On Relationships and Love: On Finding Love Part I

Hello everybody, how you doing? I hope all is well. Welcome to another lecture. This week we're sticking with our chapter on relationships and love and as promised we're going to have some lectures now on romantic love. So we're going to begin our conversation with a book by the School of Life called How to Find Love, which as we said on introduction, it's sort of applying philosophy to something that epictetus I think would agree might be outside the realm of what it could master, right? That being said, it's useful still. And as we'll have in the next few lectures, hopefully at least I'll offer some excerpts from the book How to Find Love, especially given that in our bibliotherapy book The Exrupts Are Relatively Short, that will illuminate how we might learn to make different choices in regards to choosing a partner. We might even learn about why we've made the choices we've made in the past, how we can work through that, and hopefully it'll shed light on some of our patterns, right? And make a stand to which we might be able to make some new healthier choices for ourselves and others in regards to romantic love. The first part of this conversation in the book provides somewhat of a historical background on why we might be viewing love the way we do. And what's essential to this is to understand, and this is a little bit of my perspective, what we're searching for maybe is a healthier balance between what the School of Life will refer to as instinct and reason. All right, so we're not here necessarily discussing the elimination of instinct or emotion or what we might typically associate in our contemporary understanding of what a loving relationship is. We're not trying to eliminate that. I think we're trying more so to control it, to understand it, such that it's healthy for us and our significant other. So with that in mind, I want to read a little bit here about this historical background, because I do think it's pretty interesting. So the School of Life shares with us, in the middle of the 18th century in Europe, a revolution of ideas began that has now spread around the world, a movement known to us today as romanticism. Romanticism declared that the only real foundation for a relationship was an intense bond of love, all practical considerations that had in the past influenced matchmaking were deemed either negligible or irrelevant. The marriage of reason gave way to the marriage of feeling. We were now left to choose our own partners without reference to the wishes of anyone else, be it family or society. The ideal lover was to be found by instinct, not by reason. The idea of following an instinct took on an enormous role in the story of love. Far from being a passing folly, the feeling of being in love was now interpreted as a supremely reliable guide to half a century or more of conjugal happiness. The arrival of this feeling was understood to be a little mysterious. One couldn't predict it, justify it, or wish it to occur at will. It would simply descend upon us in the presence of certain people for reasons that lay outside conscious understanding. It had elements in common with a religious visitation. One would become aware of a variety of symptoms, and would describe the literature in art, a quick and hard beat, a sense of having a lighted on the one, difficulty sleeping, and urge to speak to almost everyone about the beloved and a desire to listen to music and go into nature together with this person who was the one. Romanticism's faith in the power of instinctive attraction has been touching and at points exhilarating, but it has also proved enormously problematic. In comparison with the hopes we harbor of love, the way most of our lives turn out can appear extremely disappointing. When we take into account the statistics on marital unhappiness and divorce, we must conclude that raw instinct alone cannot be judged and a specially reliable method of locating the right partner. Our belief and instinct has been no friend of our chances of happiness. We can't go back to the marriage of reason, but we may need to look for a future beyond the relationship of instinct. At the School of Life, we anticipate and are trying to create tools for what we call a psychological relationship. A union where the best insights of psychology are brought to bear on the complex business of finding and maintaining love. So as I hopefully highlighted before, it's not a total elimination of instinct, right? It's this new thing. They're suggesting a new approach to how we might find love in our modern era. I think a lot of the points raised in the discussion about romanticism provided a moment ago and considerations around modern developments, right? This notion too that he presents the idea that which is not based on anything but the individual I think is a very interesting idea. What might that even mean for the relationship itself? So again, this book is I think about finding love and I think some of these points will also resonate in regards to how we might sustain love. That being one of them perhaps, right? How are we encouraged to view and understand love? And we even, you know, I think the introduction we talked about this a little bit too. The ancient Greek conception that Deboutan challenges and his other piece we might talk about essays in love, right? That's by Alan Deboutan. How to find love is by the School of Life, which is a project founded by Alan Deboutan. He challenges that ancient Greek conception, right? That we're all born with twice as many limbs and we're split in half by Zeus and we're searching our whole lives, you know, ardently searching with a sense of yearning for our missing other half, right? And he challenges this, right? So we could even see that although romanticism based on the history we provided was a development in the 18th century, there were I think earlier, or let's say even earlier notions that were similar to this, right? When we think about Aphrodite, right? When we think about the gods getting involved in life, you know, on earth. When we think about something like Cupid, right? Shooting you with an arrow. Literally the arrow descends from the sky. So there's really interesting sort of cultural acere marks upon, right? And then there's some tropes, anecdotes even that inform the way we look at love, or at least let's say love based on instinct, right? And he's not, once again, I don't think he's at all implying that that is an entirely horrible thing, but he wants us to apply some psychology, and I'm also adding, I think, and he would agree, some philosophy as well, right? To again, ask questions, to engage in dialogue meaningfully, to work to know ourselves, to care for ourselves, so that we can offer that to our significant others and have a thriving relationship. Or one of the major remarks we get from Deboutan is the idea that a relationship should be a place characterized by almost constant kind teaching and learning. Right? So that teaching and learning fuels the growth that is necessary for a healthy relationship. So there's more work than this sort of, let's say, instinctive understanding of love would encourage us to consider, or would connote in a sense, right? There's a sense that nothing's ever perfect and that's okay. In a relationship, or let's say a perspective on loving relationships, that's characterized more by reason. Right, when we apply reason to finding love, we apply reason to being in love, Deboutan, but I think it's highlighting that there might be some real serious benefits to that. So we maybe want to move a little bit away from the romanticism and into this new approach being presented by the School of Life. And I think again, we'll find that there's grounds for self-increase that are really useful, an encouragement and some frameworks for self-increase that will be very useful in this book and the lectures I hope to provide. And in addition to that, there's going to be notes I think that will really help us shift, or potentially help us shift our perspectives on romantic relationships to kind of move a little bit away from what Deboutan and what the School of Life see as a potentially, let's say, how do I kind of summarize this in one word? Potentially disappointing doesn't capture it, right? But I think these new considerations will hopefully lead to less disappointment in love and what kind of give us some new ideas, some new concepts, some new practices to guide us in this very important part of our lives.