Alain de Botton | The Course of Love

welcome to the Free Library of Philadelphia tonight I'd like to especially welcome visitors from the School of Life YouTube channel my name is Laura Kovacs and I'm honored to introduce Alain de Botton exploring a philosophy of everyday life he is the author of more than a dozen books that span fiction and nonfiction on subjects that range from religion to art to love travel architecture and literature he also founded and runs the School of Life dedicated to a new vision of Education on how to live well the virtues to cling to and the vices to be wary of he last visited the free library in 2012 with religion for atheists a practical and provocative argument that allows non-believers in his words to rescue some of what is beautiful touching and wise from all that seems no longer true twenty years after the publication of his debut book the best-selling novel on love he returns to fiction and to the love story with the course of love ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming Alain de Botton such a such a pleasure to be here I'm not going to talk directly about my novel what I really want to do is to talk about some of the ideas behind the novel and the novel is about love so tonight is all about love and it's going to be a personal intimate sort of evening will laughs there may be tears moments of reflection and confession too so it's all going to happen can I start by asking whether anyone in the room is married and happily married anyone this is you know this is really astonishing properly astonishing because for most of human history the idea that you would not just be married to someone but in love with them actually loved them was just considered absolute peculiar the point of marriage was not to love your partner it was to unite your bit of land with their bit of land your cow with their sheep whatever it may be the point is it was a broadly dynastic and practical business and the notion that you would on top of everything actually really think that your spouse was wonderful as a human full human being and respect and admire their soul well this just didn't really happen it's only in the last three seconds in evolutionary terms that we have can't come to this new arrangement and this new arrangement we call Romanticism you know romanticism is the word that historians give to a movement which comes in the 19th century and the point of romanticism is that it totally reinvented how we see love and nowadays even though we may not think of ourselves as romantics we live in a culture that is profoundly romantic and let's remember that we all love within a context we love within a historical and social framework you know there's that lovely quote from La Rochefoucauld where he says there are some people who would never have fallen in love if they hadn't heard there was such a thing and to some extent we're all picking up cues from outside about how we should love and those cues in recent times have all been romantic cues so we're we are romantic lovers so I want to just step back a little and just run through some of the key ideas that romanticism gives us about what love is like so romanticism tells us that all of us have somewhere out there this very very special person who we can call a soulmate and we may not have met them already but they exist definitely out there you may have to swipe a lot and go on many dates etc but they're out there and when you find your soulmate it's just amazing what happens is an end to all loneliness all those broken shy vulnerable misunderstood parts of you are at last endorsed by another person who can see you as you really want to be seen and acknowledge you in all your strengths and tolerate all your weaknesses and in many ways romanticism and a very high idea of what human beings were like you know the older religious view sees human beings as essentially broken in need of the mercy of God if you're Augustinian tainted by original sin the sins of Adam I speak to you as a secular Jew the sins of Adam have it's good to be at a pulpit don't let this the sins of Adam have tainted us all but the point is romanticism had a very much more optimistic view we were all of us we are all of us like angels without our wings but with pure of heart good fundamentally good inside so we're on the lookout for these very special other really good people and when you find that click with the the the person you make all without sarcasm why are any an angel when you find that click with your soulmate your quest your life's quest is at an end how are we gonna find this very special person romanticism has an answer let's remember that for most of human history people had what we call marriages of reason in other words the community society would get together and for logical reasons may not have been good logical reasons but anyway reasons that you could account for in logical terms would choose you a partner suddenly this changes and we enter the era of the marriage of feeling in other words marriages that are justified by someone having a really really special feeling about someone and you know it is when you're I don't know you're in the mall or you're on a train or on an aeroplane and you just see a very special person you just get that feeling and that feeling that feeling of being in love is becomes the centerpiece of what long-term relationships are meant to be based on and so all of us especially young people are looking out for that special feeling if you don't feel that special feeling you might fake it you might be a bit embarrassed about it but you need it and also once you have that special feeling no one can argue with it you know your parents can't go why are you having that special feeling for that person you know you're not supposed to do that that special feeling is like a kind of special anointment from above and you do not question it and so you just kind of go for it um sysm unleashed an era of crushes you know the crush may seem like an incidental and rather playful aspect of love but for romanticism it's almost if you'd like the secret central Sun around which the planets of Romanticism orbit the crush is a very brief sighting of another human being which leaves you absolutely certain that they are the one and in 19th century poetry and fiction there are so many crushes a lot of crushes happen on trains now his entry is both the age of romanticism and the development of the railways and there are so many moments at which you're sitting in a carriage and you see somebody and maybe they're reading a book or something and use just something perfect about lots and lots of crushes and on tiny details lead to a deep certainty that's a very key thing the other thing about Romanticism romanticism tells us that love is forever when you fall in love with someone it's forever it doesn't have an end date but it's till death do us part one should point out that for the romantics many the romantics died young and their partners died young so and indeed weirdly it was it was kind of poignant and an almost you know romantic that the person who you thought you were going to spend another 50 years with dies so young a lot of tuberculosis and so you're getting together with a perfect person they're so perfect but then they succumb to tuberculosis they're gonna be out in a few months but in those months it's so intense and it's so tender and and indeed is itself a romantic at lots of suicide in romanticism the shortening of life and the intensity of life is a great is a great theme now the thing about romanticism is about the romantics is and not many of them had jobs a lot of them a lot of them were unemployed or had a stipend or family money or something so that left them a lot of time to focus on love and and so they would spend a lot of time going for walks in the countryside go for a walk was a very key romantic thing to do especially in summer especially near waterfalls and oceans cliffs are very romantic places whether the sea crashes into the rocks and special times of day dusk is a very Mantic time when the sunlight is just lighting up shafts of golden light light up the underside of the clouds turning them a pinky hue it's very romantic sort of time now another thing that romanticism does is to reinvent what sex is all about people of course always had sex and they always loved and sometimes the two went together and sometimes not what Romanticism does is to insist that sex become the crowning achievement of love the crowning moment of love and that you cannot have sex without love and that love is as well anointed by the sexual act so sex becomes in a way a much much more serious business and the other thing that were comes much more serious is adultery which becomes a tragedy adultery becomes a tragedy in the nineteenth century novel all the great 19th century novels in one way or another are about adultery if you think of you know Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary or a Tolstoy and a Karenina and on and on suddenly adultery moves from being deeply unpleasant and a problem to being a tragedy something you may kill yourself over because sex is so intimately tied to emotions and this is a new thing and we are the heirs of this host of ideas these ideas that seem in a way like common sense I'm deliberately slightly trying to take you to 30,000 feet over them that they're quite bizarre they've not necessarily always been around and I want to argue that even though in many ways these ideas are beautiful and lovely and touching and exciting they are also trouble they are big trouble I want to argue that our relationships are in trouble partly because of this ideology of romanticism which has wreaked havoc on our chances of having successful long-term relationships why why this sounds rather cynical I'm not cynical I'm on the side of love but unless I'm on the side of love in a way that discounts some of the reasons that romanticism gives us for why relationships should be the way they are so let me point out some of the ways in which I think romanticism has ruined love well one of the things that romanticism does to insist that two people who get together are very pure and good the truth is about all of us well you're all crazy and I'm crazy too everyone is very seriously demented we human beings are only just holding it together we are quite fragile we're very very unable to understand ourselves it normally takes you've got to be at least over 45 before you begin to understand basic things about yourself we don't we can't regulate our moods we can't understand where our moods are coming from we're very bad at communicating these moods and we're real trouble to be around and the thing is not just we're crazy but anyone we're likely to get together with is also going to be crazy and you know when you have a crush on someone and they look so amazing at the supermarket aisles or on in in the Train maybe they have some lovely sides don't get me wrong people do have lovely sides but they also have something that we tend to forget which is difficult sides everyone that you're likely to get together with everyone is going to be serious trouble from close up okay it's just a rule of life you don't know what the specific nature of the trouble will be but it absolutely is gonna be there and it's just going to take time for you to find out and why why do we have such a hard time accepting this about ourselves you know many of us feel I don't if there's any single people here people young single people in their 20s a particular particularly guilty of this I was one of them myself once and the feeling goes like this you think look broadly speaking I'm quite an easygoing person broadly speaking and if I was just with the right person amazing and so it's just a problem of finding that right person but but broadly speaking I'm okay now I think if you think that you are an easy person to live with okay you don't know yourself everybody is extremely hard to live with why it's just an extremely hard thing to do to live with anyone all of us are so peculiar in our quirks it starts with what time of day we want to get up to what our moods does to how we behave when we're angry to how we behave and we're trying to get close to someone on and on on and the problem is that we don't really know this enough about ourselves we're not aware enough of how disturbed we are why are we not aware of this well basically because we're surrounded by a bubble of sentimentality our parents don't really want to tell us maybe they don't really want to see it so they're not gonna tell us the truth about ourselves our friends well they're not gonna tell us why would they tell why would they bother with the arduous task they know all sorts of things about how crazy we are but then they just want a nice evening with us occasionally they're not gonna go into the the byways of our of our characters and meanwhile there are our exes and our exes well they did have glimpses and that time they said you know I want to spend more time on my own etc it wasn't quite that but that was a nice way of putting it they couldn't be bothered either so you aren't left in blissful ignorance because simply a collection of people have never bothered to tell you how it is that you are real trouble so we enter relationships very unaware of who we are now in a better society if I was running the world all of in a very typical dinner date question when you sit down for dinner with people would be so I'm crazy like this how are you crazy and two people would just exchange notes on their relative craziness and this wouldn't be seen as an insult it's not like I'm perfect how are you perfect you know I mean do people go I'm very I'm very special and perfect I'm very special perfect too you know these are two people in in trouble you know one of the real enemies of successful relationships is self-righteousness and self-righteousness stems from a feeling that you're basically a really good person and you know you're yeah you're one of the good guys so what's going on why why are other people causing trouble you know that's a problem that's dangerous much better to go in with an Augustinian spirit I'm broken I'm sinful I'm one of the sons of Adam tainted by original sin how are you that's a it's a good way that's a good way of getting into a relationship because you know you'll be humble you'll be a little a little humbler now let's think about how people get together so romanticism remember is in rebellion against the marriage of reason and it says that instinct will lead you to the right person and that's why never mess with instinct never asked never question instinct in stink is this quasi divine force leading us to the right person oh yeah really okay now let's say we have to go to the psychotherapists now you don't necessarily have to be paid up Froy din etc just the loosest acceptance of some of the basic tenets of psychotherapy will tell you that we learn to love not when we have young teenagers dating for the first time but when we're children it's when we are little children that we learn about love it's in the family that we learn about love and you know many parents are extremely full of goodwill but they are likely to have mixed their love with some slightly troubling dynamics maybe they were a little bit anxious as parents so when they loved you they loved you in a way but there was a lot of anxiety around or they were quite controlling or they were a little depressed so you needed to cheer them up all the time or they would get very close and then withdraw or they died when you were quite young whatever it happens to be there is likely to have been mixed in with our experience of earliest love a set of criteria which were less than optimal and which indeed militate against our chances of full happiness so the thing is we grow up as adults and we're not free to fall in love with just anyone you know we know in the physical realm that people would say things like you know they have to be blonde or they can't be short or they've got to be like there's or there must be fat or whatever it is we have criteria but we also have not just physical criteria but psychological criteria and these most of the time we don't really understand them but they're fascinating and they tell us if we only we were slightly more expert in our own psyches we would start to unpick them but we sensed them when we set friends up on dates you know imagine when you're setting up a friend and you go you know you should really get together with you know my friend because you know on paper you guys are fantastic so these two people go off and they have a dinner date and on paper they're so compatible etc and then one of them comes back and he says how was it and they go yeah you know that's so nice but now you know they just didn't have that feeling that special feeling and you go what was nice and maybe a little boring in some ways it right now was like nice boring a really fascinating because sometimes we discount people on the dating scene not because they are nice and a little boring not really that at all but because they are not going to enable us to suffer in ways which we're quite used to we need to suffer some of us in very particular ways and there's a little unconscious bit of our brain as we're assessing a partner we go now now you're not going to make me unhappy in the way that I expect to be made unhappy you're not gonna really feeling I had when I was three when Mum was kind of down and I needed to be the Joker or when I was you know when dad was a little distant I'm not getting that from you seem really reliable now I think I'm yeah - nice - nice you know bit boring that's the pleasant psychological blocking explanation for these things so in other words look our instincts are trouble our instincts are not reliable because they are the legacy of a complex history of love which was bound up with some really troublesome dynamics and yeah this the romantics don't quite tell us about look there's other things that are problematic in Romanticism the experience of love at the beginning is very bound up with honesty and some of the most touching moments in early love are to do with being able at last to say things that you've not been able to say to other people you know you meet at the office let's say and you know suddenly you're in a relationship and you're able to say all those things you know you know that guy does iti hate him you hate him - yeah we both hate him in the bottom we hate him - and and you do you feel that way about the conference yeah I feel the same way so and so suddenly you've got a lot of lot in common and then I mean sorry don't be shocking but a lot of this goes on around sex as well so you know you're intimate with someone and you go but you know I've always sorry embarrassed you you know I've always wanted to do that thing and they go really I wanted to do that thing as well I just didn't know it was allowed and you go yeah sure so you start doing that thing and it's it's just so amazing and you feel like you know the whole world which was previously alien has now kind of been humanized through the prism of this very special person and and you feel no longer that you no longer have to hide who you are and it's one of the most exciting things about love no longer needing to hide who you are and all the things that you've were so afraid were weird and unacceptable etc the other person seems to understand and accept but then but then but then normally about three months into a relationship you've tried everything the rope the tying the faying the extreme thing and then better you're in a restaurant and like you see a waiter and you go amazing like if we invited them and they could have joined us and we did this kind of thing whereby they they would be watching and you'd be there and I'd be there and and you just kind of look back at your partner and they're looking pretty ashen-faced and looking rather shocked and horrified and you go wow I realized suddenly there's a fork in the road one fork leads to the path of total honesty the other Fork leads to the path of love what are you gonna pick are you gonna pick most of us end up picking the path of love because we don't want to hurt our partner and we learn something that the romantics are not so good at reminding us is okay and is indeed an inevitable part of love which is that in order to maintain any relationship you have to lie not in the name of ending the relationship or of deceiving your partner for any sinister ends but in the name of love to expose someone to everything that you are is not something we should ever do to someone we claim to have good intentions towards being yourself is something you should spare anyone you love it's trouble it's difficult so in a way an editing of yourself belongs to love to edit yourself is not a betrayal of love it is a loyalty to love but again romanticism doesn't remind us of this it it frightens us into thinking that something has gone wrong if we're having to do quite a bit of editing in various ways it's worth mentioning another thing about about the romantics so the romantics were not really into practicalities no one I've never read please correct me if anyone knows it in the whole history the 19th century I've never read any room antic piece of literature that talks about laundry there's just like no one ever does the laundry it's just just never happens in a poem epic poem novels novella nothing right no one's ever done the laundry throughout a hundred years and indeed there are many many things which are immediately considered unromantic if you get interested in them so if you went on an early date and you started talking about your you know dishwasher or the cutlery drawer and you said you know I really just didn't how like the knives and the forks go to the people we immediately go that's really unromantic my god that's pretty unromantic now the thing about relationships is that actually they involve an awful lot of practicalities but romanticism locates practicalities in a distant corner it doesn't want to give them status it indeed sees them as a betrayal of what love is to be about and this leads us to tremendous difficulties when we get into relationships and find that we are hampered by all kinds of practical hurdles and difficulties and squabbles you know in the nineteenth century there's one that you know in Madame Bovary in in Flores Madame Bovary Emma Bovary who's married a you know very nice slightly dull but you know fine ordinary mortal she's sent absolutely panicked the day that she realizes that her marriage is gonna be a lot about ordering cheese she's got ordered cheese and milk quite a lot so everyday she's got to tell the maid about ordering thing and she thinks my life has gone wrong she thinks my life is a disaster because she's read novels about what love is supposed to be about and she's expecting guys on horseback aristocrats castles castles in the mist etc all these things and instead she's just sitting with the husband ordering milk and cheese and she thinks well my life has gone wrong and she destroys herself eventually commits suicide it's a total disaster because she's read the wrong novels ladies gentleman I wrote a book I wrote a novel partly to save you because many of us many of our ideas many of our ideas on love come from novels and most novels give us a really strange view of love there's not enough laundry there's not enough practicalities and so you know when we end up it's particularly afflicts intelligent people like you very intelligent people are particularly averse to practical because they look at their parents and grandparents I thought oh these guys were really boring they didn't really know about life we're kind of modern and cool and know about things and so we're not gonna spend a lot of time kind of arguing about who cleans the car or who takes out the garbage it's a turd that was there that's just for stupid people so then they get into a relationship and then after a little while they're faced with the towel incident and the towel incident goes like this someone has a towel on the floor someone hangs the towel and one person thinks that the towel on the floor is a sign of moral decay and decadence and the one who hangs it up thinks that the hung towel is a symbol of righteousness and dignity and they go at it and at first it starts quite gently please will you hang up the towel and there was fine where it is pick it up later maybe no please hang up the towel please and anyway and both people are convinced this is a completely stupid thing to have an argument about I mean really please you know one of us went to the Ivy League the other was got a PhD we're not gonna argue about this is absolutely great you know that an argument is gonna get bitter the moment that two people are convinced it's a stupid thing to have an argument about and unfortunately romanticism tells us that an awful lot of things are stupid to have arguments about ladies gentlemen there is nothing too stupid to have an argument about nothing absolutely nothing everything is a worthy point of argument and you know a lot of frustration is to do with how much time we budget I mean you know the people who are inventing electric cars they know it's very difficult so they spend a lot of time and when it goes wrong after a while they don't they don't just fling everything down and go I'm giving up now I'm gonna get divorced from the project cuz they know they've got at least you know seven years of her fiddling through all the things when you know a project is hard and it is hard you don't panic when you think a project is easy and it's hard then you panic and many of us feel because of the ideology of romanticism that certain things do not belong to legitimate difficulty whereas they do and we're not properly prepared let me talk for a moment about sulks because the other thing romanticism created an epidemic of sulking in the modern world so sulks are really interesting what is a sulk okay so sulk is interesting because what a sulk essentially is is a feeling of deep upset with a lover sulk in love deep upset with a lover for the fact they haven't understood you about something that you are refusing to explain you do not want to explain and why don't you want to explain what you don't want you could explain in theory you explain yourself to lots of people you're not going to explain yourself to your lover absolutely not because they should love you and if they love you they should know they should know just they should know so you're not gonna say you should know so when you get home after that trouble you're just gonna go into the bathroom you're gonna lock the door and you're not gonna say and they say please just open the door come on and you know because you want them to read your soul through the bathroom door into your soul to understand who you are and you're not going to explain Romanticism believes that two people should be able to intuitively understand who each other is that that you know words have a curiously low status within Romanticism I wonder does anyone here think that by thinking too much you can break or damaged feelings anyone think that by by thinking too much you can so break yeah few people that's a classic romantic idea I I like you don't don't worry it's fine but but it's a very classic idea and and it's really the idea that feelings exist here and reason exist here and if you submit feelings to reason you're ruining them in some way and and and that extends into love where if you spend too long having to spell everything out and something kind of a bit wrong you should be able to understand people intuitively that's why one of the most romantic things to say in the early days of love is you're reporting on a love affair to a friend you say you know it was amazing we hardly needed to speak we understood each other you want to go really well how long is that gonna go on for and and and is that a good idea an alarm bell immediately look I am a writer so I'm very invested in the idea of actually spelling things out but the point is it is a very legitimate concern despite some early stunning examples of soul reading your partner cannot read your soul they can't do it and nor should they expect it to ever we have to give accounts of what's going on inside us to our partners but again romanticism dissuades us from this task it seemed like a betrayal no we have to have rather artificial sounding conversations in which the strange things inside me can have a chance of being understood by you and that's gonna require an awful lot a lot a lot of a lot of artificiality if you if you put it that way but artificiality in the name of love in the name of the continuance of love it's not a betrayal of love look something else that happens in in love is criticism you know when you first get together with somebody one of the most exciting things in the early days of love is the feeling that everything about you is just accepted and it's really quite delightful even things that you considered may be quite embarrassing about you the lover thinks kind of charming so you tell them you know I've got this gap between my front teeth and they go oh that's kind of kooky but keep it sweet and you know or you could I'm quite shy at parties and they go oh don't worry I'm that's all right come with me I'll introduce you to people etc so even little vulnerabilities oh these are my old pajamas I know they're not that great but you know that's I feel cozy in them and they go oh that's so nice so you you accept accept a lot of things that could be considered weaknesses or problems that is has a very nice part of what makes early love just so beautiful it can't continue and nor should it and it normally comes to a screeching halt over the serial moment it's early morning I'm cereal and they sound like a cow they are chewing and it's during this cereal they sound I'm having breakfast with with a cow it's just it's disgusting I can't so you just clean really sorry and you're a little tired and you could find a better way of putting to use good you sound like a cow what I don't eat like that right and they go no one's ever no one's ever told me that I eat in this way and you want to go of course they haven't why would they why would they bother your parents wouldn't bother your exes wouldn't bother but you know but the point is it's a it's a legitimate thing to try and point out but we have this idea very strong idea if you loved me you wouldn't criticize me that's a strongest idea romantic idea - love is not to criticize right true love you know and very firm people say in these heated moments I say things like well my mother my mother accepts the hold of me why can't you what is it about you that means that you constantly tried to criticize me ladies an gentlemen is an alternative to romantic love it was invented by the ancient Greeks and it can really help us out over the serial incident it goes like this the ancient Greeks believed that love is not an endorsement of everything about another person what love really involves is admiration for what is good in another person and the feeling of love is a feeling of respect for accomplishment virtue and beauty in a way perfection when you encounter perfection in another person in a given area that's when you feel love you might feel other things towards someone's flaws tenderness sympathy patience all sorts of kind of other things are they're quite nice things but you don't feel love love is about perfection love is about accomplishment you don't love what is imperfect and for the ancient Greeks relationships are essentially processes of Education there are educational institutions and both the lover and the loved one are teacher and pupil in a constant rotation and it is not a departure of love to try and teach your partner indeed the point of love is to try and guide your partner to be the best version of themselves and far from being a betrayal of love it's an honoring of Love's deepest promise to point stuff out so we should be teachers and we should be students within the classroom of love now why aren't we why is this so difficult so partly because we love against the backdrop of Romanticism that sees all criticism or feedback as a betrayal of love that doesn't help and that means that when we're in the teaching role we're likely you know what makes a good teacher a good teacher is calm a very important first rule of teaching you're calm and you're calm in part because you don't really care that much you know it's the student body if they're not going to understand trigonometry well doesn't matter as their problem you have another class next year etc you're very calm you don't really care about the outcome you do your best but you don't really care about the outcome why can't we do this in love partly because we are so invested so the reason why we lose our tempers and lose our calm over say the breakfast cereal moment is because we're thinking at the back of our minds my life's a disaster if this person does not understand this lesson I've married an idiot and I've ruined my life so in other words at the background is not it'll be fine it'll be okay the thought is I've ruined my life so of course you're not gonna become you gotta be more or less hysterical and even though you wanted to take the person you know HR tells us that if you want to try and feed something back to somebody it's got to be 99% honey great calm just point out one tiny thing instead of which you're going you stupid idiot you sound like a bovine creature it's by the time you're talking like this you've lost your audience entirely you know humiliation is unfortunately never a route to education once you start to humiliate someone you've lost them and unfortunately because we're so scared because we're so far not because we're bad but because we're so scared we tend to deliver our lessons in love in very very harsh terms meanwhile our so-called student doesn't want to be a student they think whoo you my teacher or something they cross there are what are you gonna give me a lesson in love right they're angry they don't want to hear a lesson and they're remembering their mother who accepted everything about them so they're kind of furiously so then the couple loves classroom collapses in bitterness and silence and what you get instead is nagging and shirking what and nagging and shirking but that the nagger the nag has given up teaching the nagas has given up trying to persuade through reason and logic and patience and they simply want to insist take the garbage out now stop eating like this do it like this and you don't even want to explain why because it's so painful to expend why you just try and force the person to do what you want and the other it's always accompanied by it's it's yang which is shirking which is the other person just go No and goes upstairs and reads the paper so they're not listening and you're insisting and loves classroom is entirely broken down partly because of an ideology developed largely in Germany and Britain and some extent France in the late 18th and early 19th century called Romanticism so that is what makes our lives so difficult well is there any answer yes of course there are lots of answers um look I should start by saying marriage and long-term relationships let's take on marriage marriage is a really difficult almost cruel thing to do to someone you claim to love because it's really so tricky but but nevertheless I don't want to advocate a diet of low expectations you know I'm not saying you know it's great that we have the high expectations we have the thing is that we've got the expectations here and we've not built the scaffolding to reach them reliably because all we've left ourselves is instinct and half-baked notions of is going with our feelings I mean so many other things in life are difficult and we do not allow instinct to guide us if I said you know I'm landing a triple7 tomorrow I've not done any aeronautical training I've just got a really good instinct about how it's gonna work you think of my god I'm gonna perform a minor surgical procedure through instinct you think this man's crazy we're ready to accept a classroom and its importance in many areas oddly we resisted in love and the results are everywhere to see in the extraordinary number of failed relationships that surround us I don't believe that love is a feeling love is a skill and it's a skill we've got to learn often through patience through mistakes etc now what might we be learning in love's true classroom so one of the things to learn here's one here's one lesson that I found very very useful let me try it out on you it's very helpful when dealing with your partner to imagine that even though they look like an adult they're in fact about three years old inside the partner as child theory you might call it it's terribly helpful the thing is that when we comes to dealing with children we're so generous in our interpretation of what might be going on behind behavior which is that optimal so if you cooked your three-year-old some dinner made of schnitzels and potatoes that's where you put it down and they're sitting down with you and then they just swipe it off the floor yeah right you don't hit them and go what are you trying to do to me honey do you know I've been at the office all day what are you trying to try and ruin my life you don't say that you think oh maybe didn't sleep well enough perhaps he's got a sore gum or maybe he's a bit jealous about his younger sister it can't be easy to be dethroned like that and so in other words we really extend sympathetic explanations we go 360 degrees around a piece of difficult behavior in order to try and find something to attenuate an otherwise harsh interpretation do we do this with adults no no absolutely not we go you know you're trying to hurt me what are you trying to do bring me down ruin my life etc we don't extend this kind of generosity we're so aware we're so aware that it's patronizing to treat someone as younger than they in fact are that we don't we're not alive sufficiently to the idea that it's sometimes the height of generosity to treat someone as maybe younger than they seem in order to extend as I say this generosity of interpretation you know all of us are as I say broken quite difficult quite wounded the problem is you can't see it often you can't see our wounds so if I had a very badly broken arm and a big cast and a sling or something people would treat me nicely you know doesn't matter about the bad speech he's got he's got a arm in a sling someone would open the door for the guy just a little more you go easy go easy when you see somebody with a wound the problem is that all of us are really wounded inside but you can't see it so we look part of our problem is that we look kind of normal yeah you know normal I look normal and we look kind of adult as well you don't look 3 a really big problem of adult life is we look about and yet we're not to enlarge part and so that requires an awful lot of work of the imagination to decode to translate to take what seemed like one thing and to see that it's in fact another you know this is what this is again what's like a therapist to a very keen on one of the things it's very hard to try and get close to someone that you're in a relationship with when you fear rejection and we sometimes think that rejection is just something that happens at the beginning of a relationship but actually there's a constant and ongoing fear of rejection so imagine somebody comes home and their partner just a little subdued hi hi and and suddenly some little trigger is pressed in their minds and they go home the partner doesn't want me so instead of going I was a little struck by how you're a little distant and cold and I'm you know I want to be close to you and I'm not too bad just want to share that instead you go well I'm just gonna go upstairs I'm gonna do something on the computer I'll see you later bye right and in other words you suddenly get quite brutal and they go oh you seem a little cold and you go no I'm not cold I just died you don't want to see you tonight and and actually if you decode all that really it is I really want to see you but I'm afraid that maybe you don't want to see me and I'm quite vulnerable in front of you because I've kind of given over my life to you and that's hard to remind you because we're supposed to be married and we got a mortgage etc and yet I find it quite hard to say that I want to touch you and sometimes I think that you don't want to touch me and instead that comes out as you're a bit of a you know I'm going upstairs so it's a real it's a real headache and we need to do that work of decoding and and translation look another thing we really must try and do in love is it's so easy to think your partner is an idiot it's really important to see that they're not an idiot they are a lovable idiot and in order to see them that way we need that you that that quality which you need more than anything else in a relationship which is humour comedy think of something like so think of someone like Larry David right if Larry David was in your life you just think the guy's such a jerk he's such an idiot right but why don't we think that because he comes presented to us with the beautiful envelope of comedy and so even there was a complete jerk we kind of love him too he's a lovable idiot that is the work of comedy and even if we don't have Larry David's genius we try and do that with our own partners to look at them through the eyes of a humorous loved look I think that many of us feel that getting into a relationship and making a relationship work is just instinct it isn't there are many criteria boxes you have to take before you're ready for love I think just a summer I think you're ready for love when you're fully aware that you are completely crazy when you're fully aware that anyone you're likely to get together with is crazy as well when you realize that anyone that you see in the supermarket or online or on tinder etc that anyone even they look absolutely lovely they will be crazy too and quite a lot of trouble too so don't run off and that life a life together with somebody's going to involve a lot of laundry and some arguments about towels is not the end of love it is what love requires and that you'll constantly be needing to apply humor and generosity of interpretation if you can do at least some of those things then you are ready for love otherwise take a pause read my book and then we'll talk again thank you so much before I ask you the question I want to ask could you just explain to me I've read many of your books how do you pronounce your last name that's a really important question yeah I'll start with the first name which is Ella and the surname is de Botton and it's it's a it's a troubling name that's originally a Spanish name it's a Sephardic name so there was once somewhere in the Iberian Peninsula a place called button and then it got a dern you know that's it so I'm not a French aristocrat unfortunately and I just got this weird name so thank you well school life coming here when's the school of life coming here well soon I hope soon I hope we hope to bring it here the school of life is something that I started about five years ago broadly speaking I started it because I thought that so many things that we need to learn are just seen as lying outside of Education and I had too many conversations with people who say things like you can't learn that that's just something that you know you just pick up you really is then is there no shortcut here are you sure I have to actually go through nine divorces and get the wrong job is it or is there nothing that one human being can tell another if you have a nice grandmother they might tell you well it's to replace grandmothers because grandmothers are in short supply and sometimes they don't get around to telling us what they should and I think there is a lot of transgenerational wisdom and the school of life is an institution designed to try and capture that until we come here we trying to come here until we come here watch us on YouTube we have a lively YouTube channel some of you here might be from there and thank you and so you know the digital digital space allows us to be a little bit everywhere and so but yeah we want to come back in a three-dimensional form as well so watch this space other thoughts you raised a very good question of where do we get our ideas of romantic love something we don't normally think of and identified the source in terms of his went off there we go and so on but in in a sense that begs the question given this the current notion of romantic love isn't natural it isn't historical where did the romantic writers and the TV writers in the movie right where did they get it from in other words what what's its original source you know I think the transmission of ideas is fascinating because we sometimes look for a very linear thing like one person said this and then they influenced the whole century but the climate of ideas is formed by many many different actors and together there are movements but I think without being able to pinpoint it on just one person or a set of people although you know with romanticism you really can to an astonishing degree pinpoint certain developments to a group of writers artists and theorists who are alive in it essentially a fifty-year band who will now still influence how a young man and woman in Philadelphia today are dating can literally be traced back to some certain things that Keats would have said way back when and it's bizarre because the boy and the girl haven't read Keats so that's kind of odd cuz like how can you be influenced by someone you've never read but you can be you know these things are in the air and I think the way of liberating ourselves is partly to become aware of the ideas which we have imbibed without quite questioning their origins what we call common sense is often riddled with all sorts of errors and the work of intellectual life is to become self-aware and therefore to audit your ideas more forcefully and see which ones you might actually want to give up and which ones you could properly and honestly keep clinging to aside from this novel which other novels or films or other works would be aligned with this question such a good question I tell you a film that I saw recently and loved is a film by Richard Linklater called before midnight and it's part of the trilogy of films that he made which started with before sunrise before sunrise is a classic romantic novel before midnight is a much better movie much more honest much more useful movie it contains the longest argument I've ever seen in cinema it contains a bitter argument that lasts literally because I timed it 22 minutes 22 minutes above a couple basically spilling out their fury with one another they loved one another deeply but they are so hurt they're so fed up they're so angry and they just go for it and it's strange seeing that in cinema partly because well cinema as we know does not properly hold up a mirror to the reality of our lives we need art because we can't be honest about who we are the reality of who we are despite all our social media etcetera etcetera we are still routinely and constantly not just on Instagram lying about who we are the reality of who we are doesn't get out it doesn't get out among friends it doesn't get out a lot social media and for me art good art is the place where you can meet the real truth about what it is to be human without varnish and I mean there's lots of stuff called art which for me doesn't pass that criteria because it's still selling you essentially a kind of sentimentalized version but great art in great art I think you feel the artists knows you better than you know yourself has put a finger on a dynamic which is yours is fundamentally yours but with a clarity and an honesty of which you were not consistently capable and then that's when art becomes overwhelming and the most important thing in the world and you think wow that's it that's why it exists but you don't get that moment often like like love it's rare you know I think it might be one movie every five years that actually does that to you properly but that movie by Richard Linklater is is absolutely one of them so you were talking before you mentioned self editing yourself sort of lying a little bit in order to make that relationship work and I was reminded of Manou it seems like something people experience the sort of pang of pain or hurt almost when you're not like true to yourself when you do something that doesn't seem feel honest to who you are so do you see that sort of self editing or lying almost as unnecessary compromise of your own individuality that makes sense sadly yes and don't get me wrong I mean I think what you're saying is that feels painful and sad and I agree it is but I don't for that matter thing but it's necessarily always wrong because it's done in the name of something I mean the moment when I fully understood it was around children I've got children now and being a parent is all about editing you do not want to expose because when you have a child you think I love this person more than anything and you also realize because I love them more than anything I don't want to show them more than a fraction of who I really am not in order to deceive them and lie to them but in order not to hurt them because there's so much about me that I'm disturbed you know there's a bit disturbed so you know we edit ourselves this happens a lot you know around sexuality but it happens around all aspects of the self so it's a melancholy I'm the great I'm a great believer in melancholy moods melancholy moods and moods when you realize that you're dealing with one of the great incompatibilities of life or one of the great unsolvable problems of life death the pains of love the difficulties of work etc they don't need to illicit in raging misery but they can often elicit a mood of tender melancholy where we think you know stuff tough this business of being alive and that's a mood that it's melancholy is not a very American emotion really well that's that's pretty unamerican really but I think it's one of their not many advantages to living in the UK but one of their lunches is that you know we do melancholy well and there needs to be room for it I think in the individuals soul I think we needed take some of the pressure off us and they can't communicate with the way that we can and I think that sometimes we're just like kids we can't communicate what we're feeling as well how do we work through a relationship and how do we that's such a good question I think you start with the idea that it's very difficult that it's not normal that that you're absolutely right we live you know we're almost made biologically living it in a forward direction where we don't look backwards we don't look inwards we don't place much emphasis on communication these were not priorities among our earliest ancestors we just it doesn't come necessarily naturally to us so to accept that we're trying to do something kind of artificial like landing a plane or performing a surgical operation but there's nevertheless very important which is trying to tell another part of all get in touch with our own feelings and then convey those feelings to another person it's bizarrely hard to get in touch with your own feelings why is it so hard partly cuz our feelings flip through consciousness so quickly leaving almost no trace so that somebody will go you know a partner may say something like you know John got a promotion the other day and you don't even notice but you actually upset that's kind of really annoying news what really but you don't know you don't recognize it but you're kind of in a bad mood and but you don't know why you're in a bad mood but you do notice that the chair is broken at the end of the table and you go you still haven't fixed that chair you're really not looking after the house very well and the other person goes I am looking after the house I'm doing quite a good job I think why you was bringing me down no I'm not bringing you to and suddenly the original catalyst of the upset has been lost and it would require you know unbelievable forensic sensitivity to go oh hang on a minute hang on a minute it wasn't that not the chair the chair is a cover for this other thing and I think it also requires a modesty about how peculiar we are that the things that set us off are ostensibly so small and so it really helps again to have art and culture in the background that legitimates this kind of work and makes it seem like part of something that we've all got to do because the more we think oh yeah that's that's kind of you know a little bit of self-analysis that's good thing to do then the more will feel less peculiar for needing and wanting to do it what did you enjoy most about creating the exhibit at the Rijksmuseum for artists therapy oh so I made a museum show in Amsterdam a few years ago look what I enjoyed the most was telling people that art could be something that they engaged with in a really personal way because one of the questions that I'm obsessed by is what is art for and clever elite people just tend to assume that art is just great and obviously important is obviously important to read Proust obviously important to read uh starsky and to like Monet etc and I've got this little side of my brain that goes why why we need to kind of explain it and I want art to be useful I've always had this desire not to simply study art and love art for its own sake but because it does stuff because I've noticed it doing stuff for me sometimes and that's what I think that you know the point of art should be explained I think quite clearly and the people who guard art in universities and museums are often kind of reluctant to say what it's really about and so I wrote a book called artists therapy the museum show followed on from that which just try to unpick what it was what it is about works of art that makes them important I just give you one tiny example I studied what's the most bought postcard in the world and the more most bored postcard is won by money from it's a painting that hangs in the Met in New York and it a really hopeful scene a beautiful garden in springtime and clever people get really worried when people buy that sort of postcard and fit pin it to the fridge and they go don't people know that life's really full of pain and Assyria and disasters and trump and oh I promise not to mention Trump anywhere on my trip politics and and then really what I think a lot of art is is bottled hope it's hope that's been collected and stabilized because many of our moods internally pass very quickly and often you want a work of art to stabilize a mood that's valuable but fragile in yourself you find an external form of it you pin it to the fridge because you really what you're saying is I'd like to be more like that thing more reliably like that thing so that's little theory on art one last question which is going to go to my uncle I have an uncle in the audience uncle Claude who lives in Philadelphia Claude you're on tell us tell us your question and a hamper for my uncle Claude I'm fascinated by you every time I hear you speak this is what you need family for he's gonna he's gonna say what I was like as a quiet child who didn't speak look he's written books he's on a podium no IDs what is your question uncle close question I have you've written the book about love has it helped you at home being more romantic has it helped me at home good question [Applause] the the you know I've got a wonderful wife and part of the reason she's wonderful is she's incredibly dark so at least once a day she goes look do you want to divorce me are you how are you how's it going should we end this so how's the experiment going on on our anniversary our ten-year anniversary she was like okay surely it's not as surely tonight we're gonna you know it ended all and and I love that it's very relaxing it's a good sort of starting point so we like to tease each other and and when I said I've written a book about marriage you were oh and she said look she really liked the book actually and she'd normally doesn't like what I wrote but she really liked it I think because she recognized that I'm on the side of love that I'm on the side of trying to make relationships stronger the novel is a story of two people just did a little sales pitch the novel is a story of two people who start out as fervent romantics they love each other but they haven't got the first clue how to make a relationship work and it follows them over time over the years and shows the patient and slow way with which through which they come to understand what it means to properly love one another and yeah so my wife was keen on that she liked that and she said go on but what she really hates unfortunately is people keep coming up to her going so what do you think about the book and that she that she doesn't hate and she doesn't like at all and and she has various answers depending on on the audience including that's it I'm leaving him after this book or I can't leave him can you imagine my my distress I've now got to stay at least a couple of years just to you know until the say until the paperback we're sticking until until the paperback then we'll cut loose but anyway so that's my answer but listen time is running out and what I really want to say I'm an American book tour going all around your beautiful country I was in New York last night Philadelphia tonight such a pleasure such an honor so nice to meet all of you thank you for coming I'll be signing upstairs and I wish you so much luck in life and not least of course in love thank you so much [Applause]

Channel: Author Events

Views: 66,164

Rating: 4.9089375 out of 5

Keywords: Alain de Botton, The Course of Love, The Architecture of Happiness, how to be happy, how to be in love, School of Life, books, author talk, Free Library of Philadelphia

Id: Lj2m31gekYc

Length: 59min 14sec (3554 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 01 2019