there’s a lot of anger around our love
lights privately-held but a lot of us go
around feeling quite enraged angry
privately about the way that our love
lives have gone my task today is to turn
that leader into sadness if we if we
manage to turn rage into grief we will
have made psychological progress and
this is that the Tasaday lies behind
rage very often is an unusual quality
because we tend to think that very angry
people are sort of dark and pessimistic
characters absolutely not scratch the
surface of any regularly angry person
and you will find a wild optimist it is
in fact hope that drives rage think of a
person who screws every time they can’t
find their house keys or every time they
get stuck in traffic
these unfortunate characters are
evincing a curious but reckless faith in
a world in which keys never go astray
the roads are mysteriously traffic free
it is hope that is turbocharging their
rage so if we’re to get a little bit
less sad and as a little less angry
about our love lives we will have to
diminish some of our hope and the reason
is that all of us will not manage to
find the right person but we will
probably all of us managed to find a
good enough person so and that’s success
in short we don’t know very much how to
love we and it sounds very odd because
much of somebody said you look all of us
probably in this room who would probably
need to go to a school of love we don’t
want a school of love love is just an
instinct and no it’s not it’s a skill
and it’s a skill that needs to be
learned and it’s a skill that our
society refuses to consider as a skill
we are meant to always just follow our
feelings if you keep following your
feelings you will almost certainly make
a big mistake in your life
what is love ultimately laughs I believe
is something personal as a distinction
between loving and
loved we all start off in life by
knowing a lot about being loved being
loved is the fun bit that’s when
somebody brings you something on a tray
and ask you how your day at school went
etcetera and we grow up thinking that
that is what’s going to happen in an
adult relationship we can be forgiven
for that it’s an understandable mistake
but it’s a very tragic mistake and it
leads us not to pay attention to the
other side of the equation which is to
laugh and what does it really mean to
love to love
ultimately is to have the willingness to
interpret someone’s on the surface not
very appealing behavior in order to find
more benevolent reasons why it may be
unfold in other words to love someone is
to apply charity and generosity of
interpretation problem is we live in a
romantic culture that privileges impulse
and when it comes to love something
tricky occurs because you don’t have to
be a paid-up believer in psychotherapy
of psychoanalysis to realize that the
way we love as adults sits on top of our
early childhood experiences and in early
childhood the way that we learnt about
love was not just via experiences of
tenderness and kindness and generosity
the love that we will have tasted as
children will also be bound up with
experiences of being let down being
humiliated maybe being with a parent who
treated us very harshly who scolded us
who made us feel small in some way
in other words quite a lot about our
early experiences of love are bound up
with various kinds of suffering now
something like bad happens when we start
to go out into the adult world and start
to choose loved partners who think we’re
out to find partners who will make us
happy but we’re not we’re out to find
partners who will feel familiar and that may be a very different thing
lights privately-held but a lot of us go
around feeling quite enraged angry
privately about the way that our love
lives have gone my task today is to turn
that leader into sadness if we if we
manage to turn rage into grief we will
have made psychological progress and
this is that the Tasaday lies behind
rage very often is an unusual quality
because we tend to think that very angry
people are sort of dark and pessimistic
characters absolutely not scratch the
surface of any regularly angry person
and you will find a wild optimist it is
in fact hope that drives rage think of a
person who screws every time they can’t
find their house keys or every time they
get stuck in traffic
these unfortunate characters are
evincing a curious but reckless faith in
a world in which keys never go astray
the roads are mysteriously traffic free
it is hope that is turbocharging their
rage so if we’re to get a little bit
less sad and as a little less angry
about our love lives we will have to
diminish some of our hope and the reason
is that all of us will not manage to
find the right person but we will
probably all of us managed to find a
good enough person so and that’s success
in short we don’t know very much how to
love we and it sounds very odd because
much of somebody said you look all of us
probably in this room who would probably
need to go to a school of love we don’t
want a school of love love is just an
instinct and no it’s not it’s a skill
and it’s a skill that needs to be
learned and it’s a skill that our
society refuses to consider as a skill
we are meant to always just follow our
feelings if you keep following your
feelings you will almost certainly make
a big mistake in your life
what is love ultimately laughs I believe
is something personal as a distinction
between loving and
loved we all start off in life by
knowing a lot about being loved being
loved is the fun bit that’s when
somebody brings you something on a tray
and ask you how your day at school went
etcetera and we grow up thinking that
that is what’s going to happen in an
adult relationship we can be forgiven
for that it’s an understandable mistake
but it’s a very tragic mistake and it
leads us not to pay attention to the
other side of the equation which is to
laugh and what does it really mean to
love to love
ultimately is to have the willingness to
interpret someone’s on the surface not
very appealing behavior in order to find
more benevolent reasons why it may be
unfold in other words to love someone is
to apply charity and generosity of
interpretation problem is we live in a
romantic culture that privileges impulse
and when it comes to love something
tricky occurs because you don’t have to
be a paid-up believer in psychotherapy
of psychoanalysis to realize that the
way we love as adults sits on top of our
early childhood experiences and in early
childhood the way that we learnt about
love was not just via experiences of
tenderness and kindness and generosity
the love that we will have tasted as
children will also be bound up with
experiences of being let down being
humiliated maybe being with a parent who
treated us very harshly who scolded us
who made us feel small in some way
in other words quite a lot about our
early experiences of love are bound up
with various kinds of suffering now
something like bad happens when we start
to go out into the adult world and start
to choose loved partners who think we’re
out to find partners who will make us
happy but we’re not we’re out to find
partners who will feel familiar and that may be a very different thing
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