The Concept of true Love – TV-Talk with Alain de Botton | Sternstunde Philosophie | SRF Kultur

[Music] um well love is always complicated and one of the big dangers is to think that love is simple or comes naturally you know it's amazing that we train in so many areas of life how to fly a plane how to run a business how to make a surgical intervention we train in everything but when it comes to love we just let people imagine that they already know how to do it it's crazy if i said i was going to fly an airbus a380 to new york but had never trained you would say this man is mad but however we let people every generation fall in love start relationships get into marriages without the slightest technical idea of what they're doing love is not an emotion it is actually a skill and it's a skill that we should learn systematically now this sounds very unromantic and if i said to you you know don't just fall in love go to a school to learn love you'd think oh that sounds terrible i you know i just want to feel with my heart this is because we have a very romantic idea of love but the romantic idea of love is the destruction of love it's only when we throw away our romantic ideas that we can start to love properly so in our society we have an idea of love which destroys the love we are trying to have spread out the interesting thing is we're not free to love just anyone all of us have a very special type of person and most of the time we don't even understand why we have this type so we'll just say you know i met this person in a bar and oh suddenly it just had to be them and then you you show them someone else and they go oh no i couldn't love them there's something wrong with them but we don't know what so we don't know why we love and why some people it's impossible to love now i'm sufficiently indebted to psychoanalysis to believe that the reason why we choose to love the people we choose to love is because of childhood because we all learnt about love when we were children and when we become adults we remember the feelings of love in childhood and the people that we end up falling in love with are people that remind us in many ways of the people we first loved when we were children it's no surprise that many lovers call each other baby you know it sounds strange but but you know it's like this and of course this explains why we often make very bad choices because sometimes in childhood the relationships we had with those we loved the adults we loved were not perfect maybe you know mummy was a bit depressed or daddy was always away or had a terrible temper and then we become adults and we start falling in love with people who are always away or have very bad tempers or a bit depressed and all our friends tell us why are you with these people why aren't you with someone perfect and we go well they don't seem so right but of course what we're doing is we're using the map of love that we started with in childhood and we are not free to love everyone yes i mean look you know love has many indignities if you like we shouldn't get offended um but look definitely we know that sometimes people will say i i love the way you are you're a bit like my mother so competent or you're a bit like my father so reliable so we know there are very good reasons why we fall in love with people who remind us of the good sides of our parents and people we knew as children but the the reason it becomes difficult is when you see people who can only love um very di people who will cause them suffering and for many people love is not just about finding pleasure it's also about finding a suffering that feels familiar and and this explains how we we see people who have types and they break up seven relationships and they always go back to someone who is basically the same type of person and everyone scratches their head goes why are they always with people who have no money or who who bully them or uh who are unreliable whatever it is and we can't understand it so one of the first things we have to do when we become lovers is to understand what is on our love map why do we love the people we love where our ideas formed from listen all of us are a bit crazy when it comes to love the idea that we are all perfect beautiful angels meeting over dinner with a candle and everything's perfect is is wrong all of us have a lot of which we call emotional baggage from the past it has to be about 90 biographies yes you know when two people meet for dinner they are not just two people they are two people and all of their past they are they're coming for dinner with their families with their childhood everything is there and the greatest present you can give a lover is to understand yourself enough that you can tell them who you are not just whether you play tennis or you like skiing or what kind of jam you like but but really who you are emotionally because all of us are a bit difficult and the more we understand about ourselves the more we can prepare the people we love for what it's going to be like to be with us and you know it would be great on a first date if you could say to your lover look i'm a bit crazy like this i have five things i'm a bit crazy about how are you crazy and they would say you know yeah i'm a little bit crazy too here are my five things and they could be an honest intelligent uh generous revelation of who each of us is because otherwise everyone goes you know i'm perfect oh yeah you're perfect too and everything begins with great hopes and then of course you crash into reality so we don't need our lovers to be perfect what we need is our lovers to warn us about the areas in which they are imperfect in good time calmly before they've done us too much damage and that's one of the great skills of love about look i think you can love someone and genuinely respect them and be very enthusiastic about them and at the same time never mistake them for an angel you know it's they're angels in the sky for a good reason they are not on the earth you know we are not you know if if i meet a friend who says i'm just falling in love she's perfect he's perfect i immediately a warning light goes off no no you haven't begun to know them the only people we can ever think of as perfect are people we don't know you know when you see someone in the queue at the supermarket or at the airport oh they look so nice they'd be perfect you don't know them everyone once you get to know them is difficult maybe difficult in this way maybe difficult in that way but everybody is a bit of a nightmare when you know them very close up they're also very sweet and very lovely but you know we need generosity towards our lovers and the best kind of generosity comes from a sense that of course they're not perfect we are all human and that is really look it's like it's like with children right imagine somebody who said i'm going to have a child and my child my child will be perfect perfectly well-mannered always good always polite you think oh what's going to happen the day they're not but a good parent goes yeah my child will sometimes be tired sometimes be naughty sometimes be angry it's okay i love the child because they're you know my child and that's what i think real love is you know if we're thinking what is love love is not an admiration for the perfect love is a sympathy for many things which are less than perfect so when you say you love someone you love something that is a bit broken that's real love be [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well look it's interesting that there's only one pill in this game um in other words that lisa is supposed to fall in love but our chemistry teacher also needs a pill he needs a pill to forget what he's done because unless he takes a pill to forget what he's done the love that he receives from lisa will be unbelievable you know one of the greatest problems in love is the feeling that our lover doesn't really love us imagine somebody who's very beautiful and everyone falls in love with them at some point this person will go with their lover do you really love me or do you just love my looks imagine a very famous tennis player and who might wonder do you love me or just my ability to hit the ball or a very rich person who goes do you love me or just my ability to make money and ultimately we don't want to be loved for the external bits of us we don't want to you know it's paradoxical we want to try and encourage people to love us but then if they only love us for the things that we use to encourage them we don't like it and the reason for this is childhood when we first tasted love we were about this size we were screaming we looked horrible and we couldn't we had no money we had no good looks we had nothing interesting to say but still someone loved us and that is deep down what we are still searching for a love that is not conditional on performance and this chemistry teacher has persuaded by a piece of you know chemical performance someone to love him and he will never be able to forget and in the middle of the night he will think is it really me she loves or is it just an idea of me created artificially by chemicals personally it's the person viewed without just the things about them that are good right so at the beginning of love we love someone for their strengths but no one wants to be loved just for their strengths we also want to be loved and forgiven for our weaknesses and so this is the paradox when we go out on a date we look great but if the relationship is to work we need our lover to accept us when we're wearing a pair of old pajamas and we know that that's when we found love when somebody says look you're in your old pyjamas but you're still quite sweet that's when we know we love someone when we have to put lots of makeup on and impress them with long words that's not love that's a performance and we don't want love as a performance vampire yeah well no because there are very good reasons why we love our children that i mean first of all i i i don't think that love is just a mad chemical reaction that we can't understand we must beware of this idea that love is madness or and it's just therefore uh you know something you can't understand no we fall in love for very logical reasons with people they may be quite bizarre reasons someone reminds you of your mother or an uncle or something so it could be bizarre but it's logical so i don't believe in this kind of cupid's arrow model that we have absolutely no idea why we love the people we love know there is a logic why we love who we love and i think this film is even though it's trying to be all about chemicals and neuroscience it's really a romantic film which says love is is kind of a trick is just a blindness and let's try and blind someone with love because it's all completely crazy anyway this seems to me the wrong way of looking at it love is something that is open to investigation that has reasons behind it you don't need to trick anyone into love you need to understand love understand yourself understand other people then love will grow naturally so i'm very against this idea of love as a magic potion it isn't love is admiration sensitivity tenderness love stories are hugely responsible for destroying our chances of having happy love lives the history of western european romantic literature is a catastrophe as a model for how we should love i mean take shakespeare's romeo and juliet it's the love story between a 16 year old boy and a 13 year old girl that ends in a double suicide it's insane and we say oh it's so romantic no it's not it's crazy this is not love this is pathology these two people should be locked up and put in in a psychiatrist's chair so the idea that this is romantic no it's not it has nothing to do with love uh you know we are just beginning to understand love and i think that psychologists psychoanalysts philosophers have done amazing work in trying to understand really what goes on in love and the madness that you see in the hollywood movies and in you know prestigious literature like shakespeare it's very beautiful it's very lovely but like a certain kind of chocolate that everyone thinks is great but actually nutritionists tell us is really problematic so these stories cause us real problems the love stories we have have ruined our ability to have good love lives by the way that's why i wrote a book that's a love story because i wanted to write a different sort of love story this is an anti-romeo and juliet book two people meet they're in love they have a love story but it's very different i wanted to write an anti-romantic story that is at the same time very pro-love i really believe in love i really believe in happy love but i think we are understanding it totally the wrong way and so that's what i wanted to do last night humanism people always dream of something in the future which already exists now it's like virtual reality everyone's saying oh virtual reality we'll be able to put on glasses and we'll be able to see other worlds have you ever just sat in bed shut your eyes you can see other worlds already you don't need that you don't need a love pill all you need is imagination sensitivity and a conversation with your partner where in a quiet location you hold a hand and you say how are we how we doing what's on your mind how it's on my mind have we talked enough recently this is the love pill we don't need some stupid chemical love pill we have it already it's called conversation and communication you know the reason why lovers stop loving one another most of the time is anger because secretly one or the other is angry with the other one there is not angry like shouting angry but quietly angry they don't feel listened to they feel a little bit hurt the the heart of love has become the archeries of love have become furred and blocked and that's why people don't have sex anymore they don't like touching each other anymore because that's quietly offended you didn't listen to my point you didn't listen to me so two people are in quiet warfare so what these people need is not a love pill they need some time together and a chance to unblock the channels of feeling between them this is are you trying to sell a love pill i don't know of course um look i i there are also look imagine if you said to someone um i'll give you a pill and you can write the best book in the world um or you know you can try and write it yourself i think things that are not done for us it becomes somebody else i think there's someone you know imagine if you said to a child i'll do your homework for you um it'll be brilliant you'll get 10 out of 10 but i'll have done it do you want to do it you know an honest child goes i think i want to do it because at the end of the day we like to live our own lives we like to suffer our own suffering it's like a pill for happiness you know a good life is one where we suffer when we need to suffer we feel joy when we need to feel joy where we earn the love of others we don't demand it or trick it out of them there's something wonderful when someone loves us for something beautiful that we've done if we're tricking the other person it doesn't feel like love well you know romanticism tells us that love is easy and that um true love is just something that you feel very suddenly for someone and then once you feel it it will be enough to guide you through the whole of life and that all you need to do is to find the right person and when you found the right person it will be perfect your love life will be perfect forever maybe you have children that will be beautiful and easy you won't argue and it will be like this until the day you die now most people watching will go hmm no it's not really like this right and so people feel very guilty and sad and alone for most of us we want a long-term relationship but the story of love that our society gives us is all about the first two months all the pop songs are about the first two months all the movies it's the early days i wanted to write a book that would look at love over the long term and that would try and show how you need to learn certain skills in order to try and understand your partner and they can understand you so this is a book about two people who love each other but they don't know how to love and they have a terrible time um not terrible but a scratchy time for you you know i should i should warn your viewers this is a very boring book like it's really not for everybody if you like a book where there are explosions and gun chases and dramatic things don't go near this book nothing nothing happens nothing happens in this book it's totally boring book but this is a book if you love to analyze psychology you know there are some people who love to just micro analyze love and which is what i love to do you know when i talk to my friends i just always want to understand relationships exactly and so so this is a microanalysis of lots of moments in love let me give you one example okay so um early on in the relationship one of the one of the the man um discovers that he's quite into sulking there's a lot of sulking so sulking really interests me like what is going on in sulking sulking is is fascinating because we don't sulk with everybody we only sulk with people that we really trust and believe should understand us but for some reason don't and therefore it's very prevalent in love where when you love somebody you think well this person must understand me totally so one day maybe you go to a party this happens in the novel and uh maybe you're a little bit upset and your partner says to you is anything wrong and you go and the partner goes but just explain to me what's wrong and you go and they go come on under just explain to me and you refuse and you get home and then when you get home you go to the bathroom and you shut the door and this time they knock at the door and they say come on i've upset you just tell me and you go because you are romantic and because you're a romantic you believe that when you love you are able to read the other person's soul that your soul and their soul is able to communicate without words in other words if i need to explain to you why i'm upset you don't love me a true love is the ability to understand someone without words this is the story that romanticism tells us now of course that's nonsense because no one sadly can read our minds this is the great fantasy in love that the other person can read our minds they can't and so therefore we have to do this really boring thing in love and this is my characters have to understand slowly we have to actually explain what's in our mind and if we're upset we have to explain why and we have to just communicate it's very boring but it's very romantic in the true sense well you know it's interesting because there is as you say this very strong idea that if you love me you accept every part of me and if we're honest with ourselves of course none of us is perfect we've all got problems and in a way love shouldn't just be accepting everything about somebody it should be an environment in which we're able to try and educate the other person to become the best version of themselves and they should do this the same to us they should teach us things they should say you know you speak a bit loudly or your stories are a bit boring and the other person should go yeah you know you eat in this funny ways and gently two people should teach each other now this sounds very odd and mostly if you look at most arguments between couples they are really moments where one or the other person has tried to teach something to their partners but the problem is that we do it so badly we are such bad teachers and we are also such bad students in love and part of the reason is we've got this romantic idea that love is not a classroom um and so we believe the other person should accept us now we're bad teachers partly also because we are so stressed and panicked good teachers are calm they take it slowly they don't rush they're calm and partly they're calm because they don't care so much but in love we care so much and that's why we get so angry and agitated and hysterical and we say things like if you drop that towel again on the floor i'm gonna go mad because we're thinking you've ruined my life i'm with somebody i'm with an idiot i've married an idiot and so we become hysterical and then the other person as soon as you humiliate somebody well they're not gonna learn anything if you make anyone feel bad about themselves they will never listen to you you need to teach gently and at the same time you need to be a generous pupil maybe the other person can see things about you that it's okay to be taught but instead you have two partners they're like this no i don't have anything just to to learn and the other one goes you must change and so you get this terrible dynamic one person can't teach the other person can't learn and it goes like this round and round you know it's it's fascinating because my wife and i are so nice to our children and we are not so nice to each other i mean not as we are nice on a good day but we are not as nice and i think you know what's fascinating is why you know when my children were very small especially the older he behaved really badly right so i would come home from work tired stressed i'd cook him you know some schnitzel potatoes i'd prepare some broccoli i'd put it down in front of him he was maybe two and then he'd go yeah and throw it all on the floor now the interesting thing was that i didn't turn around to him and say you horrible person do you know how hard my day has been i've had a horrible time and now this i hate you right i didn't say this i thought oh poor thing maybe he's tired uh maybe he has a tooth coming through maybe he's jealous of his brother or something i was looking for explanations for bad behavior but this doesn't happen with adults you know this is and this happens with my couple they have children and so they're really nice to their kids and then with each other they're so tough they don't think oh maybe the person's had a bad day maybe maybe what he's saying isn't what he means maybe what she says isn't what she wants to say we are so tough and i think one of the secrets of love is to try it's not always possible but to try and treat your partner as if they are about two years old now i don't mean not always and not but in this area because we know how to love children very intuitive mind you we didn't always know how to love children we've learned how to love children a hundred years ago people didn't know how to love children 100 years ago a child who threw their supper on the floor you'd hit them you'd stick them outside in the rain to teach them a lesson we know that's not right but we are still very tough towards one another you know what's interesting is that many arguments between couples start with both of them thinking this is too stupid and too small to have an argument about so people get very impatient they're like i've been to university i'm an intelligent person i'm not like my parents i'm a sensible person therefore i don't argue about silly things like glasses this is already a dangerous thing because there is nothing too small and no one is too intelligent to have an argument a huge argument over a tiny thing we are all crazy creatures and therefore we must you know one of the great enemies of love is the belief that some things are simple and again this has to do with literature if you think of romantic literature it tells us that the real problems of love are going to be political or maybe your parents don't agree maybe there will be a war and you'll be separated on the battlefield nonsense the real difficulties of love are should the towels be on the floor or be hung up should you brush your teeth like this or like this who holds the television remote control it sounds idiotic but this is the point we are not prepared for the smallness of the issues that cause us trouble and therefore we become extremely impatient and impatience is not the result of difficulty it's the result of difficulty that we haven't budgeted for and we don't budget for difficulty in other words we don't say today i'm going to try and buy glasses for the house with my lover this is one of the greatest challenges known to human beings this is as difficult as climbing a mountain or as learning how to play the violin and therefore i need to take it slowly we need to be very gentle et cetera my couple they go in and they go oh we're going to choose them in five seconds which one do you want i like this one this is great this is absolutely great and the other one's going no no this is great this is great and they go come on we haven't got time no one's going no no we haven't got time let's just take this one let's take this one and they're getting more and more hysterical and they both think the other one's stupid so they're being too tough on one another they haven't read the right novels like madame bovary and flaubert's novel her relationships were doomed because she'd read the wrong novels i'm hoping that my couple could read my novel in other words they would be taught gently that it is very normal to argue over tiny things and that we must you know in 19th century literature no one ever has an argument about laundry we never hear anyone doing the laundry if you put a microphone into most couples one of the things they argue most about is who is doing the laundry but we are not generous towards ourselves we don't see this as a challenge of love um absolutely absolutely i think there's a real difference between generosity and being a yes man a woman and just simply caving in because i agree um ultimately what we want to love is someone who is authentic who has their own center of interest and their own personality so yes it's it's it's maddening someone who always says yes we know is very dangerous because sometimes we need to hear no and i think one of the nicest you know in a way one of the nicest things that a lover can do for us and this happens in novel is they tease us if a lover teases you nicely generously but is just slightly mocking you that is that is very nice because it shows two things firstly my lover is being kind because they're doing it nicely but secondly and even more importantly they have spotted something that's wrong in my personality but they've turned it into a joke so rather than simply saying you know you can never make a decision they nickname you hamlet they go how's hamlet hamlet are you deciding and so we laugh a little bit and we are we are invited to laugh at ourselves and one of the important questions you can ask of anyone is what would you like to be teased about if you had an ideal lover what would you want them to be teased about and you know i if i had a lover i do have a lover but my ideal lover would tease me for probably thinking too much and sitting around with books too much and would probably say come on socrates let's go in the kitchen and you know clean the floor in other words because everyone knows that they are exaggerated in some all of us are exaggerated of course definitely but but i i simply want to say that a certain kind of humor is incredibly important in love and this is something that my couple also discovers because you know after a few years with someone it's very easy to think you know i've married an idiot and and just that's it justin there he is again there she is again a stupid idiot right now if you look at comedy and the history of comedy most great heroes and heroines of comedy shows are kind of idiots i mean if you think of you know the office with david brent or larry david in curb your enthusiasm or um you know i'm thinking of anglo-saxon ones but uh you know john cleese and in faulty towers these guys are total idiots and if you met them in life you'd think oh my god but the genius of the comedy show is that when we see them we laugh very generously with them and they turn into what i could call a lovable idiot and it is an enormous progress when you can move from thinking that your partner's an idiot to thinking that they're a lovable idiot that's fantastic this is an achievement of love and we need uh we need to go to school to learn how to treat our lovers as loveable idiots come here to these um look i think that it you know there's a story that says sex simply dies and that's just something that happens mysteriously and as you'll have noticed i'm an enemy of this mysterious story i don't like the mysterious story that we fall in love for no reason or that we go off sex for no reason i'm enough of a philosopher to think no let's let's look at this and one of the things that we observe is that the lack of sex uh in a couple is very frequently caused not by just a lack of interest but by an emotional block and as i mentioned earlier by anger by irritation by annoyance when we have sex you know let's think what is sex sex is a moment of extreme vulnerability you you give yourself to someone in a very vulnerable state now if you feel that the other person is hurting you maybe in a totally different area maybe they are insisting on a sofa you didn't like maybe they're insisting that you go and see their parents when you don't want to maybe they you know don't put away the kitchen in the right way right you don't want to be vulnerable in front of someone who's hurting you the terrible problem is that you are very often we're not able to say so we just think i don't feel like having sex we don't think i'm angry because our brains don't work like this so what we should be saying is at nine o'clock yesterday morning you said something to me which so upset me but i can't even remember what it is but actually it's to do with who should put the bread away and that's the reason why now if you touch me i'm just going to go no i want to watch tv i don't really want to watch tv i'm upset and you know so much of love and it sounds strange so much of love is ruined by being quietly upset by our partners all of us are children in love we are as vulnerable as children and children get very upset by tiny things you say to them and when we're adults we think oh i'm strong i'm you know i don't get upset by little things but we're not those big adults in relationships in relationships we are without a skin anything can hurt us if somebody you know if you say to your lover um you know do you want to have dinner tonight and they go ah that can hurt really hurt and but we don't know how to say that it hurt because it would make us sound ridiculous if you had to go i'm a bit upset because i told you that i hurt my little finger and um you seemed a bit bored right that makes us sound like an idiot but so we don't say but then inside we go cold and this is the great danger so we need to be honest that we are hurt by tiny things and we need to create a safe space in which we can admit that hurt it comes a good fashion versus there is a particular challenge um which particularly arises once you've been with someone for a long while we learn about love as children but when we are children the one thing that love cannot be associated with is sexuality so they cannot be among children and parents uh any kind of sexual feeling so this becomes utterly taboo and then something odd happens you see when we become lovers in adulthood um the more the relationship goes on the more some of these early feelings around our parents start to arise again and this is very nice and it deepens the relationship but it also means that we are unable we are we suddenly feel the taboo of childhood again um you know i always think it's a warning sign when couples start to call each other maybe they have children and they say oh mummy so suddenly the mother the wife becomes mummy and and the guy becomes daddy even when the children are no longer there it's like they suddenly start calling each other and problems right that you're only mother and father and the reason that's problematic is uh your mother and father were people that you never allowed to have sexual feelings towards so what we're trying to do is to have sexual feelings towards people that we love and this is a very new situation and it's a very it's psychologically very difficult and you know i think look i have quite a tragic view of some sides of love i don't think there's an answer to everything i think knowing that this is a problem is an enormous advantage um and i think that simply being able to make a separation between you know the mother the father role and the independent existence of uh the the adult outside of that role is very important this is why people like to go away to hotels it's no reason it's not it's not the reason you know it's not that the bed is softer it's really that you're able to leave behind mommy and daddy which is which has been blocking because of a taboo uh the sexual feeling see bringing it in so you know often you see couples and they've been together for a while and one or the other will say to you something like ah i'm so bored we've talked about everything i just know everything about them as soon as they start speaking i just everything is so familiar now one of the solutions to this lies rather strangely in art in painting because if you look at the history of art what it is is really a succession of geniuses looking at everyday things with new imagination curiosity generosity and what happens is that these things that seem so ordinary suddenly no longer seem so ordinary so mane will look at asparagus we've all looked at asparagus a hundred times but he looks again and he says you know it really is beautiful and when we look at money we think oh it looks so beautiful because he has had the tenderness and imagination to look again or we might see you know a painter who shows us a riverbank or a cloud or an apple cezanne might paint a group of apples and we think it's that the artist is a genius no it's the world is full of wonderful things that we don't appreciate because we are blind and we are spoiled and we are habituated to things and we think nothing interesting goes on and the thing that we get most spoiled about is our lover and you know our lover is amazing what you felt for them the first time you met them is still what you could feel towards them but the problem is you think you know them you don't know them uh you don't even begin to know them you don't even begin to know yourself and if you learn to appreciate them with the same imagination as a great painter there would be lots to talk about and lots to think about us you know very often what attracts us in love is things that we're missing in ourselves so let's say we don't feel creative enough and then we find someone who's very creative uh and that seems very exciting uh and maybe they fall in love with the fact that we're very ordered and sensible and rational but on both sides what can then happen is that the other one's a positive trait um becomes uh irritating and i think what's going on there is you know we talked about education what's what's going on is that two people are not learning properly from each other's strengths and they're not able to see that actually you know the ordered person thought that they were going to learn how to be a bit more creative and the creative person thought they were going to learn how to be a bit more ordered but that hasn't actually happened and so then you get this sudden irritation because both of them have failed to take the best sides out of each other's uh things so so two people are attracted for good reasons but you then need to learn how to become the thing that you wanted so the chaotic person loved order at the beginning but then all they're doing is encountering they didn't actually become ordered they wanted to become ordered but they refused the lesson of order and now they turn around and blame the person for the very thing that attracted them in the first place there's something else that my couple learns and it's a theory that i call the weakness of strength and you know one thing that it's important to bear in mind is that everybody has strengths in a couple everybody has things they're very good at and if you look at the strengths they're almost all connected to weaknesses so somebody who's very ordered is probably also going to be too punctual and somebody who's you know very imaginative might also be very bad at cleaning the kitchen et cetera now what happens what happens it's not me what happens in couples is that um after a while you can focus just on the weaknesses so you you just say you know oh yeah the strengths yeah i know all about them but here's my list of ten weaknesses it's very important to see that almost every weakness in a person is connected up to a strength that strength is still there but you're not looking at it so it's good to go in the other direction back towards the uh the the strength so as to be able to see that the weakness of a strength when you know homeland glass thinking shaft [Music] oh in terms of an affair or yes um well i think um look affairs sound like wonderful ideas because it suggests that you can have everything in one life you can have the stability of love the excitement of the affair and no problem at all so this sounds like a great idea unfortunately the reality is that we are madly jealous people and all of us cannot accept the idea that somebody that we love is going off to hold the hand of somebody else it's incredibly painful it destroys us and i think we just need to be honest about this in ourselves and ultimately realize a tragedy a tragic part of existence which is we can't have sex love stability excitement novelty uh continuity all in one situation um and i think you really need to ask yourself look every situation has suffering you know sometimes people say to me things like well it's disgusting you know people think it's okay to have affairs they should just be happy in their relationships to which i go well you sound quite moralistic but then i meet other people and they say to me things like oh it's really easy we should have lots of affairs let's become polyamorous jealousy is just an invention by capitalism we don't need this etc so both sides think that there is an easy answer there is no easy answer all of us have to in a way make a terrible sacrifice and you almost need to ask yourself how would you like to suffer would you like to be with one person and you'll have lots of good sides of stability but you will be bored sexually there won't be that much excitement but you have good sides but that kind of suffering or do you want lots of excitement but the terrible suffering of chaos con you know discontinuity upsetting the children so you always need to ask yourself you know not there isn't a problem free solution there is only a better or a worse way to suffer for you so it's it's only suffering in both areas uh just whichever one you want whichever one of the most painful things in us is that we think we're very abnormal right we all go around thinking i'm very strange and the reason is that we only know ourselves from the inside but other people we only know from what they choose to tell us and of course they don't tell us very much because they want to see this and that so we have the wrong idea of what love is like for other people and so we think oh what's wrong with my life what's gone wrong with my life they seem so happy and they seem so happy especially on valentine's day it's torture everyone seems to be having such a great time what's wrong with me now the good news is everybody suffers everybody's full of suffering it's just we're not honest enough about ourselves and i see the role of literature you know the reason i write books about love is i see the role of literature as showing us honestly what goes on in people's bedrooms because even though we think we're liberated and are very honest we're not and i think some things we're always going to suffer with but we suffer doubly if we think we're alone with the suffering or if we're confused with the suffering so for me the role of literature is to tell us we're not alone and to help us to understand the sorrows that we maybe cannot solve guilty philosophy other people um i think that philosophy is an attempt to understand what it means to be alive and that is everything that happens in a human life from childhood through to death um you know most of the time our minds we don't really like to think too much if you say to somebody i'd like you to go in a dark room all alone and think for an hour most people are like oh can i take my phone no no just you in your mind we're like oh no i don't like that so we hate thinking we don't like going inside because it's scary it's full of anxiety it's full of potentially regret melancholy doubts all sorts of things but it's so important this is why socrates the earliest most famous philosophers famously said the unexamined life is not worth living and what he meant by that is when you don't examine your life you make the wrong choices you suffer more than you need to you don't understand your own heart and mind and so you know i want to i wanted to write books about love for example because love gives us so many problems i've suffered so much in love everyone around me suffers so much in love and we can't remove all these problems but we can remove that secondary layer of suffering that comes from confusion feelings of persecution or just ignorance of what we're suffering from positions it is yes look there are such people but i think um i think our psych our brains are such complicated and weird things we can't escape them maybe for a few years we can go jogging we can throw ourselves in our work we can drink a lot to escape the fact we have a mind but at some point or another if we don't wrestle with our mind we won't be able to sleep you know insomnia is the revenge of all those thoughts you didn't want to have in the day that are suddenly pushing themselves forward at three in the morning so our mind wants to be heard and the best that we can do is to try and hear it and for me what we call art and literature is an arena in which we can try and understand who we are not we can nev we will always have to suffer but we can maybe suffer a little bit less with the help of with the right books with the right literature look i believe in high expectations i just don't believe that we can get there by intuition we need to get there by strategy by learning and so i believe in building a set of steps up to the cloud of happiness we can't just jump there we need to to get there solidly by by planning um and look there are you know at the end of the book the hero he almost goes through in his mind some of the things he realizes he needs to know in order to love successfully properly and these things include such things as he realizes that he is a little bit crazy and one of the real enemies of love is the feeling that we're normal i'm totally normal i'm healthy et cetera he's rabbi the hero sees this is kind of the enemy if you think like this you are self-righteous and you're going to be very brittle and always blaming the other person so he's ready to accept that he's probably quite difficult to live with if you can accept that you're quite difficult to live with you're not if you think you're easy to live with you're very difficult this is a first rule he also accepts that his partner is kind of crazy but it's okay because not just she's crazy everyone's crazy anyone you could meet is going to be a little bit crazy and that the important thing to do is to communicate uh to laugh to share to have a channel of constant you know dialogue but also to accept imperfection so these are some of the lessons and they're very they sound well they don't sound very romantic and if there's one rule of thumb if it doesn't sound romantic it's normally a very good thing if it doesn't sound if somebody says to you you know if i say to someone you know you should go out with your partner and just discuss everything you've been angry with for the last week and they go oh that doesn't sound very romantic good that's a that's a good sign anything that sounds unromantic is probably very romantic in the true sense of helpful to the survival of love that is [Music] tag you

Channel: SRF Kultur

Views: 122,375

Rating: 4.9429564 out of 5

Keywords: SRF Kultur, SRF Sternstunde, Sternstunde Philosophie, SRF Sternstunde Philosopie, SRF Philosophie, Sternstunde, Alain de Botton, De Botton, Love, Concept of Love, True Love, Finding Love, Tinder, Relationship, Soulmate, Conflict Relationship, Couple, Couple Therapy, Sexuality, Sex, Marriage, Lasting Relationship, Finding a Partner, Partner, Polyamorie, Problems of our Time, Philosophy Explained, Philosophy, TV Talk, Philosophy Talk, Talk, Barbara Bleisch, Yves Bossart, SRF, Kultur

Id: wFCsLSGPLMk

Length: 58min 53sec (3533 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 14 2019