Alain De Botton

I say at one point that in a better world than ours, lovers on a first date, one of the first things they should say to one another is, so how are you crazy?

And they would each see that question as not necessarily...

pejorative one or an insulting one it's like everybody should be on top of their eccentricities and difficulties and see the ways in which they damage others and you know the best wedding present you could ever give anyone is a sort of 150 page manual called why I'm difficult to live with the most dangerous people are those who think that they're easy to live with because they're going to be you know we don't need people to be perfect

But we need people to have a grasp on their imperfections and to be able to explain as far as they can the nature of these imperfections before we've been hurt too badly by them.

Because by the time somebody's really wounded us and then they start to explain, oh, but, you know, it's because my mother, when I was three, I was damaged.

You're not going to listen because, like, you've ruined my life.

I don't care about, you know, where this comes from.

But if you can do it early on, you can explain yourself.

You can say, look, I'm a little damaged in this area, or when I get sad, this happens, or when I get anxious, I have a tendency to do X, Y, and Z. If you can explain it, you're halfway there.

That's such a wise thing.

And, you know, I was thinking about sulking, you know, because there's some sulking going on in the novel.

Oh, yes.

Sulking is a... We're talking about romanticism.

Romanticism is responsible for an epidemic of sulking.

Because if you think of what romanticism... Romanticism tells us that a good lover understands you wordlessly.

You know, there's so many romantic scenes where two lovers seem to complete one another without language.

It's like...

Someone says something like, you know, do you know how it feels in the autumn when you're walking in the mist?

And the other one goes, yes, I know exactly.

You don't need to explain any further.