On Relationships and Love: On Finding Love: The Three Instincts Part II

In addition to providing the three instincts, the School of Life also discusses how all three of them can be problematic. So to introduce that conversation they say, our society encourages us not to probe our three instincts for completion, endorsement, and familiarity too much. We are encouraged to go out of our feelings and to trust our instincts. However, a degree of wisdom begins with the knowledge that our instincts will have points to be extremely misleading. This is a feature of all human instincts, not merely the affectionate kind. We're not spontaneous experts in knowing what is good for us. An instinct is not easy to discount or dislodge, but it is possible to improve upon it and train it towards maturity. We will always be creatures of instinct, but we can learn to manage our drives more effectively. By doing so, we will radically improve our chances of finding someone we can love successfully over the long term. So the problem with our instincts for completion is that it drives us towards strengths and others that promise to compensate for weaknesses in our own natures. What this means in practice is that in order to become complete, two things must happen. We need to be willing to learn things and our partner must be willing to teach us things and vice versa. The success of love will depend on success at learning and teaching. Unfortunately, we tend to fail badly in both areas. So, where I think philosophy comes in here is actually, this is a good timing. Our last discussion and our next discussion from our index of our book will be about fear and confidence. I think one of the virtues that's key to being good at this, teaching and learning in a relationship is being confident, both in ourselves and also in the relationship. Because teaching and learning, you got to be careful to not, let's say, be offended when your significant other has good intentions, which is to say the intention of teaching you and helping you grow. That requires confidence. And I also think when you're teaching, you have to believe that the other person will, in the same way, not interpret what you're offering as something offensive. So confidence is key and it's a virtue that we'll be talking a lot about in our next few lectures when we discuss the chapter on fear and confidence. So I want to mention that before moving on to what the School of Life offers, which is the following, in terms of a solution to this, a flourishing relationship should be a form in which we teach each other many things and gracefully learn in turn. If we understand ourselves properly, we will know that there are many sides of us that need improvement. Love aims to be a safe arena in which two people can gently teach and learn how to grow into better versions of themselves. Teaching and learning does not symbolize an abandonment of love. It is the basis upon which we can develop into better people. So once again, this notion of knowing ourselves, knowing that we're not perfect, that requires confidence to face our own flaws, let's say, to work on those flaws. As we had the great quote from Seneca, learn or learning to love requires working to perfect ourselves, that, again, I think requires confidence, it requires humility, which those are very similar terms, very similar ideas. And the more we practice that within ourselves, the more we are willing to have, let's say, our significant others, point to, hopefully, as this reading says, gently point, right, or kindly point lovingly, point to areas in which we can grow without getting offended. The problem with our instinct for endorsement is that the romantic script of love tells us that our significant other will and must understand us without us needing to speak. They will endorse our lonely, confused, hard to reach aspects just by intuition. Although this is very touching, there's a huge problem here in the long term. It dissuades us from the difficult, but necessary task of explaining ourselves, what we want, how we feel, why we are sad, and what irritates us. We start to think that our significant others should simply be able to know the contents of our minds without us doing anything to share them. So where does philosophy come in here? I think the self-writing practice is a great way to cultivate the solution to this problem with improving on the instinct for endorsement, right? As he says, even in a very successful relationship, there is only a tiny amount that a significant other should be expected to know of their partner without it having to be explained in language. We should not become furious when our significant other doesn't guess right. Rather than yelling or retreating into a sulk, we should have the courage to try to explain to teach them calmly. So self-writing to me and writing in general is a great way to work on speaking more clearly for a couple of reasons. As I hope we've made clear already, self-writing makes our thoughts more clear to us because we can see them. But it's also giving us practice in expressing ourselves through writing. If you want to be a good speaker, I think obviously you have to write, you know, most of the time I would say, you write the speech first, right? Which of course isn't to say that some people are very gifted in their ability to give a great speech without thinking about it at all, sure, right? But ultimately, to practice writing, I think, is again, to practice expressing our thoughts clearly and examining them clearly. So to get into a practice of self-writing, especially around issues that might impact us in relationships, I think is really helpful in making sure that we don't even expect ourselves just to understand ourselves because even that isn't easy, right? So the idea that self-writing is a pathway to understanding ourselves and can also be a pathway to expressing ourselves such that our significant other can understand us, right? These are really powerful ideas, I think, that could be really helpful. And I've known, you know, from my work as a philosophical consultant, I've worked with a few people at this point and I've had people adopt self-writing practices and tell me that it's helped them tremendously in their marriages, for example. So much so that, or one example that really demonstrated that was one of my clients actually had their significant other read certain parts of their writing because they just really loved what they wrote and then want to have to like read the paper, right? And they didn't want to just try to say it and like miss certain aspects of it. So they literally just gave their significant other the notebooks and read that page and they said it was very helpful, right? So we can clarify our thinking, we can clarify our knowledge of ourselves and those are really helpful things in terms of practice when it comes to expressing ourselves to others so they can understand us more clearly. And as I just said, right, even the writing itself can actually be the thing the person reads. So I think for working on the improvement of the instinct for endorsement, that self-writing that we've been talking about a lot this semester might be really useful. The problem with our instinct for familiarity is that the caregiving figures in our lives during our childhoods may not merely be associated with tenderness and understanding. They may have mixed up their love with the host of problematic components. These qualities may now be the very things we need to find present in someone before we experience ourselves as in love with them. That of course would be the problematic components. So how can we work on this? The instinct for familiarity leads us to two kinds of difficult types. People who have the same bad qualities as caregiver figures and people who have none of the bad qualities as these figures, but none of their good qualities either. Okay, therefore, the School of Life is offering the following solution. They believe that we should work more so to direct our efforts to changing the way we characteristically deal with the difficulties we are attracted to because ultimately they're pessimistic in this book about whether human beings can ever completely change the types of people that we're attracted to, and I would argue, of course, and I'm sure they would do that. There are certain traits that we should work to entirely avoid. Of course, certain behaviors, certain characteristics, of course, are ones that we should avoid entirely. That being said, this is more for those that we acknowledge or that maybe we can acknowledge that you know what? Okay, this is something I would be willing to deal with to sustain a healthy, loving relationship, but it's difficult to do so. Right? What they're suggesting, of course, is that there's an enormous opportunity to move from a child to an adult pattern of response in relation to some difficulties that we find ourselves to be consistently attracted to. So we want to work to be less agitated in response to these things, these characteristics, these behaviors, and that response for them will really make a significant difference. Right? So this is for me, I think, an acceptance of the simple but powerful fact that nobody's perfect, right? So nobody's perfect, we might be attracted to traits that are to use their word problematic. But that's a part of what it means to love people, to acknowledge that we're all imperfect. as we talked about with self-love, right? That's an important pathway to acceptance. You know, that acknowledgement is a necessary part of that acceptance, so we want to work to kind of accept the traits that we might be attracted to and then decrease the intensity around our negative response. Okay, we should keep reminding ourselves of the awkward truth that certain qualities are difficult for us. It's not a mistake that we've been drawn to this person. We should remind ourselves that our room for maneuver is limited. The task is not to hate a partner for their deficiencies. It is to get interested in a kindly way in their development. Right, and some of what we are attracted to again in this reason and this instinct is based in childhood. Right, so we've had experience with childhood caregivers that according to their perspective, right, might create some problematic traits that we for some reason find attractive. So I think this is an interesting opportunity through self writing or maybe a meditation session, right, to kind of think back, right, what tend to be the patterns of attraction that we've exhibited, right. Both in let's say traits that we would characterize as positive traits and traits that we might characterize as problematic or let's say detrimental to a long term relationship. How might we again, in some cases, of course, stop entirely being attracted to how can we avoid that and then for some of these traits that are like, let's say less intense, but keep recurring, right. How do we learn how to cope with them better in future or in current relationships, right. Because if we could discern the pattern, we can see where they might come from. That might be really helpful information. Right again, how do we work to kind of, you know, improve our ability to grapple with these traits, especially if they're traits that don't seem like they're going away. So reflect on past relationships, both romantic relationships and to kind of stick with this theme, think about your relationships with caregivers from childhood, what characteristics they exhibit. How do the characteristics they exhibited through actions and words and what have you. How did maybe even, you know, going back to the formative moments, how did they impact you with these things. Someone might have been a little bit forgetful, someone might have been a little bit angry, right. How do we interpret our current world as a result of those past experiences. Things that might be useful to think about. [BLANK_AUDIO]