pressure." What is your level of emotional dexterity? So that's
43:31a good question to be asking yourself as well. Also, one of the really good questions in any
43:37relationship is to say, "How have I annoyed you?" How have I frustrated you? You know,
43:42a lot of what happens between couples is there are things that are bubbling away beneath the surface
43:47that people can't find the courage to say. And because they can't say them, the problem doesn't
43:52improve. The problem gets worse. People can't have sex anymore. A lot of the reason why people can't
43:57have sex has got nothing to do with sex. It's to do with the fact they feel disconnected and angry
44:01and misunderstood. You can't have sex with someone who you feel misunderstood by or you feel furious
44:06with. What helps desire is trust. And the way to build up trust is to communicate, and particularly
44:13communicate, ruptures of trust. If you want to have good sex, don't get a candle, don't go to
44:18a hotel. Start to ask each other, "Have I annoyed you? Is there something I've done that you'd like
44:25to tell me?" And you say this patiently, not in the middle of the night when you're stressed or
44:30maybe you've drunk too much, but when you're calm, when there's a sense of lightness and forgiveness,
44:37use the right moment to ask the right question. We're living in a world where therapeutic language
44:42and insights have spread for the first time far outside the consulting room. There is mass
44:48adoption at a superficial level of therapeutic language. And the area where we find this most
44:54obviously is social media and in particular Instagram, which is enormous, it's an enormous
44:59force in the world, and it has brought up a generation, I'd say, to speak in pseudo or vaguely
45:07therapeutic terms. I don't mean that as an insult. Some of these insights have been fantastic.
45:11People are now able to talk about, let's say, attachment theory, the mention of an avoidant
45:17attachment theory or an anxious attachment theory in many circles now doesn't create the puzzlement
45:21that it was generating 15 years ago. 15 years ago, this was not common knowledge. That was
45:26still in the university, in textbooks and in the consulting room. Now it's out in the world. And
45:30the medium that has changed this, as I say, is social media. What's the problem? I'll tell you
45:35one of the problems. One of the problems is whose fault it is. The tone of a lot of social media
45:43posting blames the problem for the struggles in relationships, fairly and squarely on the partner,
45:49not on yourself. There is an obsession with finding borderline people, narcissistic people,
45:56avoidance, anxious people, out in the world. And of course they exist, but the tone is the problem.
46:02The tone says, get out. These are red flags and everybody that you're meeting, the reason why you
46:09haven't made a relationship work, is because these people are unbalanced psychologically. My answer
46:15is this. If you are looking to find a person with no problems at all, with no psychological
46:21disturbances, good luck to you. If you're looking to find somebody with no red flags, good luck to
46:26you. Everybody has red flags. That's part of what it means to be human. That's the story of Genesis.
46:32The story of Genesis is Adam and Eve had some red flags. That's what it is to be human being,
46:38is somebody with a red flag. So the problem is not the red flag, it's how you deal with it. And this
46:43is what I worry that therapeutic culture on social media doesn't train us to do. It doesn't train
46:48us for patience. It doesn't train us to think we might be the problem. It doesn't ask us to think
46:53what we've brought to the situation. It doesn't create an atmosphere of forgiveness. The reason
46:59is very simple, outrage sells. It's more fun, it feels more spirited. It's punchier to say that ex
47:08of yours, they're the avoidant, they're crazy, they're narcissistic. It sounds better and it
47:13leaves everybody happier. But long term, it's not the solution. Chapter 4. Overcoming status anxiety
47:24and loneliness. You know, we mustn't forget that one of the sources of love that is most important
47:30to us is not just interpersonal romantic love, but the love that you get from other people. Strangers
47:38dependent on your standing in the community, your status. You know, status is a really interesting
47:47feature of everybody's ambitions. You know, why do we work so hard? We work so hard,
47:52not just for material rewards. We work hard in order to gain the esteem, the respect, the regard
47:58of people whose good affections we rely on to feel good about ourselves. If you said to somebody,
48:05you've got a choice, either we'll give you $10 million a year, but every time anyone sees your
48:12face, they'll go, oh my God, I hate that person, they're awful. I despise that person. You could
48:17have that option, or we'll give you a minimum wage, absolute minimum, bare minimum to survive.
48:23But every time anyone sees you, they'll go, oh my God, that person is amazing, it's just great, etc.
48:29We know which one we'd pick. We know that we would pick the love and affection of the stranger and
48:35the respect and esteem of our community, way over simple material rewards. Now, in our culture, the
48:42reason why most of us work so hard and the reason why most of us are so interested in money has
48:46nothing to do with the money. It's just that money is the chief conduit towards the love and respect
48:52that we stand to gain from our communities. If you change the status system and what you get status
48:58for, you will change the incentive structure. There have been periods in history where the
49:02number one thing you needed to do in order to have a high status was to worship God really intently.
49:07And then if you're good at worshiping God, you'd be considered amazing. And then people did that
49:11in droves, and that was considered very, very serious. In other cultures, it was considered
49:15very serious to be a good hunter. So people became more and more good at hunting, and that was what
49:20you did. And that was the root to getting status. Nowadays, how do we know what the status system is
49:26based on? We know it because of a very simple question that any stranger will ask us within
49:31normally 30 seconds of meeting us. What do you do? And according to how you answer that question,
49:35people are either going to be really pleased to see you. "Oh, great! We must hang out." Or they'll
49:39leave you alone by the peanuts and they don't want to know you. We're living in a world of snobs. A
49:45snob is really anyone who takes a small part of you and comes to a global decision of what you're
49:50worth and how much love you're worth. And that is the reality, the brute reality of the way in which
49:57we live in society. We will be judged ruthlessly by our careers, by what is on our business card.
50:02And we will be given love, status love, not romantic love, but status love. Maybe romantic
50:08love too, that's another consideration. But generally status love according to how impressive
50:13we are in the field of careers. It's why we work so hard, it's why we're so panicked about careers,
50:19and it's why there's such despair when careers don't work out. We're losing not just materially,
50:24we're losing our sense of our good name in the eyes of society. It's very brutal. I think older
50:30societies, pre-modern societies, had some built-in safety valves to try and protect people from that
50:40unitary sense that what you are worth is what you do, that you are what you do. It's always
50:46been somewhere there in the system because we are material creatures, we do depend on material
50:50goods, so it's always been there as part of the mix. But other cultures have softened this in
50:55a way that ours no longer does. They've softened it in a number of ways. Firstly through religion,
51:00through the mass adoption of religion. And the interesting thing about religion is generally
51:04the gods that people have worshiped love people, not for what they do but for who they are. They
51:09look inside your soul. And that's a vital defence mechanism. You're giving unto Caesar what Caesar
51:15wants and the rest is up to God. And that gives you a sense of freedom. It's like, well, I may
51:21not be performing so well in my career, but I've got an alternative route to love and affection.
51:27That's a huge defence. The other thing that really protected people was isolation. You know,
51:34we are one of the first societies to be constantly surrounded. 24/7 by other people, we live in vast
51:40cities. Most of the world's population now lives in a city. That wasn't the case until, you know,
51:45a minute ago. This is very new. When you don't live in a city, what do you live surrounded
51:49by? A very important psychological tool called nature. Trees, rivers, forests, grasses, insects,
51:59animals. What on earth has these things got to do with love? Well, what they do is they break that
52:04unitary system where you are worth what another human being defines you as being worth. When
52:10you're surrounded by nature, you're no longer just defined by other humans. You get to live in a more
52:15expansive, a more liberated world where your value is, you know, up to wider forces and that lends
52:23a lot of oxygen and a lot of freedom that we've lost as we've moved towards urban societies and
52:28of course, as we've gone online. Okay, here's another pet idea of mine. You know, religion
52:34disappeared as the guiding force in people's lives around 100 years ago when Nietzsche famously said,
52:41"God is dead." He announced the death of God. Now, you might say, "Hang on a minute, there are lots
52:45and lots of believers." There are. Of course there are. Many societies are still defined by religion.
52:51However, one can propose that in key ways we are no longer living in religious societies. We
52:56are living in modern, secular societies that are based around romantic love, status performance,
53:03material goods, a denial of nature, a cutting off from the natural world, and a cutting off from
53:10any sense of human agency being limited. We believe in human agency being able to determine
53:16everything. Along with that comes a denial, of course, of our own mortality. How would we
53:21start to do something about that? Well, I think we need to look to religions for answers. Religions
53:26have worked it out. I think that we need to steal from religions and to institute in secular culture
53:34many of the maneuvers of the safety valves and genuine insights that religions were brilliant at
53:41delivering. For example, we need to break bread together. All religions bring people, strangers
53:47together to break bread from different communities in order to lessen suspicion. We need to get back
53:54to a tradition of communal dining and of breaking the barriers that separates strangers from one
54:01another. We need also to talk with intelligence and intent about love and about our capacity
54:08and possibility of loving better than we do, of reminding ourselves that we need to make an effort
54:14around love. Buddhism does this, Christianity does this. All the main religions emphasize not just
54:20that love is important, but that love is hard, and we need a little bit of that. Religions also,
54:27almost all of them, have created spaces that are separate from the spaces of commerce, spaces that
54:33are beautiful, spaces that are peaceful, spaces that bring people together to create a different
54:38kind of fellowship, one more guided by a spirit of friendship and kindness and vulnerability.
54:46We need to replace our temples and churches with secular buildings that aren't just going to be
54:50shopping malls and that aren't just going to be car showrooms, but the places that will bring
54:55people together, the most beautiful community centers imaginable still need to be built, and
55:00I'd love to see them built. We think we're alone in being alone, and we think there is shame that
55:06attends to admitting how alone we are. The root out of loneliness is to share your loneliness,
55:13is to dare to believe that the things you are most ashamed of cannot be, structurally they cannot be,
55:19things that exist in your heart alone, that they have to be things that despite the evidence,
55:25the surface evidence of other people's cheerfulness, probably exist in other people.
55:30Other people are also lonely, are also sad, also feel lost, also feel that they've messed up,
55:35also have a hard time in their relationships. The beginning of friendship begins with the
55:40capacity to be vulnerable and to admit to loss and sadness. We think that friendship
55:45is a mutual club for cheerfulness, it's not. True friendship begins with tears, with the
55:50ability to admit to sadness. This is why men in many ways have a harder time than women, forming
55:56deep friendships because men, there's still in many societies a real taboo around male tears.
56:03Men cannot admit to being sad and weak without feeling that they have lost their masculinity.
56:09Extremely unfortunate as a root to friendship because it means that your friendship will need
56:14to be based on posturing and on the recounting of triumph and success. Whereas in fact, of course,
56:20true friendship begins with the revelation of vulnerability and fragility. As ever with a
56:25problem, self-awareness and mutual awareness is the way through. Once we can see the pattern,
56:30we can break the pattern. Once we can see that we're living in a prison defined by a material,
56:36a material status system that many of us don't value, that we are doing this not because we
56:41want to, but because it exists, we can start to find alternatives. I'm not talking about throwing
56:46in your job. I'm talking about evaluating yourself and other people beyond your job.
56:52I'm talking about getting back in touch with nature. I'm talking about getting in touch with
56:56vulnerability and sharing that vulnerability. These are all tools and mechanisms that we can
57:00put in motion to escape an otherwise really oppressive and genuinely loveless environment
57:06in which we're forced to live and can't breathe very easily in. You could define love as the quest
57:13to overcome isolation and understand someone else and find understanding by someone else. It is the
57:22most noble and the most complicated of goals. If anyone can reach the end of their life and say,
57:28"I have loved. I've loved properly. I've understood and been understood. I've helped
57:32and been helped." This is a life well-lived. We don't need to achieve that much that is splendid
57:38in the material world or in the world of insight in the humanities, insight in the sciences. What
57:45we really ultimately need to do to make our time worthwhile is to have built a bridge to another
57:51human and to have opened our heart and have seen theirs with respect and humility and generosity.
57:56That truly ultimately is the definition of a good life. Want to support the channel?
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