Alain de Botton — The True Hard Work of Love and Relationships

on being is brought to you by the John Templeton Foundation the Templeton Foundation supports academic research and civil dialogue on the deepest most perplexing questions facing humankind who are we why are we here and where are we going to learn more please visit Templeton org the Templeton Foundation stay curious how different would our relationships be if the question we asked on an early date was how are you crazy I'm crazy like this and then understood that the real work of love is not in the falling but in what comes after Ilan de Bhutan's si why you will marry the wrong person is one of the most read articles in the New York Times of recent years as people and as a culture he says we would be much saner and happier if we re-examine our very view of love nowhere do we realistically teach ourselves and our children how love deepens and stumbles survives and evolves over time and how that process has much more to do with ourselves than with what is right or wrong about our partner we must fiercely resist the idea that true love must mean conflict free love that the course of true love is smooth it's not the course of true love is rocky and bumpy at the best of times that's the best we can manage as the creatures we are it's no fault of mine or no fault of yours it's to do with being human and the more generous we can be towards that flawed humanity the better chance we'll have of doing the true hard work of love I'm Krista Tippett and this is on being [Music] Alain de Botton is the founder and chairman of the School of Life a gathering of courses workshops and talks on meaning and wisdom for modern lives with branches around the world he first became known for his book how Proust can change your life I spoke with him in 2017 so we did speak a few years ago but on a very different topic and I'm really excited to be speaking with you about this subject which is so close to every life and you know as I've prepared for this I realized that you've actually I mean I knew that you'd written the novel on love a long time ago but you've really been consistently attending to this subject and building your thoughts on it and your body of work on it which is really interesting to me I mean you wrote on love at the age of 23 which is so young and you were already thinking about this so deeply I mean there's I think this is the first line every fall into love involves the triumph of Hope over knowledge well I mean I think you know what's striking is that our idea of what love is our idea of what is normal in love is so not normal it's so everyone so abnormal and sophisticate ourselves for not having a normal love life right even though no one have seems to have any of loved perfectly right right so we have this ideal of what love is and then these very very unhelpful narratives of love and they're in every way you know they're in movies and songs and we mustn't blame songs and movies too much but but if you say to people look love is a you know a painful poignant touching attempt by two flawed individuals to try and meet each other's needs in situations of gross uncertainty and ignorance about who they are and who the other person is but you know we're gonna do our best that's a much more generous starting point so the acceptance of ourselves as flawed creatures seems to me what love really is in the love is at its most necessary when we are weak when we feel incomplete and we must show love to one another at those points so we've got these two contrasting stories and we get them muddled and also I mean and you know I feel like this should be obvious but you just touched on art and culture and how that could help us complexify our understanding of this and one of the things you point out that you know about I don't know I don't know when Harry Met Sally or Four Weddings and a funeral one of the things that's wrong with all of that is that they a lot of these to take us up to the wedding they take us through the falling and don't see that I think you've written somewhere he said why is your 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 that's right I mean we are we are strangely obsessed by the run-up to love and we what we call a love story is really just the beginning of love story but we leave that out and so but you know most of us we're interested in long-term relationships we're not just interested in the moment that gets us into laughs we're interested in a survival of love over time yeah I mean a lot of what you are pointing at the work of loving over a long span of time is inner work right and and hard to film that but you know I'm very intrigued by how you talk about the ancient Greeks and their pedagogical view of love yes I mean that's fascinating because one of the greatest insults that you can level at a lover in the modern world apparently is to say I want to change you you know the ancient Greeks had a view of love which was essentially based around education that what love means love is a benevolent process whereby two people try to teach each other how to become the best versions of them somewhere they try it there they are committed to increasing the admirable characteristics that they possess and that they possess any other person possesses that's right that's right you know there's some your your most recent book on this subject is the course of love which is a novel but it's a novel that actually I feel you kind of weave a pedagogical narrator voice into it do that's fair into the narrative and you know you say what point this is the relationship between Robbie and why am i Kirsten and you know you said at one point their relationship is secretly yet mutually marked by a project of improvement which I think we all recognized and then there's this moment where you say after the dinner party Robbie is sincerely trying to bring about an evolution in the personality of the wife he loves but his chosen technique is distinctive to call Kirsten materialistic to shout at her and then later to slam to doors that's by the time we've humiliated someone they're not going to learn anything the only conditions as we know with children the only conditions under which anyone learns a conditions of incredible sweetness tenderness patience that's how we learn but the problem is that you know the failures of our relationships have made us so anxious that we can't be the teachers we should be and therefore some often you know genuine legitimate things that we want to get across I'll just you know come across as insults as attempts to wound and are therefore rejected and you know the arteries of the relationship start to firm some recently said to me I went to Kerry so how you respond to this you know it was a wise Jewish mother who had said to them men marry women with the intention that they with the idea that they will stay the same women marry men with the idea that they will change which is obviously a huge generalization but it gosh it made a lot of sense to me and even in terms of my own life and in terms of what I see around me yeah I mean I would argue that both genders want to change one another and they both have an idea of who the lover should be and I think you know a useful exercise that sometimes psychologists you know level at feuding couples as they say things like if you could accept that your partner would never change how would you feel about that sometimes pessimism a certain degree of pessimism can be a friend of love you know one once we accept that actually it's really very hard for people to be another way with sometimes ready you know we don't need people to be perfect is that the good news we just need people to be able to explain their imperfections to us in good time before they've hurt us too much with them and and with a certain degree of humility that that's already an enormous it's a lot to ask but it's so it's also it sounds reasonable right I mean if we could really have that in our minds early enough on in a relationship that's right and and you know almost from the first date yeah you know that my view of what one should talk about on a first date is not showing off or not you know putting forward one's accomplishments but it was quite the opposite you know one should say well how are you crazy I'm crazy like this you know and there should be a mutual acceptance that to damaged people are trying to get together because it's pretty much all of us there are few there are a few totally healthy people but pretty much all of us reach dating age with you know some scars some wounds and sometimes we we bring to adult relationship some of the same hope that a young child might have had of their parent and of course an adult adult relationship can't be like that it's got to accept that the person across the table or on the other side of the bed is just human which means full of flaws fears etc and not some sort of superhuman yeah and I think that that question that you use it could be a standard question on an early date and how are you crazy there's also something that you're getting it that it almost seems like we we must be hardwired to do this although you know one of the wonderful things we're learning in the 21st centuries that we can change our brains but a way you say it in in on love and a scene and on love is you know boy meets girl and and they you start to be enamored and in details of this new person and find things in common like I don't know both of us had two large freckles on the toe foot and then you know instinctively and this happens very quickly he teases out and in your personality from the details but also I you know also what I know from my own life is you tend to and I think we when we fall in love with another person we magnify in our minds those things that are immediately enrapturing and craft our idea of the other person almost exclusively around those wonderful qualities which is not fair to them or to us that's right and you know we feel in a way that we know them already and we have we impose we don't don't which you know also explains another phenomenon that I'm fascinated by and you probably would have noticed in in both novels is the phenomenon of being in a sulk of sulking because sulking is a fascinating situation which takes you right into the heart of certain romantic delusions because what's fascinating about sulking is that we don't sulk with everybody we only get into sulks with people that we feel should understand us but rather unforgivably haven't understood us so in other words it's when it's when we are in love with people and they're in love with us that we take particular offense when they get things wrong because the kind of the governing assumption of the relationship is this person should know what's in my mind ideally without me needing to tell yes if I need to spell this out to you you don't love me and that's why you know you'll go into the bath from bolt the door and when your partner says you know is anything wrong you'll go mm-hmm and the reason is that they should be able to read through the bathroom panel into your soul and know what's wrong and that's such an extraordinary demand yes we we see it in children I mean this is how little children behave they literally think that their parents can read their minds it takes a long time to realize that the only way that one person can really learn about another is if it's explained to them preferably using people when people always say communicate I mean you know we have to be generous towards the reasons why we don't and we don't because we're operating with this mad idea that true love means intuitive understanding and you know crazy when people say things like I met someone you know the loveliest thing is they understood me without me needing to speak you know so many alarm bells go off when I hear that because I think okay well good luck in this instance but you know if you guys get together that's not going to go on forever no one can you know intuitively understand another beyond a quite limited range of topics your children how old are your children they're still pretty young right there yeah that tenant okay yeah so I you know as the as a noun that I have young adult children when you hear that coming out of the mouth of your 21 year old you know he should under he and he should know he should just know and you just but I also I also what I also know is that grasping this what you're talking about is its work it's it is the work of life right it is the work of love and you know but it's interesting that you know you mentioned your your children and children generally because I think it sounds eerie but I think that one of the most one of the kindest things that we can do with our lover is to see them as children and not not to infantilized them but when we're dealing with children as parents as adults we're incredibly generous in the way we interpret their behavior in if a child says if you walk home and a child says I hate you right you immediately go okay it's that's not quite true probably they're tired they're hungry something's gone wrong somewhat their tooth hurts something we're looking around for a benevolent interpretation that can just shave off some of the more you know depressing dispiriting aspects of their behavior and we do this naturally with children and yet we do it so seldom with adults you know when an adult meets an adult and they say you know I've not had a good day leave me alone rather than saying okay I'm just gonna go behind the facade of this understand that's actually not about me that's about what's going on inside them writing right right exactly we don't do that we take it all completely personally and so I think you know the work of love is to try when we can manage it we can't always to go behind the front of this rather you know depressing challenging behavior and try and ask where it might have come from you know love is doing that work to ask oneself where's this rather aggressive pained non-communicative unpleasant behavior come from if we can do that we're on the road to to knowing a little bit about what love really is I think [Music] I'm Krista Tippett and this is on being today a conversation about love with writer and philosopher Alain de Botton [Music] you know I'd love to talk about your you use this word pessimism a little while ago and I'd love to dig into that a little bit more and what you're really talking about is is being reality-based um as opposed to paying ideal based um there's a beautiful video that I've shared that's out there I think it's a darkest truth about love is that right that's the title isn't it yes that's right I'd like to talk through you know some of these core truths that fly in the face of this way we go around behaving and that movies have taught us to be possibly our parents taught us to behave these core truths that can put us on the foundation of reality yes I mean that's very useful we couldn't chisel them in granite I mean look what what's the first important truth is you're crazy as it were all of us that all of us are deeply damaged people play the great enemy of love good relationships good friendships is self-righteousness if we start by accepting that of course we're you know only just holding it together and in many ways really quite challenging people you know I think if somebody thinks that they're easy to live with that by definition then it'd be pretty hard and don't have much of an understanding of themselves I think you know there's certain wisdom that begins by knowing that of course you like everyone else is pretty difficult and well this knowledge is very shielded from us you know our parents don't tell us our ex-lovers they knew it but they didn't be bothered to tell us they they you know sacked us well they tell us where we're dismissing what they say anyway well that's right and all friends don't tell us cuz they just want a pleasant evening with us so we're left with you know bubble of ignorance about our own natures and often you know you can be way into your 40s before you're starting to get a sense of oh well maybe you know maybe some of the problem is in me because of course you know it's so intuitive to think that of course it's it's the other person so to begin with that sense of you know I'm quite tricky in in these ways that's a very important starting point for being good at love you know so often we blame our lovers we don't blame our view of love and so we keep sucking our lovers and blowing up relationship or in pursuit of this idea of love which actually has no basis in reality it's simply not rooted in anything we know this great person this creature does not exist and is in fact the enemy of good enough relationships you know I'm really fond of Donald Winnicott this English psychoanalysts term which he first used in relation to parenting that you know what we should be aiming for is not perfection but a good enough situation and it's wonderfully downbeat you know no one would go you know what what are your hopes this year I just want to have a good enough relationship people go on I'm sorry your life so grim you wanna go no that's right really good that's that's kind of for a human that's brilliant and that's that I think the attitude we should have yeah um you you know one of the at this darkest truth about love you know you say the idea of love in fact distracts us from existential loneliness you know you are redeemable alone you will not be understood but also behind that is the right these are as you say these are dark truths but it's also a relief as truth always ultimately is if when we if we can hear it that again that is the work of life is to record I mean you know it goes on inside us I think one of the you know one of the greatest sorrows we sometimes have in in love is the feeling that our lover doesn't understand parts of us and and a certain kind of bravery a certain heroic acceptance of loneliness seems to be one of the key ingredients to being able to form a good relationship and isn't that interesting and it sounds paradoxical of course if you're if expect your lover must understand everything about you you will be well you'll be furious pretty pretty much of all the time it you know there are islands and moments of beautiful connection but we have to be modest about how often they're gonna happen I think you know if you're lonely with only I don't know forty percent of your life that's really good going you may not want to you know be lonely with over fifty percent but you know I think you know there's certainly a sizable minority share of your life which you're going to have to enjoy without echo from those you love yeah you know I baited over whether I would discuss this with you but I I think I will like I'm single right now and have been for a few years and and it's actually been a great joy you know not that I think I will be single forever or want to be single forever although actually I think I've I think I would be alright if I were you know which is a real watershed and also what this chapter of life has taught me to really enjoy more deeply and take more seriously all the many forms of love and life aside from just you know the romantic love or being coupled you know just as you were saying yeah yes I mean just as she was saying I'm single I was about to say you're not because you know we have to we have to look at what this idea of singlehood is I mean we've got this word single which captures somebody relationship that's right and you know another way of looking at love is connection we're all the time you know we are hard-wired to seek connections with with others and and that is in a sense at a kind of granular level what love is love is connection and insofar as one is alive and one is in you know buoyant relatively buoyant spirit some of the time it's because we are connected and we can take pride in how flexible our minds ultimately are about where that connection is coming when I think it's also worth saying that you know for some people relationships and not necessarily the place where they encounter their best selves yeah that that actually the person that they are in a relationship is not the person that they want to be or that they can be in other areas of life that they feel that there's there are other possibilities that they'd like to explore and you know I think getting into a relationship with someone asking someone to be with you is a pretty cruel thing to do to someone that you love and admire and respect because the job is the job is so hard most people fail at it you know when when you ask someone to marry you for example you're asking someone to you know be your chauffeur co-host sexual partner co-parent fellow accountant you know mop the kitchen floor together etc etc and on and on the list goes no wonder that we fail at some of the tasks and and get irate with one another it's a burden and I think sometimes you know the older I get sometimes I think I want Isis thinks you can do to someone that you really admire is leave them alone just just let them go let them be good don't impose your yourself on them because you're challenging um I want to read your this definition of marriage that you've written in in a few places I think it's wonderful and just talked about this marriage ends up as 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 avoided investigating well yes it's it's challenging and it's certainly contrary to the romantic view but again this kind of realism or you know acceptance of complexity I think is ultimately the friend of love I'm not I mean look it's also worth adding I don't believe that everybody should stay in exactly the relationship that they're in and that any relationship is worth sticking with and that in a way the fault is is always the fault of the lovers if it's not both lovers if it's not happy there are legitimate reasons to leave a relationship but when you're really being honest if you ask yourself why am I in pain and you can't necessarily attribute all the sorrows that you're feeling to your lover if you recognize that some of those things are perhaps endemic to existence or endemic to all human beings or something within yourself then what you're doing is encountering the pain of life with another person but not necessarily because of another person and for example I mean you you know you are in fact arguing as you said before some marriages are meant and and there's you know there's certainly reasons for marriages to end or to end marriages but that you also point out this very contradictory fact that the thing that's ultimately wrong with adultery as an easy-out - what's going around the marriage is that it is based on the same idealism that certain ideas of marriage are based on that go wrong that that's right in a way that you'll just redirect in your hope elsewhere and this is the perfect one right this is the one person who want with whom you won't be ever be lonely again who will understand you completely that's right that's right and so it's you know on and on the the cycles of hurt continue hmm you know something else your name about marriage that I feel is not often enough just name just that you know you we spoke a little while ago about children coming into a marriage and and and of course children teach us so much I mean one thing you say it's beautiful the children teach us that love in its purest form is kind of service the love we have for our children I mean I certainly knows if my so the love that I have for my children has changed me and it is it is it is distinct from all the other lovers I've ever known but also that the children are hard on marriages right I think and you know on a more complicated level if there are problems in the marriage that guy can get amplified when children there is also partly just because you can oh everybody's tired I mean in a way there's a lot of mundane 'ti in relationships and one of the things that romanticism does is to teach us that you know the great love stories should be above the mundane so you know in none of the Great's a 19th century novels about love does anyone ever do the laundry does anyone ever you know pick up the crumbs from the kitchen tables anyone ever you know clean the bathroom it just doesn't happen because it's assumed that what you know what makes or breaks love it are just feelings passionate emotions not that kind of day-to-day wear and tear and yet of course when we find ourselves in relationships it is precisely over these areas that conflicts arise but we refuse to lend them the necessary prestige I mean there's no argument as vicious as when two people are arguing about something but both of them think the argument is trivial so they'll say things like oh I mean it's just you know it's absurd we're arguing over who should hang up the towels in the bathroom that stupid people yeah and and you know that that's going to be trouble and so we need in a way one of those sort of you know one of the lessons of love is to lend a bit of prestige to those issues that you crop up the crop up in love like you know who does the laundry and on what day um we rush over these decisions we just see them as legitimate you know we think it's a fine - yeah I mean as you say that there's a lot of life in one day right it's this stuff of of our days I mean there's this wonderful line from the course of love about you know this to parents of children the tired child inside each of them is furious at how long it has been neglected and in pieces that's right and you know in a way it's it's so funny my wife I can be indiscreet on a my wife's you used to say to me in the early days of our marriage sometimes would say that to me things like you know my father would never have said something like that I would say something I'm you know it's not my turn to make the tea or something sugar my father would never have said if you you know he would always do this for us and then I had to point out that there was really a you know she wasn't comparing like with like that she was comparing his men have followed us as a father not as a lover and you know in the end what s what is say to her and did end up saying to her was in a way I'm probably behaving exactly like your father but just not the father that you saw when he was around you yeah the way you behaved towards your mother that's right exactly exactly and so what are things we do as parents is to edit ourselves which is lovely in a way for our children but it gives our children a really unnatural sense of what you can expect from another human being because we're never as nice to probably anyone else on earth as we are to our children I mean saying this is this is the cost of good parenting [Music] after a short break more with Alain de Botton subscribe to on being on Apple podcast to listen again and to discover produced and unedited versions of everything we make support for on being with Krista Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding principle and animating force for our lives a powerful love that helps us live in sacred relationship with ourselves others and the natural world learn more by visiting Fetzer org I'm Krista Tippett and this is on being today we're exploring the true hard work of love with the writer and philosopher Alain de Botton you know I'd like to go a slightly different place with all of this things you've been saying pointing out about how love really works that people don't learn when they're humiliated that self-righteousness is a is an enemy of love I'm thinking a lot right now these days about how and if we could apply the intelligence we actually have with the experience of love not the ideal but the experience of love in our lives to how we can be as citizens moving forward where there's a lot of behavior in public speaking for the United States but I think you know I think there's there forms of this in the UK as well we're kind of acting out in public the way we act out at our worst and in relationships you know I think you're on to something a huge and rather counterintuitive because we associate the word love with private life and we don't associate it with life in the Republic with with civil society yes but I think that a functioning society requires will rise to things that are against don't sound very normal but they require love and polite and by love I mean a capacity to enter imaginatively into the minds of people with whom you don't immediately agree and to look for the more charitable explanations for behavior which doesn't appeal to you and which could seem plain wrong not just to check them immediately in prison or to you know haul them up in front of a law court but to just tell them how stupid they are right just right or so exactly exactly we're permanently you know all sides are attempting to show how how stupid every other side is and the other thing of course is is politeness which is an attempt not necessarily to say everything - to understand that there is a role for private feelings which if they were to emerge would do damage to everyone concerned we've got this culture of kind of self disclosure and as I say it spills out into politics as well the same dynamic goes on it would like if I'm not telling you exactly what I think then you know I may develop a twitch or an illness from you know expunging my feelings and you know to which I would say no you're not you're preserving you know the piece and you know good nature of the Republic and and it's absolutely what you should be doing yes and I guess you know I I've been having this conversation with a lot of people this year I mean that the truth is more than ever before perhaps in our world we we are in relationship right we are in we are connected to everyone else and that's a fact their well-being will impact our well-being is irrelevant to our well-being and that of our children but there's a we have this habit in this capacity in public - and it also we know this we know that our brains work that's right wait to see the other to see those strangers those people those people on the other side politically socioeconomically whatever forgetting that in our intimate lives and in our love lives you know in earth in our circles of family and friends and in our marriages and with our children there are things about the people we love the most who drive as crazy that we do not comprehend and yet we find ways to be intelligent right to be loving because it gets a better result that's right and you know families are at this kind of testbed of love because we can't entirely quit them me and this is what makes families so fascinating because you're you're thrown together with a group of people who you would never pick if you could simply pay on the grounds of you know compatibility you know compatibility is an achievement of love it shouldn't be the precondition of love as we nowadays in a slightly spoiled way imagine it must be yes wonderful I think this is deeply politically relevant and it's totally and I think you know you know if we just try and explore the word political political really means you know outside of private space and we're highly socialized creatures who really take our cues from what is going on around us and if we see an atmosphere of short tempers of selfishness etc that will bolster those capacities within ourselves if we see charity being exercised if we see good humor if we see forgiveness on display again it will lend support to those sides of ourselves and you know we need to take care what we're exposing ourselves to because too much exposure to you know the opposite of love you know makes us into very hostile and angry people yes and I think it's also such an important thing to bear in mind that the import of our conduct moment a moment that that right that that is is having effects that we can't see that's right with far more sensitive than we allow for and we need to build a world that recognizes that if somebody goes you know rather than this or thanks rather than yes or you know whatever it is this can ruin our day and we should think about that as we approach not just our personal relationships but also our social and political relationships these things are humiliating little things can deeply wound and humiliate you know let's not forget that one of the things that makes relationship so scary is we need to be weak in front of other people and most of us are just experts at being pretty strong you know we've been doing it for years we know how to be strong what we don't know how to do is to make ourselves safely vulnerable and so we get we tend to get very twitchy you know pretty naturally aggressive etc when we're asked to we know when the moment has come to be weak and I feel like there's there's always this calling now because the stakes are so high for emotional intelligence in public which of course we don't none of us gets perfectly in our in our intimate lives but we we do know these things about people we love and they're also true of people we don't know and don't think we love but I I want to return a little bit to UM love and sex and eros and all of this I have to say one thing I really love and appreciate and learn from in your writing is your your reflection on flirting the art the art of flirting that it can be something edifying a pleasurable gift and you have this phrase a good flirt so would you describe what a good flirt is well you know if we think about what flirtation is in many ways flirtation is the attempt to awaken somebody else to their attractiveness I mean I think you know it would be a such a pity if we had to drive something as important as kind of validation and self-acceptance and you know a pleasant view of oneself through the gate of rather narrow gate of sex and flirtation is a kind of act of the imagination and you know what's fun about flirtation is that it often happens between really quite unlikely people yeah you know two people meet and you know maybe they're both with someone or they're there's a you know difference in status or background etc and they can find that they're in a little conversation about the weather and both bodies will recognize there's something a little bit flirtatious going on and it's got really nothing to do with with sex as such it's it's just two people delighting wakening whatever it to the fact that they're right they're quite nice people yeah and the attractive yeah and that that's that's okay yeah he also had this one lovely film it's one of these schools live films of about this you know a good flirt you can make these assumptions that this other person you know maybe would love to sleep with us won't sleep with us and the reason why they won't has nothing to do with any deficiency on our part but it's also not as you say a deception it's a natural pleasurable human experience that's right I mean the other thing that we get quite wrong in our culture is the whole business of what sex actually is you know because we we've come kind of from a Freudian world you know Freud has told us that there's a lot more going on in sex than we want to believe and that a lot of it is quite weird and darker than we'd ever want to imagine and that sex is everywhere in life even in places where we don't think it is or perhaps should be but in a way I've got a sort of different view of this I think that it's not so much that sex is everywhere it's that psychological dynamics are everywhere even in sex and so often we think of sex as just a sort of a pneumatic activity but really it's a psychological activity and if you try to imagine why people are excited by sex it's not so much that it's a pleasurable nerve ending business it's it's ultimately that it's about acceptance if you think about why you know why is it exciting to kiss someone for the first time it's not you know it's probably more fun eating an oyster or flossing your teeth or watching TV then kiss him is a bit weird odd thing we call kissing it's like sort of trying to inflate somebody else's mouth I mean it's just odd nevertheless we like it not because of its physical feeling but because of what it means the meaning mean we infuse and the meaning we infuse into it is I accept you and I accept you in a way that is incredibly intimate and that would be quite revolting with anyone else allowing you into my private space as a way of signaling I like you and what really we call it getting turned on but what we really as it were excited by is that someone accepts us with remarkable you know delight in us right defects the light in us and that's what's exciting about it in other words sex is continuous with a lot of things that we're interested in outside of the bedroom and you say that flirting you know is one way to to experience in the course of ordinary life in a way that's completely non-threatening to whatever your commitments are what is what is enjoyable about sex it's not necessarily the act itself the fact that we are sexual beings that's right that's right and you know but we feel often conflicted about it I shouldn't be I shouldn't be like I can't flirt etc so there's a lot of a lot of fear of them there's a lot of fear of slippery slopes yes you know in many situations we can we can hang on on the slippery slope it's okay we've you know we've got tools to hang on in there yeah I want to know I don't wanna let you go before asking what you think about what's your view of online dating because this is a new way that so many people perhaps most people moving forward our meeting our engaging this romantic side of themselves I mean at one level online dating promises to open up something absolutely wonderful which is a more logical way of getting together with someone the sort of dream is that the secrets of our soul and the secrets of somebody else's soul will be so downloaded onto a computer and that we will find the best possible match for who we are the darker side of online dating is that it encourages the idea that that a good relationship must mean a conflict-free relationship and therefore any relationship which has conflict in it which has unhappiness and areas of tension in it is wrong and can be terminated because we have this wonderful backup which is alternatives so like any tool it's it's got its pluses and minuses and has to be used correctly and I think what I mean by correctly is it has to broaden the pool of people from which we're choosing our lovers while not giving us the illusion that there is such a thing as a perfect human being right so then you're back to the basic truth the darker - it's about love also what online dating does it has introduces you to people but then really the whole thrust of your thinking is it's that that loving is really what comes next it's what comes after the meeting that's right Silicon Valley has been incredibly interested in getting us to that first stage of meeting the person and you know that's great but the next stage has been abandoned you know where is the app that will tell you how to read you know how to interpret somebody else's confused signals of distress or that will remind you at a certain point to you know look charitably upon you know someone's behavior because you remember their childhood etc so we have a long way to go our technology is still we still it sounds odd because we it's one of the sort of narcissism of our time that we think we're living late on in the history of the world and we think was sort of you know we're late comers to that to the party there's been we're still at the very beginning of understanding ourselves as you know human emotional creatures we're still you know taking our first baby steps in in the understanding of love and we need a lot of compassion for ourselves and no wonder we make horrific mistakes you know pretty much all the time [Music] I'm Krista Tippett and this is on being today a conversation about love with writer and philosopher Alain de Botton [Music] I happen to see your tweet at the end of 2016 when that when the New York Times released its most read articles of the year and your why you will marry the wrong person was number one which is really extraordinary I mean the most read article in a year of the brexit vote the presidential election war refugee crisis I wonder what that tells you about us as a species look it was deeply fascinating and quite extraordinary and apparently it was first by a long way I mean it's just peculiar and and I think that look first of all it tells us that we have an enormous loneliness around our difficulties you know one could write a follow-on piece I may have all my heart you know called why you will get into the wrong job which would probably score quite highly - and you know why you'll have the wrong child and why you go on the wrong vacation and why your body will be the wrong shape and why you'll think you live in the wrong country etc and in a way we need solace for the sense that we have gone wrong in an area whatever it may be where perfection was possible and anyone who comes along and says you know it's normal that you are suffering life is suffering is doing a quite unusual thing in our culture which is so much about optimism you know it sounds grim it is in fact enormous ly consoling and alleviating and helpful in a culture which is oppressive in its demands for for perfection so you know I think a certain kind of pessimistic realism which is totally compatible with hope totally compatible with laughter good humor a sense of fun it's not it doesn't have to be exactly exactly so you know I'm a great fan of gallows humor I mean we're all we're on the way to the gallows in one way or another and you know we can hug and give each other laughs and point out the more pleasant side as we as we head towards the scaffold but maybe your last word I just want to ask you weed weed smoke weed first began to speak about on love which you wrote I think which was published when you were 23 the late nineties you've now been married for over a dozen years and you know what what did you really not know I mean and at that book was so wise and in fact that book that you published when you're 23 in love really presented a lot of the themes you've carried for it in time but I do wonder like what what you really did not know what you've learned what you continue to learn about love at this stage in your life I genuinely thought at that time that problems in love are the result of being with people who are in one way or another defective and you know in 2002 this belief was severely tested in that I met someone who was really absolutely wonderful in every way and through much effort I pursued her and eventually married her and discovered something very surprising she was great in a million ways she was very right and yet oddly there were all sorts of problems and I think it's been you know the path that I've been on to realize that those problems had nothing to do with her being a deficient person or indeed with me being a horribly deficient person they were to do with the challenges of being a human being trying to relate to another human being in a loving relationship that I was encountering some endemic issues that every couple however well matched and there is no such thing as a perfect match you know however well matched every couple will encounter these problems that love is something we have to learn and we can make progress where's and that it's not just an enthusiasm it's a skill and it requires forbearance generosity imagination and a million things besides and we must fiercely resist the idea that true love must mean conflict free love that the course of true love is smooth it's not the course of true love is rocky and bumpy at the best of times that's the best we can as the creatures we are it's no fault of mine or no fault of yours it's to do with being human and the more generous we can be towards that flawed humanity the better chance we'll have of doing the true hard work of love Alain de Botton is the founder and chairman of the school of life his books include religion for atheists how Proust can change your life and the novel the course of love the pause is on beings Saturday morning email offering gathering threads from the far-flung ongoing conversation that is the on being project it's simple to subscribe go to on being org slash the pause you'll get a weekly update on our latest conversations writings and poetry from our blog invitations to live events and other news and musings again that's on being org slash the pause [Music] on being is Chris Kegel Lily Percy Mariah helgesen Maya Terrell Maurice Amberleigh Aaron Farrell LaRonde or doll Toni you Bethany Iverson Erin kala Saco Kristen Lynn profited Oh Casper tech I'll Angie Thurston sue Phillips Eddie Gonzalez Lillian ro Damon Lee and Jeffery Hosoi our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoe Keating and the last voice you hear singing our final credits in each show is hip-hop artist Liz o on being was created at American public media our funding partners include the Fetzer Institute helping to build the spiritual foundation for a loving world find them at Fetzer org Kalia pea foundation working to create a future where universal spiritual values form the foundation of how we care for our common home humanity United advancing human dignity at home and around the world find out more at humanity United org part of the Omidyar group the Henry Luce Foundation in support of public theology reimagined the Osprey Foundation a catalyst for empowered healthy and fulfilled lives and the Lilly Endowment an Indianapolis based private family foundation dedicated to its founders interests in religion community development and education on being distributed by prx public radio exchange and there's a Krista Tippett public production

Channel: The On Being Project

Views: 105,443

Rating: 4.8474298 out of 5

Keywords: Krista Tippett, On Being, The On Being Project, On Being with Krista Tippett, Krista Tipet, Krista Tippet, love, relationships, marriage, divorce, friendship, parenting, romance, sex, alan, school of life, philosophy

Id: IwSa7Ovq2sA

Length: 51min 33sec (3093 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 23 2019