I’ve been asked to talk to you today
about an essay that I wrote for the New
York Times last year which went under a
rather dramatic heading it was called
why you will marry the wrong person and
perhaps we could just a begin were among
friends by just asking how many of you
in the room do feel on balance that you
have married the wrong person
I mean we’re my friends I mean yeah lady
that couple covered me let 510
I’d say 30 people in the room and and so
we always have to triple that so there’s
a pretty hefty majority but I’m here to
give counsel and to give consolation for
this situation you know there’s a lot of
anger around our love lives 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 anger into
sadness if we if we manage to turn rage
into grief we will have made
psychological progress and this is that
the task today what 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 screams every time they can’t
find their house keys or every time they
get stuck in traffic
these unfortunate characters are Vinci a
curious but reckless faith in a world in
which keys never go astray
the roads are mysteriously traffic free
it is hope that it’s 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 folks it’s very
hard to diminish hope around love
because there are vast industries
designed to inflate our expectations of
love there was wonderful quote from the
German philosopher Theodor Adorno who in
the 1960s said that the most dangerous
man in
erica was Walt Disney and the reason for
his attack on Walt was because he
believed that Walt was the prime agent
of hope and therefore of rage and
therefore of bitterness and he thought
that it was the task of philosophy to
let us down gently which is what I’m
going to be at doing today so remember
the theme of the talk why you will marry
the wrong person there are a number of
reasons why this is going to happen to
you or has maybe already in the privacy
of your heart happen to you I should say
that it’s not that bad and the reason is
that all of us will not manage to find
the right person but we will probably
all of us manage to find a good enough
person so and that’s success as you will
come to see what is one of the reasons
why we’re not going to be able to pull
this one off as successfully as we might
have hoped at the early the outset of
our upper teenage perd when we were
contemplating love is that we are very
strange
I’m very strange and you’re very strange
you don’t let on and you know we’re not
going to do anything very dangerous but
we are basically psychologically quite
strange we don’t normally know very much
about this strangeness it takes us a
long time before we’re really on top of
the way in which we are hard to live
with there’s anyone in this room think
that they’re quite easy to live with
on balance yeah oh my goodness okay I
don’t want to be rude but please come
and see me offered I know I know that
you’re not easy to live with and the
reason is that you’re a homo sapiens and
therefore you are not easy to live with
no one is and but there’s a there’s a
wall of silence that surrounds us from a
deeper acquaintance with what is
actually so difficult about us our
friends don’t want to tell us why would
they bother they just want to pleasant
evening out they’re not our friends know
more about us and more about our floors
probably after a ten minutes
acquaintance a stranger will know more
about your floors then you might learn
over 40 years of life on the planet our
capacity to ensure it what is wrong with
us is very weak our parents don’t tell
us very much why would they they love us
too much they know they can see of
course I mean they followed us from the
crib they know what’s wrong with us
they’re not going to tell us because
they they just want to this week at our
ex-lovers a vital source of knowledge
they know apps
lutely they know but you’re in that
speech that they gave it was it was
moving at the time when they said that
they wanted a little more space and were
attracted to travel and we’re interested
in the culture of Southeast Asia
nonsense they thought lots of things are
wrong with you but they weren’t going to
bother to tell you they were just off
out of there why would they bother
so there’s knowledge that is out there
is not in you it’s out there but it’s
not in you
and so therefore we progress through the
world with a very low sense of what is
actually wrong with us not least all of
us addicts almost all of us are addicts
not injecting heroin as such but addicts
in the sense we need to redefine what
addiction is I like to define addiction
not in terms of the substance you’re
taking in other words I’m heroin addict
I’m a cocaine addict no addiction is
basically any pattern of behavior
whereby you cannot stand to be with
yourself and certain of the more
uncomfortable thoughts and more
importantly emotions that come from
being on your own and so therefore you
can be addicted to almost anything so
long as it keeps you away from yourself
so it was it keeps you away from tricky
self-knowledge and most of us are
addicts and thanks to all sorts of
technologies and distractions etc we can
have a good life where we will almost
certainly be guaranteed not to spend any
time with ourselves except maybe for
certain kind of airlines that still
don’t have the gadgets the distractors
but otherwise you can be guaranteed you
don’t have to talk to yourself and this
is a disaster for your capacity to have
a relationship with another person
because until you know yourself you
can’t properly relate to another person
one of the reasons why love is so tricky
for us is that it requires us to do
something we really don’t want to do
which is to approach another human being
and say I need you I wouldn’t really
survive without you I’m vulnerable
before you and there’s a very strong
impulse in all of us to be strong and to
be well defended and not to reveal our
vulnerability to another person psycho
psychologists talk of two patterns of
response that tend to crop up in people
whenever there’s a danger of needing to
be extremely vulnerable dangerously
vulnerable and exposed to another person
the first response is to get what what
psychologists call anxiously attached
attachment theory some of you may know
so when you are anxiously attached to
somebody rather than
saying I need you I depend on you you
start to get very procedural you say
you’re ten minutes late or I think the
bin bags need to be taken out or you
start to get strict when actually what
you want to do is to ask a very poignant
question do you still care about me but
we don’t dare to ask that question so
instead we get nasty we get stiff we get
procedural the other thing the other
pattern of behavior which psychologists
have identified and it tends to apply to
people who are in this room in other
words a types very outgoing types
strivers you become in relationships
tell me if I’m wrong you become what is
known as avoidant which means that when
you when you need someone it’s precisely
at that moment you pretend you don’t
when you feel most vulnerable you say
I’m quite busy at the moment I’m fine
thanks I’m well busy today in other
words you don’t reveal the need for
another person which sets them off into
a chain of wandering whether you are to
be trusted and there’s been a cycle of
low trust so we get into these patterns
of not daring to do the thing that we
really need to do which is to say even
though I’m a growing person maybe I’ve
got a beard maybe I’ve been alive for a
long time I’m 6 foot 2 etc I’m actually
a small child inside and I need you like
a small child would need its parent this
is so humbling that most of us refuse to
make that step and therefore refuse the
challenge of of love um in short we
don’t know very much how to love we and
it sounds very odd because actually
somebody said you look all of us
probably in this room would probably
need to go to a school of love we do
what a school of love love is just an
instinct 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
love I believe is something personal
there’s a distinction between loving and
being 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
love and what does it really mean to
love
– 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 unfolding in other words
to love someone is to apply charity and
generosity of interpretation most of us
are in dire need of love because
actually we need to be we need to have
some slack cut for us because our
behavior is often so tricky that if we
don’t do this we wouldn’t get through
any kind of relationship but we’re not
used to thinking that that is the core
of what love is
core of what love is is the willingness
to interpret another’s behavior what we
tend to be very bad at is recognizing
that anyone that we can love is going to
be a perplexing mixture of the good and
the bad
there’s a wonderful psychoanalysts
called Melanie Klein who was active in
the 50s and 60s recently from Vienna
active in North London studying how
children learned about relationships
from the parental situation and she came
up with a very fascinating analysis she
argued that when children are small very
small they don’t really realize that a
parent is one character they actually do
what she calls split a parent into a
good parent and a bad parent and so this
is when a baby is in a really an infant
stage so what you do is you split into
the good mother or and the bad mother
and it takes a long long time Melanie I
thought it might be until you’re four
until you actually realize that the good
and the bad mother are one person and
you become ambivalent in other words you
become able to hate someone and really
go off them and at the same time also
loved them and you’re able not to run
away from that situation you’re able to
say I love someone and hate them and
that’s okay and Melanie Klein thought
this is an immense psychological
achievement when we can no longer merely
divide people into absolutely brilliant
perfect what marvelous and hateful let
me down disappointed me everyone who we
love is going to disappoint as we start
off with idealization and we end up
often with denigration the person goes
from being absolutely marvelous to be
absolutely terrible maturity is the
ability to see that there are no heroes
really among human beings that all of us
and this wonderfully perplexing mixture
of the good and the bad and adulthood
true psychological maturity and may need
to be 65 before it hits you I’m not
there yet is the capacity to realize
that anyone that you love is going to be
this mixture of the good and the bad so
love is not just admiration for strength
it is also tolerance for weakness and
recognition of ambivalence and the
reason why we’re going to probably make
some real mistakes when we choose our
love partners some of you in this room
have made some stunning mistakes now why
is this the reason is that we’ve been
told that the way to find a good partner
is to follow your instinct right follow
your heart
that’s the mantra and so we’re all the
time reminded that if we stop reasoning
analyzing other people in this room who
think that you can think too much about
your emotions and that sort of you
people get yeah you can think too much a
few people okay you can’t think too much
you can only ever think badly but
there’s no such thing as thinking too
much about emotions but the 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
a bound up with various kinds of
suffering now something quite bad
happens when we start to go out into the
adult world and start to choose loved
partners we 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 because familiarity
may be bound up with particular kinds of
torture
this explains why sometimes people will
say to us there’s a wonderful person you
should go and date them they’re
good-looking that charming there are all
sorts of things and we go out with them
when we need them and we recognize that
they’re really wonderful and amazing but
we have to confess to our partners to
our friends that actually we found this
person often we struggle with the
vocabulary we say maybe not that
exciting or maybe not sexy or a bit
boring really what we mean is that we’ve
detected in this really quite
accomplished person someone who will not
be able to make a suffer in the way that
we need to suffer in order to feel that
love is real and that’s why we reject
them so we are not merely on a quest to
be happy we are on a quest to suffer in
ways that feel familiar and this
radically undermines our capacity to
find a good part here’s another reason
why we’re going to come unstuck in the
field of love we tend to believe that
the more a lover is right for us the
less we’re going to have to explain
about who we are how we feel what upsets
us what we want we believe rather as a
young child the leave of its parent that
a true lover will guess what is in our
minds one of the great errors that human
beings make it’s permanently to feel
that other people know what’s in their
minds without us having said what’s in
our minds it’s very cumbersome to use
words it’s such a bore and when it comes
to love we have this deep desire that
will simply be understood wordlessly
it’s touching
it’s a beautiful romantic idea but it
also leads to a catastrophic outbreak of
sulking and what is sulking sulking is
an interesting phenomenon we don’t just
salt with anyone we sulk with people who
we feel should understand us and yet for
some reason had decided not to and
that’s why we tend to reserve our sulks
for people who we love and who we think
love us and they tell us something you
know they unwittingly will trigger a
negative reaction in us and we’ll sulk
and they’ll say what’s wrong with you
darling and we’ll say nothing and
they’ll say but come on you’re upset and
we’ll go no I’m not I’m absolutely fine
and it’s not true and we’ll go upstairs
and we’ll shut the door and we won’t
tell them what’s wrong with us
and then they’ll knock at the door and
that’s it please just tell me and we’ll
say no
because we want them to read our souls
because we expect that a true lover can
understand what we feel and who we are
without us speaking this is a
catastrophe for our capacity to form
lasting relationships if you do not
explain you can never be understood the
route to a good marriage and to good
love is the ability to become a good
teacher now teaching sounds like a
narrow profession those guys in tweed
jackets and fussy with it with a
chalkboard etc I’m not talking about
that kind of teaching all of us whatever
our job aspirations whatever it is we do
have to become teachers now teaching is
merely the word that we give to the
skill of getting an idea from one head
into another in a way that it’s likely
to be accepted and most of us are
appalling teachers most of us teach when
we’re tired when we’re frightened
what are we frightened of with
frightened we’ve married an idiot and
because we’re so frightened we start
screaming at them you’ve got to
understand and the thing is that
unfortunately by the time you’ve started
to humiliate the person you want to
understand something less and over you
will never get anyone to understand what
you want them to understand so long as
you make them feel small in order to
teach well you need to be relaxed you
need to accept that maybe your partner
won’t understand and also you need a
culture within a couple that two people
are going to need to teach each other
and therefore also learn from one
another and this country’s me to the
next person while you’re going to have a
very unhappy relationship probably and
that is because you probably believe
that when somebody tries to tell you
something about yourself that’s a little
ticklish and a little uncomfortable they
are attacking you they’re not they’re
trying to make you into a better person
and we don’t tend to believe that this
has a role in love we tend to believe
that true love means accepting the whole
of us it doesn’t no one should accept
the whole of us we’re appalling really
one of the whole of you accepted no
that’s not love that the full display of
our characters the full articulation of
who we are should not be something that
we do in front of anyone that we care
about so what we need to do is is to
accept that the other person is going to
want to educate us and that it isn’t a
criticism criticism is merely the wrong
word that we apply to a much Noble
idea which is to try and make us into
better versions of ourselves but we tend
to reject this idea very strongly is
there any hope of course there’s hope
look I mentioned the word good enough
it’s a phrase taken from a wonderful
English psychoanalyst called Donald
Winnicott he had a lot of parents who
would come to him and say things like
I’m so worried I’m not a good parent my
child has this problem or that problem
etc and he came up with a wonderful
phrase he said you are most likely to be
a good enough parent and he relief from
our otherwise punishing perfectionism
the good thing is that none of us are
perfect and therefore we don’t need
perfection and the demand for perfection
will lead you to only one thing
loneliness you cannot have perfection
and company to be in company with
another person is to be negotiating
imperfection every day in compatibility
we are all incompatible but it is the
work of love to make us graciously
accommodate each other and ourselves to
each other’s incompatibilities and
therefore compatibility is an
achievement of love it isn’t what you
need from the outset of course you’re
not going to be totally compatible
that’s not the point
it is through love that you gradually
accept the need to be compatible um we
probably can’t change our types right so
all of us a problem many of us are have
got types who are going to cause us real
problems they may be too distant there
may be arrogant they’re going to torture
us in some way now friends casually say
to us chuck them get out the
relationship etc right no I don’t you
know we’re realist here at Google and
I’m giving you realistic advice you’re
not going to manage to change your type
let’s get that for granted what you can
do and this is a big achievement is to
change how you characteristically
respond to your tricky type most of us
have formed the way that we respond to
tricky types in early childhood so we
had a distant parent with mattres and a
distant lover when we were very young we
responded to that distant parent by
attention-seeking we rattled and banged
an our adult we Rachlin bang in our own
way and we think that’s going to help it
doesn’t it create a cycle that’s going
to be a vicious cycle it’s not going to
get us anywhere
it is open to us at any time to have a
more mature response to the challenges
that the types of people were attracted
to are going to pose for us and that is
an immense step forward and immense a um
the other thing we should do is
recognize the nobility of compromise
what are the most shameful things to
ever have to admit is to say this is my
partner I’ve compromised in choosing
them I’ve compromised oh why have you
compromised
well I’m not that attractive myself I’ve
got lots of problems I’m a bit nutty
frankly I couldn’t pull anyone better
but they’re very nice okay
now you would think loser it’s not true
compromise is Noble we compromise in
every area of life there’s no reason why
we shouldn’t compromise in our love life
maybe we’re sticking around for the
children good it was a hoe they’re only
sticking around for the children that’s
a wonderful reason to stick around
why aren’t you gonna stick around okay
so let’s look a bit more benevolently
at the art of compromise it’s a massive
achievement in love I’m going to end
with with a quote from one of my
favorite philosophers Danish
nineteenth-century very gloomy
philosopher called Kierkegaard and
Kierkegaard in his book either all had a
wonderful outburst what he basically
said of course you’re going to marry the
wrong person and make the wrong
decisions in a whole row of areas and
the reason you’re going to do this is
that you’re human therefore do not
berate yourself for doing what humans do
this is what he says marry and you will
regret it don’t marry you will also
regret it marry or don’t marry you will
get it either way
laughs of the world’s foolishness you’ll
regret it weep over it you’ll regret
that to laugh at the world’s foolishness
all weep over it you will regret both
hang yourself you will regret it don’t
hang yourself
you will regret that to hang yourself or
don’t hang yourself you’re regretted
either way whether you hang yourself or
don’t hang yourself you will regret both
this gentleman is the essence of all
philosophy thank you very much
[Applause]
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we have to offer at the link on your screen now
about an essay that I wrote for the New
York Times last year which went under a
rather dramatic heading it was called
why you will marry the wrong person and
perhaps we could just a begin were among
friends by just asking how many of you
in the room do feel on balance that you
have married the wrong person
I mean we’re my friends I mean yeah lady
that couple covered me let 510
I’d say 30 people in the room and and so
we always have to triple that so there’s
a pretty hefty majority but I’m here to
give counsel and to give consolation for
this situation you know there’s a lot of
anger around our love lives 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 anger into
sadness if we if we manage to turn rage
into grief we will have made
psychological progress and this is that
the task today what 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 screams every time they can’t
find their house keys or every time they
get stuck in traffic
these unfortunate characters are Vinci a
curious but reckless faith in a world in
which keys never go astray
the roads are mysteriously traffic free
it is hope that it’s 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 folks it’s very
hard to diminish hope around love
because there are vast industries
designed to inflate our expectations of
love there was wonderful quote from the
German philosopher Theodor Adorno who in
the 1960s said that the most dangerous
man in
erica was Walt Disney and the reason for
his attack on Walt was because he
believed that Walt was the prime agent
of hope and therefore of rage and
therefore of bitterness and he thought
that it was the task of philosophy to
let us down gently which is what I’m
going to be at doing today so remember
the theme of the talk why you will marry
the wrong person there are a number of
reasons why this is going to happen to
you or has maybe already in the privacy
of your heart happen to you I should say
that it’s not that bad and the reason is
that all of us will not manage to find
the right person but we will probably
all of us manage to find a good enough
person so and that’s success as you will
come to see what is one of the reasons
why we’re not going to be able to pull
this one off as successfully as we might
have hoped at the early the outset of
our upper teenage perd when we were
contemplating love is that we are very
strange
I’m very strange and you’re very strange
you don’t let on and you know we’re not
going to do anything very dangerous but
we are basically psychologically quite
strange we don’t normally know very much
about this strangeness it takes us a
long time before we’re really on top of
the way in which we are hard to live
with there’s anyone in this room think
that they’re quite easy to live with
on balance yeah oh my goodness okay I
don’t want to be rude but please come
and see me offered I know I know that
you’re not easy to live with and the
reason is that you’re a homo sapiens and
therefore you are not easy to live with
no one is and but there’s a there’s a
wall of silence that surrounds us from a
deeper acquaintance with what is
actually so difficult about us our
friends don’t want to tell us why would
they bother they just want to pleasant
evening out they’re not our friends know
more about us and more about our floors
probably after a ten minutes
acquaintance a stranger will know more
about your floors then you might learn
over 40 years of life on the planet our
capacity to ensure it what is wrong with
us is very weak our parents don’t tell
us very much why would they they love us
too much they know they can see of
course I mean they followed us from the
crib they know what’s wrong with us
they’re not going to tell us because
they they just want to this week at our
ex-lovers a vital source of knowledge
they know apps
lutely they know but you’re in that
speech that they gave it was it was
moving at the time when they said that
they wanted a little more space and were
attracted to travel and we’re interested
in the culture of Southeast Asia
nonsense they thought lots of things are
wrong with you but they weren’t going to
bother to tell you they were just off
out of there why would they bother
so there’s knowledge that is out there
is not in you it’s out there but it’s
not in you
and so therefore we progress through the
world with a very low sense of what is
actually wrong with us not least all of
us addicts almost all of us are addicts
not injecting heroin as such but addicts
in the sense we need to redefine what
addiction is I like to define addiction
not in terms of the substance you’re
taking in other words I’m heroin addict
I’m a cocaine addict no addiction is
basically any pattern of behavior
whereby you cannot stand to be with
yourself and certain of the more
uncomfortable thoughts and more
importantly emotions that come from
being on your own and so therefore you
can be addicted to almost anything so
long as it keeps you away from yourself
so it was it keeps you away from tricky
self-knowledge and most of us are
addicts and thanks to all sorts of
technologies and distractions etc we can
have a good life where we will almost
certainly be guaranteed not to spend any
time with ourselves except maybe for
certain kind of airlines that still
don’t have the gadgets the distractors
but otherwise you can be guaranteed you
don’t have to talk to yourself and this
is a disaster for your capacity to have
a relationship with another person
because until you know yourself you
can’t properly relate to another person
one of the reasons why love is so tricky
for us is that it requires us to do
something we really don’t want to do
which is to approach another human being
and say I need you I wouldn’t really
survive without you I’m vulnerable
before you and there’s a very strong
impulse in all of us to be strong and to
be well defended and not to reveal our
vulnerability to another person psycho
psychologists talk of two patterns of
response that tend to crop up in people
whenever there’s a danger of needing to
be extremely vulnerable dangerously
vulnerable and exposed to another person
the first response is to get what what
psychologists call anxiously attached
attachment theory some of you may know
so when you are anxiously attached to
somebody rather than
saying I need you I depend on you you
start to get very procedural you say
you’re ten minutes late or I think the
bin bags need to be taken out or you
start to get strict when actually what
you want to do is to ask a very poignant
question do you still care about me but
we don’t dare to ask that question so
instead we get nasty we get stiff we get
procedural the other thing the other
pattern of behavior which psychologists
have identified and it tends to apply to
people who are in this room in other
words a types very outgoing types
strivers you become in relationships
tell me if I’m wrong you become what is
known as avoidant which means that when
you when you need someone it’s precisely
at that moment you pretend you don’t
when you feel most vulnerable you say
I’m quite busy at the moment I’m fine
thanks I’m well busy today in other
words you don’t reveal the need for
another person which sets them off into
a chain of wandering whether you are to
be trusted and there’s been a cycle of
low trust so we get into these patterns
of not daring to do the thing that we
really need to do which is to say even
though I’m a growing person maybe I’ve
got a beard maybe I’ve been alive for a
long time I’m 6 foot 2 etc I’m actually
a small child inside and I need you like
a small child would need its parent this
is so humbling that most of us refuse to
make that step and therefore refuse the
challenge of of love um in short we
don’t know very much how to love we and
it sounds very odd because actually
somebody said you look all of us
probably in this room would probably
need to go to a school of love we do
what a school of love love is just an
instinct 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
love I believe is something personal
there’s a distinction between loving and
being 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
love and what does it really mean to
love
– 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 unfolding in other words
to love someone is to apply charity and
generosity of interpretation most of us
are in dire need of love because
actually we need to be we need to have
some slack cut for us because our
behavior is often so tricky that if we
don’t do this we wouldn’t get through
any kind of relationship but we’re not
used to thinking that that is the core
of what love is
core of what love is is the willingness
to interpret another’s behavior what we
tend to be very bad at is recognizing
that anyone that we can love is going to
be a perplexing mixture of the good and
the bad
there’s a wonderful psychoanalysts
called Melanie Klein who was active in
the 50s and 60s recently from Vienna
active in North London studying how
children learned about relationships
from the parental situation and she came
up with a very fascinating analysis she
argued that when children are small very
small they don’t really realize that a
parent is one character they actually do
what she calls split a parent into a
good parent and a bad parent and so this
is when a baby is in a really an infant
stage so what you do is you split into
the good mother or and the bad mother
and it takes a long long time Melanie I
thought it might be until you’re four
until you actually realize that the good
and the bad mother are one person and
you become ambivalent in other words you
become able to hate someone and really
go off them and at the same time also
loved them and you’re able not to run
away from that situation you’re able to
say I love someone and hate them and
that’s okay and Melanie Klein thought
this is an immense psychological
achievement when we can no longer merely
divide people into absolutely brilliant
perfect what marvelous and hateful let
me down disappointed me everyone who we
love is going to disappoint as we start
off with idealization and we end up
often with denigration the person goes
from being absolutely marvelous to be
absolutely terrible maturity is the
ability to see that there are no heroes
really among human beings that all of us
and this wonderfully perplexing mixture
of the good and the bad and adulthood
true psychological maturity and may need
to be 65 before it hits you I’m not
there yet is the capacity to realize
that anyone that you love is going to be
this mixture of the good and the bad so
love is not just admiration for strength
it is also tolerance for weakness and
recognition of ambivalence and the
reason why we’re going to probably make
some real mistakes when we choose our
love partners some of you in this room
have made some stunning mistakes now why
is this the reason is that we’ve been
told that the way to find a good partner
is to follow your instinct right follow
your heart
that’s the mantra and so we’re all the
time reminded that if we stop reasoning
analyzing other people in this room who
think that you can think too much about
your emotions and that sort of you
people get yeah you can think too much a
few people okay you can’t think too much
you can only ever think badly but
there’s no such thing as thinking too
much about emotions but the 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
a bound up with various kinds of
suffering now something quite bad
happens when we start to go out into the
adult world and start to choose loved
partners we 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 because familiarity
may be bound up with particular kinds of
torture
this explains why sometimes people will
say to us there’s a wonderful person you
should go and date them they’re
good-looking that charming there are all
sorts of things and we go out with them
when we need them and we recognize that
they’re really wonderful and amazing but
we have to confess to our partners to
our friends that actually we found this
person often we struggle with the
vocabulary we say maybe not that
exciting or maybe not sexy or a bit
boring really what we mean is that we’ve
detected in this really quite
accomplished person someone who will not
be able to make a suffer in the way that
we need to suffer in order to feel that
love is real and that’s why we reject
them so we are not merely on a quest to
be happy we are on a quest to suffer in
ways that feel familiar and this
radically undermines our capacity to
find a good part here’s another reason
why we’re going to come unstuck in the
field of love we tend to believe that
the more a lover is right for us the
less we’re going to have to explain
about who we are how we feel what upsets
us what we want we believe rather as a
young child the leave of its parent that
a true lover will guess what is in our
minds one of the great errors that human
beings make it’s permanently to feel
that other people know what’s in their
minds without us having said what’s in
our minds it’s very cumbersome to use
words it’s such a bore and when it comes
to love we have this deep desire that
will simply be understood wordlessly
it’s touching
it’s a beautiful romantic idea but it
also leads to a catastrophic outbreak of
sulking and what is sulking sulking is
an interesting phenomenon we don’t just
salt with anyone we sulk with people who
we feel should understand us and yet for
some reason had decided not to and
that’s why we tend to reserve our sulks
for people who we love and who we think
love us and they tell us something you
know they unwittingly will trigger a
negative reaction in us and we’ll sulk
and they’ll say what’s wrong with you
darling and we’ll say nothing and
they’ll say but come on you’re upset and
we’ll go no I’m not I’m absolutely fine
and it’s not true and we’ll go upstairs
and we’ll shut the door and we won’t
tell them what’s wrong with us
and then they’ll knock at the door and
that’s it please just tell me and we’ll
say no
because we want them to read our souls
because we expect that a true lover can
understand what we feel and who we are
without us speaking this is a
catastrophe for our capacity to form
lasting relationships if you do not
explain you can never be understood the
route to a good marriage and to good
love is the ability to become a good
teacher now teaching sounds like a
narrow profession those guys in tweed
jackets and fussy with it with a
chalkboard etc I’m not talking about
that kind of teaching all of us whatever
our job aspirations whatever it is we do
have to become teachers now teaching is
merely the word that we give to the
skill of getting an idea from one head
into another in a way that it’s likely
to be accepted and most of us are
appalling teachers most of us teach when
we’re tired when we’re frightened
what are we frightened of with
frightened we’ve married an idiot and
because we’re so frightened we start
screaming at them you’ve got to
understand and the thing is that
unfortunately by the time you’ve started
to humiliate the person you want to
understand something less and over you
will never get anyone to understand what
you want them to understand so long as
you make them feel small in order to
teach well you need to be relaxed you
need to accept that maybe your partner
won’t understand and also you need a
culture within a couple that two people
are going to need to teach each other
and therefore also learn from one
another and this country’s me to the
next person while you’re going to have a
very unhappy relationship probably and
that is because you probably believe
that when somebody tries to tell you
something about yourself that’s a little
ticklish and a little uncomfortable they
are attacking you they’re not they’re
trying to make you into a better person
and we don’t tend to believe that this
has a role in love we tend to believe
that true love means accepting the whole
of us it doesn’t no one should accept
the whole of us we’re appalling really
one of the whole of you accepted no
that’s not love that the full display of
our characters the full articulation of
who we are should not be something that
we do in front of anyone that we care
about so what we need to do is is to
accept that the other person is going to
want to educate us and that it isn’t a
criticism criticism is merely the wrong
word that we apply to a much Noble
idea which is to try and make us into
better versions of ourselves but we tend
to reject this idea very strongly is
there any hope of course there’s hope
look I mentioned the word good enough
it’s a phrase taken from a wonderful
English psychoanalyst called Donald
Winnicott he had a lot of parents who
would come to him and say things like
I’m so worried I’m not a good parent my
child has this problem or that problem
etc and he came up with a wonderful
phrase he said you are most likely to be
a good enough parent and he relief from
our otherwise punishing perfectionism
the good thing is that none of us are
perfect and therefore we don’t need
perfection and the demand for perfection
will lead you to only one thing
loneliness you cannot have perfection
and company to be in company with
another person is to be negotiating
imperfection every day in compatibility
we are all incompatible but it is the
work of love to make us graciously
accommodate each other and ourselves to
each other’s incompatibilities and
therefore compatibility is an
achievement of love it isn’t what you
need from the outset of course you’re
not going to be totally compatible
that’s not the point
it is through love that you gradually
accept the need to be compatible um we
probably can’t change our types right so
all of us a problem many of us are have
got types who are going to cause us real
problems they may be too distant there
may be arrogant they’re going to torture
us in some way now friends casually say
to us chuck them get out the
relationship etc right no I don’t you
know we’re realist here at Google and
I’m giving you realistic advice you’re
not going to manage to change your type
let’s get that for granted what you can
do and this is a big achievement is to
change how you characteristically
respond to your tricky type most of us
have formed the way that we respond to
tricky types in early childhood so we
had a distant parent with mattres and a
distant lover when we were very young we
responded to that distant parent by
attention-seeking we rattled and banged
an our adult we Rachlin bang in our own
way and we think that’s going to help it
doesn’t it create a cycle that’s going
to be a vicious cycle it’s not going to
get us anywhere
it is open to us at any time to have a
more mature response to the challenges
that the types of people were attracted
to are going to pose for us and that is
an immense step forward and immense a um
the other thing we should do is
recognize the nobility of compromise
what are the most shameful things to
ever have to admit is to say this is my
partner I’ve compromised in choosing
them I’ve compromised oh why have you
compromised
well I’m not that attractive myself I’ve
got lots of problems I’m a bit nutty
frankly I couldn’t pull anyone better
but they’re very nice okay
now you would think loser it’s not true
compromise is Noble we compromise in
every area of life there’s no reason why
we shouldn’t compromise in our love life
maybe we’re sticking around for the
children good it was a hoe they’re only
sticking around for the children that’s
a wonderful reason to stick around
why aren’t you gonna stick around okay
so let’s look a bit more benevolently
at the art of compromise it’s a massive
achievement in love I’m going to end
with with a quote from one of my
favorite philosophers Danish
nineteenth-century very gloomy
philosopher called Kierkegaard and
Kierkegaard in his book either all had a
wonderful outburst what he basically
said of course you’re going to marry the
wrong person and make the wrong
decisions in a whole row of areas and
the reason you’re going to do this is
that you’re human therefore do not
berate yourself for doing what humans do
this is what he says marry and you will
regret it don’t marry you will also
regret it marry or don’t marry you will
get it either way
laughs of the world’s foolishness you’ll
regret it weep over it you’ll regret
that to laugh at the world’s foolishness
all weep over it you will regret both
hang yourself you will regret it don’t
hang yourself
you will regret that to hang yourself or
don’t hang yourself you’re regretted
either way whether you hang yourself or
don’t hang yourself you will regret both
this gentleman is the essence of all
philosophy thank you very much
[Applause]
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