Shadowing Practice: Love is a skill, not a feeling | Alain de Botton: Full Interview - Learn English Speaking with Video
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My name is Alain de Botton.
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I'm a philosopher, psychotherapist, and founder of the School of Life.
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Chapter 1.
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Our Destructive Romantic Culture We know in theory that love matters a lot.
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It's in every pop song.
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It's the center of most religions.
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We sometimes lose sight of what that word actually means.
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It's really about connection and it is one of the most beautiful and one of the most complicated of all phenomena.
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Even though we think we've been around on this planet for a long time trying to figure things out,
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I'd say we were still at the dawn collectively of making sense of this phenomenon we call love
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and it's no surprise that most people will go to their deathbeds thinking, not quite sure I figured
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that side of life out at least many of us will
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still be grappling with some of the complexities of love by the time time runs out on us.
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The most central kind of love that people are obsessed about, concerned about, is romantic love.
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That is the intimate connection between two human beings who have a sexual contact.
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It's worth saying that there are other forms of love.
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We can love our children, we can love animals, we can love ideas, we can love tables, chairs, clouds, all sorts of things.
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We are capable of many forms of love but I'd say
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that when people sing about love and
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when they cry about love it tends to be the love
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of one very special person we tend to call our soulmate, our partner.
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It used to be the case that when people found partners they would do so according to fairly pragmatic considerations.
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In most nations, in most parts of the world, for most of history, couples were formed not by the individuals themselves but by the wider society,
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families, the village, the court.
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There were, if you like, dynastic marriages.
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You would get together with somebody because they had a plough
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and you had an ox and it seemed like a good match.
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Or you were the Duke of Brabant, and they were the princess of Naples.
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And that was seen as a wonderful union.
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So you got together for reasons that were nothing to do with emotional compatibility.
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There were a lot of tears, there was sadness, there was loneliness, but it didn't seem to matter because relationships were seen to be about something else.
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There was then a momentous change that occurs in towards the end of the 18th century, starting in Britain, France, Germany,
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parts of Italy, a revolution in feeling that we now know as Romanticism.
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And one of the central tenets of Romanticism is
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that each individual should be left to decide on their partner by the movements of their own heart.
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They should be left to decide for themselves.
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It's a beautiful idea.
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It's a very liberating idea.
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It should make a lot of sense and we have been in the romantic age now for, you know, 200 years, perhaps shorter,
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perhaps a little longer, that kind of time period.
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And let's put it plainly, it's been a disaster.
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We are not any appreciably happier now in a romantic culture
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than we were in a dynastic culture where marriages were made for dynastic reasons.
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Why?
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Because we have failed collectively to focus with enough intent on the difficulties
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that couples will have when they choose each other according to the movements of their own heart.
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Look, I think a really key prejudice of the romantic worldview is that if love is working well,
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it should be following instinct.
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There's been an enormous veneration, almost a worship of instinct.
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Love is described as a special feeling, not in a set of ideas, not a sense of rationally observable principles, but a feeling.
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You either have the feeling or you don't.
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You must be guided by your feeling.
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There's even a prejudice against language.
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You know, true lovers shouldn't talk too much.
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They should just feel the fluttering of their own hearts.
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That's why music has a huge prestige, higher than, you know, philosophy.
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When we're in love, we don't want to read philosophical tracks.
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We want to hear love songs.
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That is to do with our sense
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that emotion should be guiding us not reason reason is the
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enemy in the romantic world view of truly happy relationships
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if you follow reason that's cold it may be calculating it's unromantic
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and you know there are so many things that are considered unromantic
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and i would love to train our audience
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that every time something seems unromantic question it is it truly unromantic
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if we define romanticism as the pursuit of a workable relationship.
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On that basis, is it unromantic to talk about money?
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Is it unromantic to think long and hard about childhood patterns of psychological development?
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Is it anti -romantic to spend a lot of time thinking about families and friends and compatibility at that level?
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All these things, in my view, belong to a truly adequate way of surveying whether a couple should be together.
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But I'm also aware that nowadays these things are considered very unromantic.
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To live in a romantic culture means to live in a culture
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that has a set of ideas about how good couples should form.
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They should be formed by instinct, that everybody has a soulmate, that you'll recognize your soulmate by a special fluttery feeling, that you shouldn't be asked to account for that feeling.
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You should simply go for it and marry in Vegas in two weeks
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if that's what seizes you and
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that you should be able to communicate deeply with your partner without using language through that special medium of the heart, through the silence.
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Also that you shouldn't criticize your partner, that true partners should love each other for who they really are,
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which means no desire to grow or change.
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You just accept someone.
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Couples in romantic culture will sometimes complain, you're trying to change me.
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And this is seen as really offensive.
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It's like, what?
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You know, you complain to your friends.
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My partner's trying to change me.
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Oh, what an awful person.
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It must be awful.
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You must get out immediately.
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If you went to an ancient Greek, if you went to Athens in 400 BC and you said to an ancient Greek, what is love and where is the role of criticism,
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they would say love is a process of education.
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It's the education of emotion
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and lovers should of course be able to pick each other up for things
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that they don't spot in one another
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and they should be trying to develop into the best version
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of themselves rather than simply staying stuck in an admiration for
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who they are today the whole process should be dynamic become
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who you could be not worship who you happen to be right now all of this sounds very strange in romantic culture,
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which is why relationships are so difficult in our time.
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Let's remember that a person's life satisfaction is determined by up to around 70 % by the quality of their personal relationships.
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A Martian hearing that statistic, visiting planet Earth, would think, well, clearly Earthlings, given the enormous role of love, will be spending 70 % of their money
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and 70 % of their educational time working out how on earth this business of love works.
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Is that true?
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No. We spend hardly any time rationally thinking about it.
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None of us are made to sit through classes in attachment theory, classes in apology, classes in listening, classes in communication.
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No, we're, you know, physics is important.
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Geography is important.
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Don't get me wrong.
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But is there no time for this given its role in our lives?
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Do we really want to leave this to chance?
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And the answer is yes. And why?
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Because we live in a romantic culture that sees something adverse in planning
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and thinking and reflecting too hard on the business of love.
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It's very deleterious and it's been a serious problem for humanity.
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One of the most powerful disseminators of romantic culture is art.
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And by art, I mean all the leading artistic media.
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Film, definitely.
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You know, if you were learning about love from films, you would be very confused.
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And that's why many of us are confused because films, and I include that television shows and other, you know, narrative forms, these things are hugely misleading.
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They simply do not show what a real relationship is like.
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I mean, probably you can count on one hand that the number of films that have accurately shown love.
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I think one of the most accurate representations of love is Richard Linklater's before trilogy
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which ended up with before midnight it's a wonderful reckoning really with the real complexities of love
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but you know most films are not
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that most films are blithe are superficial are not modest enough
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in showing us what's really going on between couples it's also animated through music
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and music constantly um gives us little miniature stories about you know how love works
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and you know the music is terrific but it's not accurate to what's going on and it presses the wrong buttons.
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Poetry, no one really reads poetry nowadays.
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If they did, the problem exists in poetry too.
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So we have so much media around, and yet we're still so much strangers to ourselves.
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I would say that the single greatest, most misleading disseminator of ideas on love is culture and art.
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The problem is very heavily located there.
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chapter two lessons on love from psychotherapy i think we need
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to split history into phases the phase of the dynastic relationship where people would get together for dynastic
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and financial and family reasons. That ended.
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That's behind us.
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Then we moved into the romantic age, and that caused a lot of problems, and it lasted 250 years or so.
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We need to draw a line under that.
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We need to move towards something that I call the therapeutic age, the age of the therapeutic relationship.
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What on earth is a therapeutic relationship.
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Let me try and explain.
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A therapeutic relationship begins with the insights of psychotherapy.
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Psychotherapy has been with us for 120 years or so.
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It is the most sophisticated understanding of how human beings function emotionally.
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It's based on the insights of Sigmund Freud and all those who come after him.
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It is not going away.
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Some people say, oh that's isn't that old hat
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that wasn't freud proved wrong sorry no he wasn't i mean
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of course many many areas of freudian thought are wrong
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but the fundamental insight that we have an unconscious
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that how we love as adults was shaped by our childhoods
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that there are defenses that we put in place to protect ourselves as children
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that cause difficulties for us as adults this is indisputably true
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and that's not going anywhere all of us are the result of a very slow
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and long process of emotional education that took place between the ages of 0 and 10.
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This is extremely hard to perceive.
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Most of us are like, I never went to an emotional education school.
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I just grew up.
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You know, my parents lived in Idaho or Milton Keynes or Frankfurt or Yokohama.
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There's no sense that we've learned anything in particular.
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But my goodness, we have.
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All of us reach adulthood having learned very complicated languages of love and relationships,
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languages that tell us whether a human being can be trusted, whether we are worth something, whether communication is good, what happens when somebody is angry, what happens when we are shy,
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what happens when we sulk, how do we tell someone something important?
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All of these things will have been imbibed in us.
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Let me give you a metaphor.
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Very few of us, I'd say none of us, remember what it was like to learn language, to learn to speak.
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And yet most of us know how to speak, but it went in invisibly.
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While we were in the kitchen drawing buttercups or in the garden doing handstands,
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all of us will have learned incredibly complex patterns of language, of grammar.
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We have learned about the pluperfect, we have learned about the subjunctive without even knowing such things exist.
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We'll have learned tens of thousands of words and all sorts of ways of expressing ourselves and without knowing a thing.
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I want to say that a similar process goes on at the level of emotional language.
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In the same way as we learn a grammatical language, we learn an emotional language.
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As I say, a language about trust, about kindness, about communication, about self -worth,
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about dialogue, etc. All these things that we take with us into adulthood, we learned, and we learned from one place in particular,
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our families of origin, our mother and our father, or whoever our caregivers happen to be.
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These people are immensely, immensely important in shaping our emotional grammar in the same way as they shaped our linguistic grammar.
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I mean, anyone who's had a parent with a regional accent of one kind or another will know that that sticks.
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You will pick up that regional accent from your parents and you will, it might stick with you all of your life.
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Same thing goes on with, as it were, the regional accents of emotional intelligence.
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You may speak a regional accent where every man is extremely frightening, or every woman has a tendency towards alcoholism,
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or everyone who is kind is also slightly sadistic, or everyone who you depend on is also depressed.
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And these are all very, very difficult languages to have been exposed to and to pick up on.
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Many of us, sadly, have come through childhood with suboptimal language acquisition, emotional acquisition, if you like.
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And we take that into adulthood unconsciously.
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We have no clue where we've come from.
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And because we don't know where we've come from, we don't know how to plot a sensible course.
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And I'm going to mention something very important, which is attachment theory.
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One of the most useful tools for working out why relationships work
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and why they don't was formulated by two researchers of near genus, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth,
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two researchers working in the United Kingdom in the 1950s.
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They had been very marked by a phenomenon that took place in the 40s during the Second World War.
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In the Second World War, huge numbers of children were separated from their parents at a young age
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and were sent to families outside London to escape the German bombing of British cities.
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What researchers soon realized was that this was a catastrophe for the children.
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The children began to exhibit extremely distressed behavior.
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They would wet the bed, they would get very angry, they would not be able to eat.
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They would be in states of almost cataclysmic meltdown.
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Why was this?
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Materially, they were well looked after.
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Psychologically, emotionally, they were bereft.
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And researchers, this is one of the most moving stories in the history of the Second World War, researchers realized that if this carried on,
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this would do more damage for the next generation than any number of war dead.
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That the risks of German bombs were actually smaller than the risks of ruptured emotional attachment.
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And on that basis, these psychological researchers wrote to the Ministry of Defense
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and the Home Office and got the children transferred back into their homes in the cities of the United Kingdom.
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And thereby a great tragedy was averted so that after the height of the crisis,
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children were returned to their birth families and looked after again by their closest figures of attachment.
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Why are we talking about this?
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Because this was the birth of attachment theory.
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From watching how children were around their close caregivers in childhood, it was discovered that all of us are,
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in a sense, tethered to a story that we first have in childhood around our caregivers.
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And the researchers in attachment theory began to divide human beings into categories,
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highlighting their characteristic ways of behaving around relationships.
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To give you a few of the categories, they identified something that we now know as avoidant attachment.
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Avoidant attachment is a way of relating to a troublesome and troubling caregiver, who in some ways lets you down.
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And by the way, caregivers, it's estimated let down around 50 % of children.
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So around half of the population of any nation you care to mention has got children wandering around with attachment wounds.
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It's an important statistic to bear in mind when you go on a date.
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You know, 50 % chance you've got somebody with an attachment wound.
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That's not the end of the story.
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We can work with attachment wounds, but we need to know that those attachment wounds are there.
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That's how we're going to try and solve the problem, by knowing that the problem is there.
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An avoidantly attached person is somebody who responds to the insecurities in their relationship with their caregiver by essentially moving away,
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by pushing away intimacy.
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The classic sentence that an avoidantly attached person will say to their partner after a few beautiful weeks, a few mini breaks, a few lovely times, they'll go.
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This is feeling a bit too intense.
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And then they will withdraw in some way.
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They'll start causing a problem.
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They'll say, oh, I need to spend the weekend with my friends or my mother really wants to see me.
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They'll pull away from a relationship because it's getting too intense.
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And really what they mean is, I'm so afraid of love.
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And the way that I deal with my fear of love is to pull away.
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So that is avoidant attachment.
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And we see it all over the place.
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Some of your viewers will be avoidantly attached.
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Some of your viewers will have recognized this with a partner that they had.
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It's not that the avoidantly attached person doesn't want love.
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They want love.
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They're just terrified of it.
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Why are they terrified of it?
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Because it didn't go well for them in childhood.
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And this is something that we need to really keep in mind.
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We've got a culture that thinks that everybody's looking for love.
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They're not.
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They're ostensibly looking for love, but they're just as busy pushing love away
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when it comes running away from it and making sure it doesn't succeed why because love is a threat
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if you've grown up in an environment where love was not possible where relationships between caregivers
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and children were not safe you will have defended yourself against the risks of disappointment you will have insulated yourself and then
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when love comes your way in adulthood what you will do
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against your knowledge against your conscious knowledge is make sure
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that love does not succeed you will sabotage your own chances
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of a successful relationship let me give you a metaphor imagine
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that you've grown up in a prison camp you were never fed
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or the diet was very meager you didn't have much food
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and then suddenly one day the gates of prison gates are opened
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and you get to go to a banquet and you get to eat anything you like.
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And what might be the response?
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Panic.
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You might make yourself sick.
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You might try and eat the food.
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It might even kill you or threaten to kill you. Because why?
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You cannot metabolize the goodness on offer.
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Because you have learned to function with an emotionally restricted diet.
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An emotionally restricted diet where you've made do with very little.
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And so when there's a lot suddenly on offer, you panic and you think this is too intense in the same way
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that somebody who has been going with almost no food will think it's far too intense to eat a rich chocolate cake.
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And sometimes healthy love is like a rich chocolate cake, which we cannot bear.
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And some of your viewers will know the phenomenon whereby you offer somebody love.
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You love them.
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You feel that you want to give them a good life.
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You want to be a good partner to them.
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And they sort of accept it.
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And then suddenly they run away.
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They put dynamite under it.
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This is a very common occurrence.
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What's going on?
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It's not that it's too bad.
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It's too good.
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And for some of us who had to get used to very poor relationships, the greatest threat is not a bad relationship.
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That's fine.
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It's a good relationship.
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And you get patterns, horrific patterns, where people have had an unstable and violent father, let's say, an uncaring and absent mother.
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And you think that these people are going to, you know, get to adulthood and they're really going to make it up for themselves.
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They're going to find the love they yearn for and they're going to make it work and what happens to them?
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Maybe a nice lover comes along.
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Someone kind offers them, you know, a home as it were, you know, an emotional home and Maybe at the beginning they can bear it.
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It's easier at the beginning.
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You can bear it at the beginning But then the problem starts setting in
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when it really becomes clear that love may work that's
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when the traumatized attachment lover gets their sticks of dynamite out
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and starts to blow the foundations of the house up so that they can return to the suffering that feels more familiar.
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What you need to understand is that in love, we don't look for what will make us happy.
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Absolutely not.
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We look for what feels familiar.
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For some people, happiness and familiarity are one.
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But for many of us, they are not.
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For many of us, what is most familiar is a sense of not being loved properly, a sense of not being sure where we stand, a sense that someone may threaten us,
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a sense that someone may abandon us.
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That is our true home.
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And if that's our true home, we will be guided with a kind of honing instinct to re -find that,
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which is why you find again and again that the children of alcoholics do not head for sober partners.
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They head for people who are struggling with alcohol.
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Why the offspring of violent parents do not head for calm and kind partners.
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They head for people who are struggling with their temper.
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Now, what do we do about this?
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One optimistic story is to be found in the work of Sigmund Freud, who in many ways, everything returns to him.
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He observed something which he called the repetition compulsion.
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He observed that human beings are not guided by a search for pleasure, they are guided by a search to repeat patterns, a repetition compulsion often of pain.
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And he proposed an ingenious and I think optimistic answer to this.
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He argued that what many of us are doing when we repeat traumatic experiences, for example, getting back together with a violent partner or an alcoholic partner,
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what we're really doing there is not simply suffering ad infinitum for no reason.
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What we're trying to do is to master a challenge that we couldn't master in childhood, and we're trying to master it with the resources of adulthood.
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In other words, we're trying to get the alcoholic partner to stop drinking in a way
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that we couldn't when we were children.
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We're trying to get the distance, emotionally uncommunicative partner to start to talk in the way that our mother or father didn't.
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We're trying to make it up in the present.
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And Freud realized that for many of us, we wouldn't find the kind of excitement
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that we need until we locate a partner who does suggest
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that they suffer from the very problem that our crucial caregivers suffered from, until we find a little bit of an echo of the original suffering.
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But the optimistic story is perhaps we can work with them in the relationship to heal the pain.
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It's a very optimistic story.
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It works sometimes, and sometimes we may need to cut our losses.
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You know, love is not always about keeping going.
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Love is also sometimes about knowing that you are in a pattern and that pattern is driving you to destruction.
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And when that happens, it's also important to know how to save yourself from sure destruction.
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Chapter 3.
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The Playbook for a Successful Relationship.
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First of all, the idea of a playbook sounds strange.
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The idea of a playbook that you need to create to get in a relationship sounds really odd.
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You think, I don't need a playbook.
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I just need to head on in there get a dating app
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and off i go and a nice new pair of clothes
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but isn't it interesting and wouldn't it be lovely to have a playbook
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that would be trying to guide you to acquire the knowledge um
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that you need for love so the idea
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that love is a skill rather than an emotion is a strange one
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but i think an absolutely essential one in the world view that i'm positing You know, if somebody said, I'm going to climb Mount Everest or K2,
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you would say, okay, how have you prepared for this?
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And you'd be expecting them to show up with ropes, with training programs, with oxygen, with specially prepared packs of food.
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You can get the metaphor.
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We walk into the mountain of love without sufficient preparation and equipment.
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And then we're surprised that we routinely tumble off the mountain and we blame the other person.
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We say we didn't match the right person.
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We haven't found our person.
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We go back on the dating app and we go ever further to try and find the right person.
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Don't get me wrong, dating apps have their role.
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Sometimes we need to scan and see who's out there
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and find a person who halfway meets us where we want to be.
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But once you've found a more or less suitable person, that's when the work begins.
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And the work is to turn a stranger into somebody that you can understand and who can understand you without bottling it,
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without panicking, without throwing them in the bin, without saying we can't work this out if after five weeks
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and a pleasant mini break in Copenhagen we suddenly have a conflict.
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No, the point is you need to stay where you are and try and figure it out.
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But most people give up too soon, they say we can't possibly do this and they run for the hills, go back on the dating app
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and find the next person with whom they will then try
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out an equally unfulfilling attempt to match their heart with a stranger's.
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What we need to do is to start to create right people rather than search for them.
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And what does that mean to create a right person?
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It means to work on yourself psychologically and therapeutically so
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that you understand your script from childhood and do not simply play it out onto innocent person after innocent person.
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That you take responsibility for the problems that you are bringing into a relationship.
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At the School of Life, which I founded, an institution that is dedicated to emotional growth and development, we tell our people that when they're on a date with somebody,
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among the first questions is to ask people playfully, how are you crazy?
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What does that mean, how are you crazy?
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Why is everybody crazy?
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They're not necessarily crazy.
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Well, all of us have stuff that we need to be on top of.
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And if your person at dinner says to you, yeah, I get the question.
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Yeah, I've got my crazy, and my crazy is this, my crazy is that, my father, my mother.
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However, this is turning out to be a safe person.
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If the person goes, how do you mean, I can't possibly answer that question, that's rude, you think I'm not right or imperfect, run for the hills, you know, drop it right there and then.
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I'm exaggerating, but this is probably not a person you should be hanging out with
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because none of us need or can have perfect partners.
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But what we can have and must search for
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and must try to become is people who know enough about
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their patterns to be able to warn their prospective partners of what's going on and take averting action.
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The beginning of therapeutic relationships is to know that two people,
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when entering a couple, are not entering without a lot of history.
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It is essential that couples learn as much as possible about
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that history so that they are ready for the challenges and perplexities of love.
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A therapeutic relationship requires that each partner get on top of their dynamics
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that date back to childhood and are able to discuss them with relative grace, patience, and insight with their partner so that when problems arise,
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and they will, they can adopt a therapeutic language.
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It is therapeutic to say, for example, when there is a conflict, I hear your point of view.
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It may not be mine but i hear
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that it's yours it is not therapeutic to say you're wrong you're an idiot
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and you're just like your mother
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or indeed like your father this is not therapeutic i'm kidding
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but i'm making a very serious point indeed we do not
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tend to talk to each other in therapeutically informed language we
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shout we scream we blame we shape -shift we don't take responsibility we do all sorts of things
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that doom us in relationships then we stand back
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and we say we're surprised We are a society that is obsessed with finding the right person without pausing to think, how do I become the right person?
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How do I work on myself?
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Understanding that cannot be done simply, and this is paradoxical, by being on your own.
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This is another unbelievable mystery.
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You can't understand yourself just by being with yourself.
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You need other people.
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Why is that?
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It's like, why do you need a mirror to see the back of your head?
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Because we don't have eyes there.
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We need someone to help us to see the things that are really hard for us to see.
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And psychotherapy gives us a forum in which we can come, tell the therapist about what's going on in our lives, explain what happened last Monday,
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explain, you know, what happened when we took that trip to New York or Buffalo, wherever it is.
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What happened?
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And then slowly pattern recognition sets in.
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The therapist is able to go, it's funny.
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In that last relationship, you did this.
411
This new relationship, you're doing that.
412
And you mentioned that your parent did something that sounds kind of similar.
413
So I wonder what's going on.
414
And then slowly insight comes.
415
We start to put the pieces together.
416
We think I'm up to something, I'm doing something.
417
And that way is liberation.
418
We can start to break the unconscious stories that we're living.
419
Psychotherapy works with this concept known as defences or defense mechanisms.
420
In other words, these are tools that our minds adopt to try and shield themselves from accurate knowledge of their own workings.
421
This could sound really odd, like, why don't we just embrace self -knowledge with open arms?
422
Why do we need to run away from it?
423
The answer is that knowledge of ourselves is frightening.
424
It's really awful to have to learn certain things.
425
It may make us very anxious.
426
It may make us so sorrowful.
427
It may panic us.
428
And so we push away unwelcome information.
429
I think that we still perhaps can't quite bear how complicated we are.
430
You know, we're very squeamish creatures.
431
We don't like to sit with ourselves.
432
We don't like to sit with our emotions.
433
Self -knowledge remains an enormously elusive goal.
434
You know, I think it is the most important goal of life.
435
To understand oneself is literally the meaning of life.
436
The ancient Greeks knew this, you know, know thyself was the most important command in ancient Greek culture and philosophy.
437
Know thyself, most important thing you could do.
438
If you said nowadays, you know, in a conversation with friends or colleagues, you know, what's your goal?
439
Where are you trying to get to next year?
440
What are you, what are you trying to do? say, know thyself, people would go, that's a strange person there.
441
We don't know about this person, right?
442
It's not an acceptable goal.
443
We know that it's good to make money.
444
We know that it's good to travel to foreign countries to learn how to fry garlic and to learn salsa.
445
It's not particularly esteemed to know yourself.
446
And that's why we wander around strangers to ourselves and and therefore enormously confusing, and let's put it frankly, dangerous to other people.
447
Because a person who doesn't understand themselves, if confronted with their behavior will go, it wasn't me, I didn't do it, or I can't think, or ask me tomorrow,
448
they can't account for themselves.
449
They don't know why they do the stuff they do.
450
They will simply, in a relationship for example, bail out of a relationship going, it's getting too intense, and why?
451
They don't know, they don't understand what they themselves are doing even though, you know, they may have spent five years learning, you know, Spanish.
452
They may have taken an advanced degree in Japanese.
453
They may be, you know, very active in all sorts of ways.
454
They may have learned pottery.
455
They may be holding down a great job in marketing, something.
456
But the point is they will not have learned the really true constituents of emotional functioning
457
because they've been able to get away with it.
458
And part of the playbook of becoming a better lover is to dial down your defense mechanisms, to observe them.
459
A typical defense mechanism is to push responsibility onto other people, to say it's your fault.
460
For example, someone tries to tell you something about yourself.
461
Someone says, I think that you're a little bit this when that happens.
462
And rather than going, thank you, let me think about that, you go, why are you being rude?
463
Or this is not a good time for me.
464
Or I can't absorb this now.
465
In other words, you push away information that might have helped you not
466
because it's false but because it's difficult to absorb
467
and that's often what happens to us all of us all
468
of us are involved in defense mechanisms all of us can't
469
quite bear the full truth about ourselves it helps us to go to psychotherapy I know
470
that you know AI is you know delivers some aspects of
471
therapy it can be good at points the good thing about a real human being is
472
that they are not guided just by you They've got their own independent judgment
473
and also you're in a relationship with them and
474
that relationship is part of what heals you
475
Because the relationship with the therapist is a harbinger of the relationship
476
that you can then take out into the world A relationship of trust and mutual understanding.
477
This is something that AI is not going to be able to replace anytime soon So we need to understand ourselves.
478
We need to understand the past and then we need a certain spirit it.
479
One of the things that we need in that playbook of love is a good sense of humor.
480
That could sound superfluous, like what on earth, you know, why do we need a sense of humor?
481
Well, a sense of humor is a modesty about our capacity to understand anything.
482
And if we can signal to our partners that, you know, we're a little stupid, we don't get it, we don't have all the answers, that is a wonderful emollient,
483
it's a wonderful lubricant to love, because it just dials down the temperature.
484
If your partner is able to say, ah, I may not have gone to the this.
485
I may not be getting it.
486
That's brilliant.
487
And if they can make a little joke too, that's great.
488
You know, if two people can learn to see each other as idiots, but lovable idiots, that's a beautiful moment in love.
489
It could sound negative.
490
It's not.
491
It's not.
492
It's the most generous thing you can do.
493
We are two blind people helping each other to find a way forward.
494
If that's the spirit in which we can enter love, that is a spirit of generosity, a spirit of mutual forgiveness.
495
Too often we get on our high horses.
496
This is the way it is.
497
I know the answer.
498
This is what I think that is not a friend of love.
499
So we need, if you like, a modesty, a humorous modesty.
500
Let me give you another idea.
501
Another thing that we need in order to make love work is a certain degree of pessimism.
502
You know, optimism is the enemy of love.
503
If we think that we will have a perfect love story, a love story with no ruffles in it, with no kinks in it, no, it's not going to happen.
504
We need to accept that even a really good relationship has constant moments of crisis.
505
And that's okay.
506
The problem is not crisis.
507
The problem is how do we repair crises?
508
Can we repair them with forgiveness, with understanding, and most of all, with curiosity?
509
Can we get curious about why we had a bus stop?
510
Can we be searching for why our attachment patterns are not compatible?
511
Can we get interested in why we're difficult to love.
512
And that way will become easier to love.
513
So pessimism is not an enemy of love.
514
Knowing that there is no such thing as the right person actually helps you to find a good enough person.
515
You know, a few years ago, I wrote an essay that went viral.
516
I wrote it for the New York Times.
517
It was called Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.
518
Why did that essay go viral?
519
I think it went viral because people all feel, sorry, let me correct that, not all people, but many,
520
many people feel that they have married the wrong person.
521
And they panic about this and they feel so ashamed.
522
So here's an essay in the New York Times that says, yeah, we're all gonna marry the wrong person.
523
And you know what?
524
It's okay.
525
You don't need to marry the right person.
526
You need to marry a good enough person.
527
You know, compatibility is not a precondition of love.
528
Compatibility is the fruit of love.
529
If we get together with someone and we find that there are differences, right?
530
They have one kind of attachment style, we have another.
531
They like golf, we like tennis.
532
They like the curtains to be green, we like the curtains to be yellow, whatever it is.
533
Too often in modern romantic dating culture, the answer is get out, just get out, find someone else,
534
find someone better and that's why all the technological tools are all about putting new people in front of you.
535
Of course, sometimes you need to find new people, but as much as finding new people, what you need to do is to learn to live with the people who are in front of you, with the people that you found.
536
Many of us have already found a good enough partner
537
and yet we throw them in the bin
538
because we are taught by romantic culture that we can always find a perfect person with whom it will click immediately.
539
And this is such a destructive idea.
540
If you think, you know what, the work starts here.
541
The work starts when you have a problem.
542
Then you roll up your sleeves and you think, okay, well, I know that I, you know, broadly think this person's a nice person.
543
Now we're going to work at making sure that it can work.
544
And so we're going to talk and we're going to take this problem apart.
545
We're going to become like engineers who've got a malfunctioning machine.
546
We're going to sort it out.
547
This sounds unromantic, doesn't it?
548
Imagine, imagine saying, in order to make my relationship work, every evening I've talked for an hour in really patient ways
549
you think oh my god go to vegas find someone easier well good luck to you maybe you'll find that person
550
but for some of us especially some of us who've come
551
through difficult relationships difficult relationships in our past we may need to go
552
and do that kind of excavation maybe that's fine i think
553
that a good enough person is someone who will engage with the business of working towards compatibility
554
that they won't assume that you are wrong just because there are problems.
555
They will know how to repair crises.
556
They will know how to be curious.
557
They will know how to listen.
558
They will know how to be patient.
559
That is compatible with all sorts of problems, sexual problems, relational problems, administrative problems, doesn't matter.
560
You can work through them.
561
So the wrong person is someone who stonewalls, who always blames you, who blanks out, who says, it's not my responsibility,
562
or, you know, it was easier with my ex, and why are you so difficult, et cetera.
563
These people are trouble because they are refusing the work of love.
564
So it doesn't matter if you have many, many difficulties.
565
That's okay.
566
The problem is your attitude to the difficulties.
567
And the solution is an attitude of indulgence, of curiosity, and of calm consideration of the flaws that unite us all.
568
We are all mad monkeys.
569
And so long as we've been kind towards the mad monkey in all of us, we'll be okay.
570
One of the real problems, and you know, there's simply no solution, but we need to accept that there's a real problem,
571
is how long it takes to work out who we are as lovers, as people interested in relationships, who we are.
572
It takes so long, and it takes especially long to try and change our patterns.
573
You know, if we are somebody who sabotages relationships every time that love comes along, how long is that going to take to unwind this?
574
Well, it takes insight, but then it takes, as it were, work, true work.
575
And sometimes people go to therapy for six sessions or 12 sessions and they go, I haven't changed.
576
Therapy doesn't work.
577
And let's come back to my earlier example about language.
578
Imagine that you decided middle age as an English speaker to pick up Korean or Finnish, and you went to six lessons and you tried to learn Finnish and Korean.
579
And by the end of six lessons, you could barely ask for, you know, barely say your own name or say hello.
580
And then you blamed it on the whole process.
581
And you said, I'm not learning this language.
582
It's rubbish.
583
People would say, you're being too impatient.
584
And I think that some of the same holds true for rewiring our emotional language.
585
We can't pick this up in six sessions of 50 minutes.
586
It takes a long time.
587
A pattern that was laid down over decades is going to take many, many years to figure it out.
588
It's, I mean, believe me, it's bad news.
589
I wish it weren't so.
590
Can we do anything in the meantime?
591
Yes, of course we can.
592
We can, you know, we can be learning and walking.
593
We don't to pause and just sit by the roadside.
594
We can be starting on the path of relationships.
595
We can be starting from a relatively young age, but we need to be doing the work alongside and we need to be able to at least do the first thing,
596
which is to say, I'm learning.
597
I'm a learner.
598
There's a real difference between someone who goes, I know it all, and someone who knows that they are still learning.
599
When Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, was asked why he was the wisest person in antiquity, he said, because I know what I don't know.
600
In other words, that the birth of true wisdom is associated with a knowledge of your ignorance.
601
I think that's the best way we can proceed also in relation to our love lives.
602
There are lots of questions that we could learn to ask ourselves
603
and our partners in order to try and find a better relationship.
604
One of them is this.
605
When I get close to you, how does that feel, right?
606
To open up a window onto some of the complexities that occur when somebody gets close.
607
If I love you, what part of you might worry, right?
608
That's a good question.
609
Does any part of you worry?
610
Another really useful question is, how do I respond when someone is trying to communicate something to me?
611
Do I stonewall or do I accept?
612
Am I able to pause and think the issue might be with me?
613
Or do I always have to go, I can't answer that.
614
It's the other person.
615
You're being unfair.
616
You're putting me under pressure.
617
What is your level of emotional dexterity?
618
So that's a good question to be asking yourself as well.
619
Also, one of the really good questions in any relationship is to say, how have I annoyed you?
620
How have I frustrated you?
621
You know, a lot of what happens between couples is there are things
622
that are bubbling away beneath the surface that people can't find the courage to say.
623
And because they can't say them, the problem doesn't improve.
624
The problem gets worse.
625
People can't have sex anymore.
626
A lot of the reason why people can't have sex, it's got nothing to do with sex, it's to do with the fact they feel disconnected and angry and misunderstood.
627
You can't have sex with someone who you feel misunderstood by or you feel furious with.
628
What helps desire is trust.
629
And the way to build up trust is to communicate and particularly communicate ruptures of trust.
630
So if you wanna have good sex, don't get a candle, don't go to a hotel, start to ask each other, have I annoyed you?
631
Is there something I've done that you'd like to tell me?
632
And you say this patiently, not in the middle of the night when you're stressed or maybe you've drunk too much, But when you're calm, when there's a sense of, you know, lightness and forgiveness,
633
use the right moment to ask the right question.
634
We're living in a world where therapeutic language and insights have spread for the first time far outside the consulting room.
635
There is mass adoption at a superficial level of therapeutic language.
636
And the area where we find this most obviously is social media and in particular Instagram, which is enormous.
637
It's an enormous force in the world, and it has brought up a generation, I'd say, to speak in pseudo or vaguely therapeutic terms.
638
I don't mean that as an insult.
639
Some of these insights have been fantastic.
640
People are now able to talk about, let's say, attachment theory.
641
You know, the mention of an avoidant attachment theory
642
or an anxious attachment theory in many circles now doesn't create the puzzlement that it was generating 15 years ago.
643
15 years ago, this was not common knowledge that was still in the university, in textbooks, and in the consulting room.
644
Now it's out in the world.
645
And the medium that has changed this, as I say, is social media.
646
What's the problem?
647
I'll tell you one of the problems.
648
One of the problems is whose fault it is.
649
The tone of a lot of social media posting blames the problem for the struggles in relationships fairly
650
and squarely on the partner, not on yourself.
651
There is an obsession with finding borderline people, narcissistic people, avoidance, anxious people out in the world.
652
And of course they exist.
653
But the tone is the problem.
654
The tone says, get out.
655
These are red flags and everybody that you're meeting, the reason why you haven't made a relationship work is because these people are unbalanced psychologically.
656
My answer is this.
657
If you are looking to find a person with no problems at all, with no psychological disturbances, good luck to you.
658
If you're looking to find somebody with no red flags, good luck to you.
659
Everybody has red flags.
660
That's part of what it means to be human.
661
That's the story of Genesis.
662
The story of Genesis is Adam and Eve had some red flags.
663
That's what it is to be human being, is somebody with a red flag.
664
So the problem is not the red flag, it's how you deal with it.
665
And this is what I worry that therapeutic culture on social media doesn't train us to do.
666
It doesn't train us for patience.
667
It doesn't train us to think we might be the problem.
668
It doesn't ask us to think what we've brought to the situation.
669
It doesn't create an atmosphere of forgiveness.
670
The reason is very simple.
671
Outrage sells.
672
It's more fun.
673
It feels more spirited.
674
It's punchier to say, that ex of yours, they're the avoidant.
675
They're crazy.
676
They're narcissistic.
677
It sounds better, and it leaves everybody happier.
678
But long -term, It's not the solution.
679
Chapter 4.
680
Overcoming status anxiety and loneliness.
681
You know, we mustn't forget that one of the sources of love
682
that is most important to us is not just interpersonal romantic love, but the love that you get from other people,
683
strangers, dependent on your standing in the community, your status.
684
You know, status is a really interesting feature of everybody's ambitions.
685
You know, why do we work so hard?
686
We work so hard not just for material rewards, we work hard in order to gain the esteem,
687
the respect, the regard of people whose good affections we rely on to feel good about ourselves.
688
If you said to somebody, you've got a choice.
689
Either we'll give you $10 million a year, but every time anyone sees your face, they'll go, oh my god, I hate that person, they're awful, I despise that person.
690
You could have that option, or we'll give you a minimum wage, absolute minimum, bare minimum to survive.
691
But every time anyone sees you, they'll go, oh my god, that person is amazing, it's just great, etc. We know which one we'd pick.
692
We know that we would pick the love and affection of the stranger
693
and the respect and esteem of our community way over simple material rewards.
694
Now, in our culture, the reason why most of us work
695
so hard and the reason why most of us are so interested in money has nothing to do with the money.
696
It's just that money is the chief conduit towards the love and respect that we stand to gain from our communities.
697
If you change the status system and what it's earned, you know, what you get status for, you will change the incentive structure.
698
There have been periods in history where the number one thing
699
you needed to do in order to have a high status was to worship God really intently.
700
And then if you're good at worshiping God, you'd be considered amazing.
701
And then people did that in droves, and that was considered very, very serious.
702
In other cultures, it was considered very serious to be a good hunter.
703
So people became more and more good at hunting.
704
And that was what you did.
705
And that was the route to getting status.
706
Nowadays, how do we know what the status system is based on?
707
We know it because of a very simple question that any stranger will ask us within normally 30 seconds of meeting us, what do you do?
708
And according to how you answer that question, people are either going to be really pleased to see you.
709
Oh, great, we must hang out.
710
Or they'll leave you alone by the peanuts and they don't want to know you.
711
We're living in a world of snobs.
712
A snob is really anyone who takes a small part of you
713
and comes to a global decision of what you're worth and how much love you're worth.
714
And that That is the reality, the brute reality of the way in which we live in society.
715
We will be judged ruthlessly by our careers, by what is on our business card.
716
And we will be given love, status love, not romantic love, but status love, maybe romantic love too,
717
that's another consideration, but generally status love according to how impressive we are in the field of careers.
718
It's why we work so hard, it's why we're so panicked about careers, and it's why there's such despair when careers don't work out.
719
We're losing not just materially, we're losing our sense of our good name in the eyes of society.
720
It's very brutal.
721
I think older societies, pre -modern societies...
722
had some built -in safety valves to try and protect people from
723
that unitary sense that what you are worth is what you do, that you are what you do.
724
It's always been somewhere there in the system because we are material creatures.
725
We do depend on material goods.
726
So it's always been that as part of the mix.
727
But other cultures have softened this in a way that ours no longer does.
728
They've softened it in a number of ways.
729
Firstly, through religion, through the mass adoption of religion.
730
And the interesting thing about religion is generally the gods that people have worshipped love people not for what they do, but for who they are.
731
They look inside your soul.
732
And that's a vital defense mechanism.
733
You're giving unto Caesar what Caesar wants, and, you know, the rest is up to God.
734
And that gives you a sense of freedom.
735
It's like, well, I may not be performing so well in my career, but I've got an alternative route to love and affection.
736
That's a huge defense.
737
The other thing that really protected people was isolation.
738
You know, we are one of the first societies to be constantly surrounded, 24 -7, by other people.
739
We live in vast cities.
740
Most of the world's population now lives in a city.
741
That wasn't the case until, you know, a minute ago.
742
This is very new.
743
When you don't live in a city, what do you live surrounded by? a very important psychological tool called nature.
744
Trees, rivers, forests, grasses, insects, animals.
745
What on earth has these things got to do with love?
746
Well, what they do is they break
747
that unitary system where you are worth what another human being defines you as being worth.
748
When you're surrounded by nature, you're no longer just defined by other humans.
749
You get to live in a more expansive, a more liberated world where your value is you know up to wider forces
750
and that lends a lot of oxygen and a lot of freedom
751
that we've lost as we've moved towards urban societies and of course as we've gone online.
752
Okay here's another pet idea of mine you know religion disappeared
753
as the guiding force in people's lives around 100 years ago
754
when Nietzsche famously said God is dead he announced the death of God.
755
Now you might say hang on a minute there are lots and lots of believers.
756
There are.
757
Of course there are.
758
Many societies are still defined by religion.
759
However, one can propose that in key ways we are no longer living in religious societies.
760
We are living in modern, secular societies that are based around romantic love, status performance, material goods, a denial of nature,
761
a cutting off from the natural world, and a cutting off from any sense of human agency being limited.
762
We believe in human agency being able to determine everything.
763
Along with that comes a denial, of course, of our own mortality.
764
How would we start to do something about that?
765
Well, I think we need to look to religions for answers.
766
Religions have worked it out.
767
I think that we need to steal from religions
768
and to institute in secular culture many of the manoeuvres and safety valves and genuine insights that religions were brilliant at delivering.
769
For example, we need to break bread together.
770
All religions bring people, strangers, together to break bread from different communities in order to lessen suspicion.
771
We need to get back to a tradition of communal dining and of breaking the barriers that separates strangers from one another.
772
We need also to talk with intelligence and intent about love
773
and about our capacity and possibility of loving better than we do, of reminding ourselves that we need to make an effort around love.
774
Buddhism does this, Christianity does this, all the main religions emphasize not just that love is important
775
but that love is hard and we need a little bit of that.
776
Religions also, almost all of them have created spaces that are separate from the spaces of commerce, spaces that are beautiful, spaces that are peaceful,
777
spaces that bring people together to create a different kind of fellowship, one more guided by a spirit of friendship and kindness and vulnerability.
778
We need to replace our temples and churches with secular buildings
779
that aren't just going to be shopping malls and that aren't just going to be car showrooms, but the places that will bring people together, the most beautiful community centers imaginable,
780
still need to be built.
781
And I'd love to see them built.
782
We think we're alone in being alone.
783
And we think there is shame that attends to admitting how alone we are.
784
The route out of loneliness is to share your loneliness, is to dare to believe that the things you are most ashamed of cannot be,
785
structurally, they cannot be things that exist in your heart alone, that they have to be things that despite the evidence, the surface evidence of other people's cheerfulness,
786
probably exist in other people.
787
Other people are also lonely, are also sad, also feel lost, also feel that they've messed up, also have a hard time in their relationships.
788
The beginning of friendship begins with the capacity to be vulnerable and to admit to loss and sadness.
789
We think that friendship is a mutual club for cheerfulness.
790
It's not.
791
True friendship begins with tears, with the ability to admit to sadness.
792
This is why men, in many ways, have a harder time than women, forming deep friendships, because men, there's still in many societies a real taboo around male tears.
793
Men cannot admit to being sad and weak without feeling that they have lost their masculinity.
794
Extremely unfortunate as a route to friendship, because it means that your friendship will need to be based on posturing and on the recounting of triumph and success.
795
Whereas in fact, of course, true friendship begins with the revelation of vulnerability and fragility.
796
As ever with a problem, self -awareness and mutual awareness is the way through.
797
Once we can see the pattern, we can break the pattern.
798
Once we can see that we're living in a prison defined by material, a material status system that many of us don't value,
799
that we are doing this not because we want to, but because it exists, we can start to find alternatives.
800
I'm not talking about, you know, throwing in your job.
801
I'm talking about evaluating yourself and other people beyond your job.
802
I'm talking about getting back in touch with nature.
803
I'm talking about getting in touch with vulnerability and sharing that vulnerability.
804
These are all tools and mechanisms
805
that we can put in motion to escape an otherwise really oppressive
806
and genuinely loveless environment in which we're forced to live and can't breathe very easily in.
807
You could define love as the quest to overcome isolation and understand someone else and find understanding by someone else.
808
It is the most noble and the most complicated of goals.
809
If anyone can reach the end of their life and say, I have loved, I've loved properly, I've understood and been understood, I've helped and been helped, this is a life well lived.
810
We don't need to achieve that much that is splendid in the material world
811
or in the world of insight in the humanities, insight in the sciences.
812
What we really ultimately need to do to make our time
813
worthwhile is to have built a bridge to another human
814
and to have opened our heart and have seen theirs with respect and humility and generosity.
815
That truly ultimately is the definition of a good life.
816
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Why This Video Is Perfect for English Speaking Practice
This video features Alain de Botton’s thoughtful, conversational tone—ideal for english speaking practice. His pace is steady, with natural pauses and emphasis that mimic real-world dialogue, making it easy to follow and replicate. The content blends complex ideas with accessible language, exposing learners to rich vocabulary while keeping sentences structured and clear. It’s a goldmine for practicing both fluency and comprehension.
Breaking Down Natural Speech Patterns
Let’s look at a few lines that showcase natural English flow: - “We know in theory that love matters a lot. It's in every pop song, it's the center of most religions.” The repetition of “it's” creates a conversational rhythm, while the short, connected sentences mirror how we speak casually. - “Why did that essay go viral? I think it went viral because people all feel…” The question-and-answer structure is common in spoken English, and the filler phrase “I think” makes the speech sound unscripted. - “You know, status is a really interesting feature of everybody's ambitions.” “You know” is a natural filler that softens the tone, a key trait of everyday conversation. These examples show how to balance clarity with authenticity.
A Simple Shadowing Routine to Try
Use the shadowing technique with this video for effective practice:
- Watch a 30-second clip, focusing on de Botton’s intonation and stress.
- Play the clip again, pausing after each sentence to repeat it aloud—mimic his pace and emphasis. This is shadow speech in action.
- Record yourself, then compare it to the original. Notice differences in rhythm or word stress.
- Use a shadowing app to slow down the audio if needed, gradually building up to full speed.
Repeat this loop daily, and you’ll soon notice your speech sounding more natural and confident. Remember, the goal is to absorb the flow of English, not just memorize words.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if that's our true home, we will be · if confronted with their behavior will go · If we think that we will have |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | we've been · have been · it's been |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | were formed · was seen · were seen |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | those who come · everyone who is · important, which is |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.