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The ideology of Romanticism has been fatal to our chances of long-term happiness in modern relationships. Here, School of Life founder Alain de Botton delivers a lecture at the Sydney Opera House charting a wiser course for love. With deepest thanks to the team at the Opera House.
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Romanticism, the dominant cultural framework for understanding love since the 18th century, has equipped us with beautiful ideals about soulmates and passion but has catastrophically undermined our capacity to build successful long-term relationships; we must unlearn romantic assumptions and treat love as a learnable skill requiring self-knowledge, communication, patience, and acceptance of imperfection.
- Romanticism's emphasis on instinct, soulmates, and wordless understanding creates unrealistic expectations that collapse when couples encounter the practical, mundane, and conflictual reality of sustained partnership
- The speaker's core argument that all humans are 'deeply crazy' and damaged by childhood means we must approach relationships with explicit acknowledgment of psychological woundedness rather than the romantic belief in innate goodness
- Long-term relationship success requires treating love as a skill involving communication, education of each other, humor, and strategic vulnerability—the opposite of the romantic ideal of effortless, intuitive connection
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Many of our ideas on love come from reading novels, songs, and films, and we are fundamentally shaped by the love narratives we consume rather than loving spontaneously or without cultural influence.
“I believe that many of our ideas on love come from reading novels also songs, films etc. But essentially we are very shaped by the love narratives that we read.”
When teaching a partner, tension escalates and humiliation increases precisely because the teacher fears that they have married an idiot who will never understand important things, but no one has ever successfully taught anyone anything through humiliation—the moment humiliation enters, the lesson is over.
“the background of our thoughts is the most terrifying spectre as we're trying to teach and the terrifying spectre goes like this I think I've married an idiot I think I've got to spend the rest of my life with someone who doesn't understand very basic very important things... and because they're not listening we're going to ramp up the pressure and the tension and we're going to start to be rude and we're going to start to humiliate... no one has ever ever managed to teach anyone anything by humiliating them.”
Romanticism, an intellectual movement that began in late 18th century European salons and literary circles, is now a pervasive era in the history of love that influences all contemporary people regardless of whether they have ever read a romantic poet or novelist.
“Romanticism is an intellectual movement that began in the salons studies garretts of European poets, novelists, writers uh in the end middle end of the 18th century and nowadays even if you've never heard of a single romantic poet or novelist from any garrett in old Europe and you're just having your love life here in Sydney, you are influenced because we all are by romanticism.”
Romanticism replaced an earlier Christian vision of human nature that emphasized human fragility, brokenness, and sinfulness with a new vision emphasizing the purity and innate goodness of all human beings, particularly as seen in the romantic valorization of children as purely good and corrupted only by society.
“romanticism replaced an earlier vision of human nature which tended to stress how fragile, broken and very sinful we all were. An old Christian idea. Um, and romanticism comes along and dismisses this attitude as hopelessly pessimistic and insists instead on the purity and good nature of every human being.”
The ancient Greek vision of love contrasts with romanticism by emphasizing love as admiration for the virtuous and accomplished sides of another person, with the goal of mutual education in which partners rotate between teacher and student roles, helping each other become better versions of themselves.
“The ancient Greeks very focused on love as we are um but had a very different vision of what love is. They felt that love is admiration for the perfect sides of another human being, for the virtues, the qualities, the accomplishments in the character and achievements of another person... for the ancient Greeks, the whole notion of love is that love should be a process of mutual education in which two people under the opaces of love undertake to educate one another to become better versions of themselves.”
In Jane Austen's novels, some couples get together primarily for money and have terrible lives, while the heroine Fanny Price from Mansfield Park sensibly knows that money contributes to good relationships without being ashamed of acknowledging this practical reality.
“There are characters in her novels in Mansfield Park. there are these characters... There's one couple that gets together uh primarily for money because they're financially interested and only financially interested and they have a terrible life. Um and but Fanny Price, the heroine, has got she's a little bit interested in money. In other words, she sensibly knows that money has got things to contribute to a good relationship.”
The central romantic assumption is that for every person there exists a soulmate—a single perfect person whose soul will fuse with theirs, ending confusion, loneliness, and melancholy, and redeeming all previously confused areas of their life.
“there is most definitely a soulmate. We may not have met them already. We may be swiping left, right, furiously in order to try and locate them. They exist and eventually, if we keep going hard enough, we will find them. And when we find them, our soul will fuse with theirs. All areas that had previously been confused and lonely will be redeemed. We will no longer feel ourselves wordless, agonized, melancholic before the mysteries of existence.”
Madame Bovary's suicide in Flaubert's novel results from her romantic belief that love should involve castles, guys on horseback, and walks in mist, which makes her unable to accept the reality of marriage to an ordinary man who requires her to manage laundry, milk, cheese, and household accounts, demonstrating that disconnection between romantic ideology and practical life is genuinely destructive.
“Madame Bovery has been brought up uh in ideas of love drawn from romantic fiction. So she believes that love is all about guys on horseback and castles and walks through the mist etc. And then she gets married to this quite nice but you know pretty ordinary regular kind of guy but on the whole okay and um suddenly she realizes that a lot of her time has got to be spent doing the laundry organizing the milk and the cheese and sitting down with her husband while he's doing the accounts and she's supposed to be organizing the kind of domestic rotor in the evenings and he's reading the newspaper and she thinks that her life has gone terribly wrong that it's a disaster... the belief that the practical side of life has no place in a good love life is central to romantism and a disaster for our chances of uh uh love.”
A Christian principle, which the speaker as a secular Jew appreciates, is that once you understand love, you can love anyone—even a leper—suggesting that love is a skill that can be applied universally rather than something dependent on finding the perfect person.
“I as a secular Jew, I love I love the the Christian idea that once you know about love, you could love anyone. And and Christianity really emphasizes this point like you could love anyone. You could love a leper.”
When we sense that a potential partner is genuinely nice and would treat us well, we often dismiss them as lacking chemistry because our unconscious recognizes that they won't make us suffer in the familiar way we have learned to expect love should make us suffer.
“very often the thing is that our unconscious has recognized that this so-called very nice person is perfect except for they won't make us suffer in way in the way that we expect to be made to suffer in love so they've got to be dismissed they're just not going to make me unhappy in the way that I've learned to expect that love should make me unhappy.”
Sex in relationships presents a fundamental contradiction: everyone wants both safety/loyalty and excitement, but these two desires point in completely opposite directions, creating an impossible situation that no solution (free love in the 1960s, polyamory today) can actually resolve because the incompatibility is structural.
“All of us want safety. We want to be really safe and loyal with somebody and loyalty brings with it safety. So, we really want safety. And the other thing we really really want is excitement. And the two just point in completely different directions... These two things are deeply incompatible. I'm not going to go into too much why... you really have to make a choice between varieties of suffering.”
Romanticism never discusses the practical side of life including laundry, housework, cleaning, and raising children, which causes real difficulties because couples don't prepare for these aspects and end up dismissing practical concerns as incompatible with romantic love, leading to conflict.
“romantism never really talks about the practical side of life. Um, in the 19th century, no one no romantic poet, writer, artist, etc. ever mentions laundry. No, there's absolutely no mention of the fact that every couple who's been together any amount of time will have to spend a lot of time doing laundry, housework, cleaning, uh, raising children, etc. this just goes unmentioned. Um, and this causes us real difficulties because it sets up an expectation that, you know, intelligent, sensitive, soulful people don't really bother about these things”
The way we love as adults is deeply connected to and reflects the way we learned about love as children, which is the foundation stone of psychotherapy and means that adult romantic attractions often target partners who will cause us familiar forms of suffering rather than partners who would make us happy.
“the way that we love as adults is a reflection and deeply connected to the way that we learned about love as children. That is the foundation stone of psychotherapy.”
Compatibility is not a precondition for relationship success but rather an achievement of love—there is no perfect person who naturally matches us, and therefore successful relationships depend on partners negotiating differences with generosity and humor rather than finding someone inherently compatible.
“Compatibility ultimately is an achievement of love. It isn't and can't and shouldn't be its precondition... the notion that we can only really get together with somebody when we have found somebody who matches us entirely... The person who is right isn't the person who agrees and condones every aspect of our character. It's somebody who negotiates the differences between two people in a particular way with a particular generosity and uh dare I say sometimes humor.”
Flying a plane or performing brain surgery would be insane to attempt by intuition alone, yet we embark on 50-year marriages by intuition and hope things will go well, revealing our cultural inconsistency in valuing procedural methods everywhere except in love.
“imagine if I said to you, you know, I'm going to fly a trip 7 down to Melbourne tomorrow. I'm going to land it by intuition or I'm going to perform a piece of brain surgery by intuition. You'd be like, what? That's crazy. Nevertheless, in the area of love, we're ready to embark on, you know, 50-y year marriages by intuition, just hoping it's all uh going to go well.”
One key skill for long-term relationships is learning to see your partner as approximately a 2-3 year old child, imagining they are that age, which allows you to view difficult behaviors with the generous explanations (tired, jealous, anxious) rather than the punitive interpretations adults apply to each other.
“one of the things that can really help is to learn to see your partner as a small child, probably between the ages of 2 to 3 and a half. Basically, to imagine that your partner is of roughly that age... all of us nowadays are really pretty good around 2 to 3 and 1/2 year olds... you don't hit the child. You don't go I've had such a hard day at work and now this. Are you trying to bring me down? You go, 'Oh no, maybe you've got a sore tooth or you must be quite tired.'”
The romantic belief that people are innately good creates a problematic dynamic in relationships because when partners inevitably discover imperfections in each other, they cannot reconcile these discoveries with the ideology that their partner is by nature good, leading to self-righteousness and blame rather than understanding.
“If you think that you're quite perfect and that your partner is quite perfect, too, that's trouble anyway. And if you start a relationship, you'll soon start hitting upon things which will lead you to think that actually maybe they're not that perfect. Now, what do you do with that feeling if you're operating against an ideology that says that everyone and that your partner particularly is by nature good? Very unhelpful backdrop in which to negotiate the troubles of relationships.”
Romanticism believes that talking too much destroys feelings and emotions, and that the best love involves intuitive understanding without words, but this belief is a long-term disaster because it leads to sulking, where one partner withholds explanation of their hurt expecting the other to intuit their pain through what amounts to mind-reading.
“the romantics generally believe that too much analysis, too much putting of words on top of feelings is a bad thing. A quintessential romantic belief is that you destroy feelings and emotions by thinking too much about them.”
The principle that appreciation for life and relationships requires awareness of mortality—the understanding that you and your partner might die tonight—is illustrated by Marcel Proust, a hypochondriac who recognized that awareness of death makes all aspects of life full of meaning and beauty.
“Marcel P was once asked by uh newspapers... how um how he would feel if he heard that a meteorite was heading for the earth and would soon destroy civilization... And he said that it would be a marvelous thing because suddenly everything in life would be so full of meaning, beauty, charm. He would rush to go to museums... And that what and he said rather poignantly, the thing that prevents us from noticing all of these things is the feeling that it's forever and that we already possess them when in fact all of us might die this evening.”
The realization that one cannot be entirely oneself in a relationship, not because of nasty secrets but because full disclosure would destroy the other person, represents a fundamental moment when couples understand that editing and restraint are necessary expressions of love rather than betrayals of it.
“we cannot be entirely ourselves. Not because we're trying to retain a nasty secret from our partner, but because in the name of love, we cannot be entirely ourselves. We have to accept the role of editing because the full disclosure of who we are and what we are at every moment to another human being will probably destroy them. And therefore, we need in the name of love to hold back and to edit a lot.”
The romantic notion of developing crushes on people based on brief encounters is a habit we need to overcome by recognizing that there are no angels, only human beings who are deeply problematic from close up and would cause us immense trouble if known better, despite their superficial charms.
“we really have to get over the crush thing... There are no angels. There are only human beings. And every human being wandering the earth is very, very problematic from close up. You don't know how this person is disturbed and would drive you mad. But you know, you have to know and take on board that they would. They just would if you knew them better despite their charms”
All humans are deeply damaged and 'crazy' in various distinctive ways due to how they navigated childhood and adolescence, and most people spend 50 years or more trying to understand exactly how they are distorted, making this fundamental self-knowledge a prerequisite for healthy relationships.
“all of us are in various ways deeply, and I don't mean this in any way in an insult, deeply crazy. I may not know I may not know exactly how you're crazy. I can tell you later how I'm crazy... but basically, all of us, you know, none of us get through the gauntlet of early childhood, adolescence, etc., with our sanity entirely intact. We are all of us warped, distorted in very distinctive ways. It may take us 50 years to work out exactly how we're distorted, but we are distorted.”
Love is ultimately not just something that you feel but a skill that needs to be learned, which is unusual and counterintuitive because we are an incredibly procedural society with rules and techniques for most things except love, where we stubbornly insist on intuition.
“one of one of the characters in the book at some point says you know it takes them a long time to realize this but they do realize that ultimately love is not just something that you feel it is ultimately a skill that needs to be learned. And it sounds very odd because we're so we're so in love with the notion of the intuitive relationship in which everything just comes sort of by nature and if it doesn't come by nature then it is wrong and it's so contrary to the way we do other things. You know we are an incredibly procedural society that believes that there are rules and techniques and tricks and ways of making things happen. But somehow in the area of love we insist stubbornly on intuition.”
Psychological wounds and internal distortions cannot be seen unlike physical injuries, making it difficult for partners to know to offer accommodation and forgiveness, which is why understanding that 'everyone is very severely broken and in need of a lot of forgiveness and generally on the whole not mean just frightened' is so important.
“the problem with psychological wounds and and distortions is that you can't see them. I mean it's literally as sort of simple as that. You can't see them. If I've got a broken arm, right, everyone can see that I got a broken arm... the thing is that all of us are kind of like that broken inside in various key ways, but there's no easy way of signaling it, right?... everyone is very severely broken and in need of a lot of forgiveness and generally on the whole not mean just frightened. Most people are very very scared and the most appalling pieces of behavior normally have fear at the heart of them rather than evil.”
Romanticism placed an extremely high regard on honesty and the notion that in a good relationship one can finally be entirely oneself without secrets, but this is deeply problematic because full disclosure of one's thoughts and desires to another person will likely destroy them.
“romanticism had an extremely high regard for the concept of honesty and that a relationship the whole point of a relationship is that you can be honest with another human being.”
Many relationship arguments can be understood as failed teaching moments where a partner tries to communicate something important but the lesson fails because romantic ideology makes people feel that it is not legitimate to teach each other, and because people communicate with tension and urgency rather than the calm and patience that characterize good teachers.
“a lot of relationship arguments can essentially be seen as failed teaching moments. there's something you want to say and it goes terribly terribly wrong on the journey to your listener. Why does it go so wrong? Partly because we don't think it's legitimate to teach.”
Rather than reducing expectations for love, the task is to build the practical skills and steps to achieve the high expectations that romanticism has set, because romanticism correctly identified that love is important but then gave no reliable way of achieving it.
“romanticism defined very rightly certain high expectations but then gave us no way of reaching those expectations securely. It's like it set the bar but then gave us no way of exceeding to that bar reliably. So the task before us I think is to build the steps to get to the high place that we've accorded to love.”
Silicon Valley and technology companies are very romantic in their ideology, believing that better algorithms will help us find the right person, but this approach emphasizes choice and 'rightness' which is unhelpful because it sets up unrealistic expectations that everybody is a different person and compatibility requires work rather than perfect matching.
“Silicon Valley is very romantic as a as a as a kind of institution and very much believes in helping us to find the right person and if you look at most of the technological tools that have appeared in the last 15 years, an enormous number are designed to increase our choices and to try and direct us towards this person called the right person... this emphasis on rightness and this notion that just with a superior piece of technology and algorithm we will get to a person with whom there will be no friction sets us up rather dangerously for the reality of love”
A simple rule of thumb for whether to leave a relationship is: if you can honestly audit all sources of unhappiness and pinpoint that your partner is genuinely the cause of all significant unhappiness, then leave; but if you recognize that much of your unhappiness comes from existence itself rather than specifically from your partner, you should stay.
“if you can look at your life honestly survey its good and bad sides and if you can honestly pinpoint all the things that are making you profoundly unhappy to your partner if you look around you think okay yeah all the things that are really bringing me down it's them it really is them it's them leave... but if you honestly take an audit of your sources of unhappiness and the many causes for which they're uh you know reverberating through your soul and you look at your partner and you go I'm not sure if I can fully blame them for everything then stay”
After a while in relationships, partners typically begin to see each other as idiots, but comedy teaches us to see people as 'lovable idiots,' a major piece of ethical imagination that involves recognizing someone's foolishness while still finding them endearing, which can reduce punitive interpretations of partners' behavior.
“most of us after a while start to see our partners as idiots... To turn someone from an idiot to a lovable idiot in your imagination is a major piece of maturity. And if we're able to achieve that, even sometimes in love, we will have learned very much how to temper our more punitive interpretations of who it is that we've uh uh got together with.”
The optimal time to reveal one's personal difficulties and insanities to a partner is when the other person is feeling relaxed and tender, not at the moment when one's flaws have wounded them, because people are not sympathetic to explanations of hurt caused by the other person when they themselves are hurt.
“I think it's very important to do it at a time when your insanity has not wounded the other person. The the reason why most of us are so unforgiving to the flaws of others is because we encounter those flaws at moments when they've damaged us.”
The two fundamental choices in relationships around sexuality are between the safety/loyalty option (which offers coziness but missing excitement) and the excitement option (which is thrilling but chaotic with jealousy and confusion), requiring partners to consciously choose which variety of suffering they can accept.
“Do you want to go for the safety loyalty thing which is terrific, you know, fantastic kind of coziness be really sweet but you know you will be missing out... Or the excitement choice which is terribly thrilling and new people all the time... but of course it's utter chaos... So really the choice before us is what variety of suffering do you want to go for?”
Melancholy, particularly as a British export, is a more useful emotional resource than either rage or the American pursuit of perfection, allowing people to accept that life is imperfect while maintaining composure and coping, which is particularly valuable in relationships.
“one one of the great contributions you know Britain is not responsible for very much that's um totally perfect but one of its greatest exports one of the greatest British exports is melancholy and and you know melancholy is a really kind of useful emotion sometimes because it's not it's not fury it's not it's not rage it's like yeah like you know life's imperfect but I'm dealing with it I'm coping with it”
What people really need from technology is tools that teach patience, resourcefulness, forgiveness, and humor in relationships, not better matching algorithms, but to date no such tools have been created.
“What we really need is, you know, apps and bits of technology that teach us patience, that teach us resourcefulness, inner resourcefulness, that teach us forgiveness, that teach us humor. To to date, um, that hasn't happened at all. There are no apps.”
Art, particularly novels like those of Dostoyevsky, teaches the maneuver of discovering humanity behind initially unattractive or seeming profiles, which is the core skill of love, but modern culture is becoming less adept at this maneuver because technology emphasizes quick judgments based on limited information.
“It is the lesson of art... takes you behind the scenes and goes, you know, behind this profile is a human and discovers the humanity behind the profile. And I I worry that our age is getting ever less adept at that maneuver, but for me that maneuver is love.”
No one can be expected to mind-read another person and intuit the contents of their partner's soul, but romanticism places the ability to mind-read precisely at the core of its vision of love, which is deeply problematic because people simply cannot understand all of their partner's experiences and needs without explicit communication.
“unfortunately even the most well-meaning people simply cannot understand all of us. They can understand bits of us, how we felt maybe when we were humiliated by our father at an early age or how it felt to join a new school at a certain point or whatever. Some things they can just get but a lot of things particularly over the long term just no one can get. You cannot expect the other person to be a mind readader. And yet, romanticism places the ability to mindread precisely at the kernel of its vision, the core of its vision of love. Deeply problematic.”
The romantic idealization of total honesty creates a problematic situation where early in a relationship, partners may share sexual fantasies and desires without shame, but this phase typically lasts about 3 months before one partner expresses a desire that causes the other distress, forcing a choice between continued honesty or restraint for the sake of the relationship.
“This lovely phase tends to last about 3 months until until normally the moment goes like this. Not the same for everybody, but a version of this tends to happen... you turn to your partner and rather than being this kind of open j they they actually look in quite a big state of distress and they look kind of kind of unhappy and miserable and you go wow wow I better stop right there and you're at a fork in the road and one fork in the road leads to the path of honesty and another path leads to the path of love and you've got a choice to make”
A couple seeing a marriage therapist is not a sign that a relationship is failing but rather a sign that it is on safe ground because the couple has taken the step to examine the relationship logically, which is one of the best signs that a relationship is healthy.
“there is no shorter sign that a relationship is on safe ground than that a couple has taken the step to try and examine it logically.”
The speaker's novel is itself a piece of technology—an old-fashioned one made of glued together paper—designed to teach people about love through the narrative of two characters moving from romantic ideology to mature understanding of what relationships require.
“to some extent my book is a piece of technology uh very old-fashioned glued together. It doesn't move or sing or light up, but it's essentially a tool, a piece of technology... I wrote a book. It's not boring really. Well, it's nothing happens in it really, but but but really it's following two people in their attempt... they realize they've got they're going to break up and they're going to create a disaster in their lives unless they learn some lessons of love.”
The romantic cult of authenticity that insists on being true to all one's feelings in the moment is problematic because full expression of all one's feelings and desires will create damage, so strategic editing of one's immediate impulses is necessary for love.
“it's all this cult of being authentic to your feelings. You've got to be true to your feelings. That's the you know I mean really you really want to be true to all your feelings? Ooh that's going to be trouble.”
The School of Life is dedicated to developing skills in relationships and related areas because modern people need this kind of skill development, even though it sounds unromantic to say 'I've learned how to interpret my partner's moods in a class' rather than having this capacity naturally.
“The School of Life is dedicated to trying to skill people up in this area. It sounds so unromantic and and I apologize for it sounding so unromantic. If you said, 'I've just come back from a class in which I've learned how to interpret the moods of my partner.' You think, 'Oh my god, that sounds horrible.'”
Commercial systems and Hollywood filmmaking prioritize exciting narratives about the initial moment of falling in love because that moment is more compelling to audiences and easier to sell, which is why cultural narratives about love typically end when relationships begin rather than exploring how to sustain them.
“to some extent it is to do with the commercial system we live within. It's so much easier when you're trying to sell someone toothpaste to sell it with that initial heady ecstatic moment of love... if I was making a Hollywood movie and I was spending £100 million and the choice was between, you know, uh, you know, a long-term relationship or that heady moment, you know, you'd go for the heady moment.”
Tinder and similar apps place emphasis on the moment of choice in relationships, but love stories in culture typically focus on finding each other and overcoming obstacles to get together, ending when the relationship begins, which is problematic because it leaves no cultural narratives about how to sustain relationships after initial connection.
“Most love stories are not love stories. They're the stories of two people finding each other, overcoming certain obstacles, and getting together. It then ends. the story then ends... Tinder again excites us because it makes the choosing of people. It it it places the emphasis on the story of love at a very particular moment which is the moment of choice.”
Jane Austen is the last major writer in European fiction to write intelligently about the relationship between love and money, recognizing that money has contributions to make to relationships without being a sign of evil, and that practical financial interest can coexist with love.
“The last writer to talk headon about love and money is Jane Austin in European fiction... Jane Austin is the last person to have an intelligent, sane view of of of of money”
Most people have very low levels of self-knowledge and are largely unaware of their own flaws because there is a conspiracy of silence around them—parents don't reveal flaws out of kindness, friends won't reveal them because they only want pleasant evenings, and exes won't reveal them because they just want to leave.
“all of us have very low levels of self-knowledge. And self-knowledge is really, really hard to come by. partly because there's almost a conspiracy of silence around us. People don't quite tell us um what they think of us and um therefore we go through life where the average person who's met us for 20 minutes has a deeper insight into many of our flaws than we might achieve over a lifetime.”
The public commitment and social embarrassment of marriage is a feature that enables maturity to develop because people benefit from the knowledge that leaving would be deeply embarrassing and costly, which prevents them from immediately running away during difficult periods.
“Embarrassment is very important. We're willingly entering into a situation which it would be deeply embarrassing to leave. We're not simply crazy. We're aware of the debt that maturity owes to being slightly locked into a situation.”
One is ready for love when one finally accepts that one is genuinely crazy and has a good understanding of that craziness, understands one's partner's craziness, accepts the imperfection inherent in all humans, is willing to do practical housework without resentment, is ready to communicate patiently about needs, and can do all of this with humor.
“you're ready to really go for it in love. When you finally and conclusively accept that you really are crazy and you have really quite a good handle on your craziness and not least, you have a really good handle on your partner's craziness. and you have an absolute awareness that anyone you meet, even the most charming person on a train, is going to be very imperfect cuz that's human nature. When you're ready to do the laundry, when you're ready to discuss towels, add in an item, when you're ready not merely to insist that others will guess what's in your heart, but you may even have to use words to spell it out very very patiently over long periods. um and you're ready that and you're ready to believe that all of this with a dose of humor belongs to a sincere relationship”
The fact that marriages still persist despite being financially and logistically insane from a rational perspective suggests that a mature part of us understands we benefit from the constraints of marriage because certain sides of our character can only develop when we cannot immediately leave.
“I think a mature part of us knows that we benefit from the cage of marriage. It is a cage, but we put ourselves in it. We lock ourselves and we throw away the key ourselves. Not because we're crazy, but because we realize that there are sides of our character that really can only develop in an environment in which neither of us can quit the room immediately.”
Early in romantic relationships, fragilities and vulnerabilities of another person are experienced as lovable and charming, but around 3 months in, these same characteristics become irritating, and when one partner expresses criticism, the other invokes the romantic principle that if you loved me you wouldn't criticize me, creating a false binary where criticism and love are incompatible.
“in the early days of love, the fragilities and vulnerabilities of another person are part of what makes that person so lovable until maybe about 3 months in a version of the following scenario happens... one person is likely to say to another, 'If you loved me, why do you criticize me?' So, there's that if criticism is here, love is here, they should never be together. And if they are ever together, it's a sign that love has failed. This again is a disastrous philosophy.”
When couples stop trying to teach and instead engage in nagging and shunning, nagging is an insistent demand without charm or persuasion, while shunning is the other partner's defensive withdrawal, creating mutual deafness where teaching and learning has completely broken down.
“Well then the couple things get rather brittle And rather than trying to teach, the couple descends into a cycle of mutual nagging and sherking. What is nagging? Nagging is what happens on the other side of an attempt to teach. You're not going to you're no longer try going to try and teach. You're just going to insist. You're going to force the person to believe and to listen... And meanwhile, nagging always has the counterpart in sherking. The sherking knows that tone... they're going to pick up the newspaper, go upstairs, they're not going to listen.”
Richard Linklater's film 'Before Midnight' is one of the only sensible films in recent years about marriage and long-term love because it presents an adult description of relationships rather than romanticized versions, though it had limited commercial success.
“the only filmmaker who's ever made a sensible film in the last sort of 10 years about marriage is Richard Linkl with his beautiful film Before Midnight which is about the only adult description of love and it was a very small grossing movie”