Alain De Botton

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1,037 appearances 5 recordings 5 series first heard Jan 2024 last heard 1 Jul

Alain De Botton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Conversations · Special Collection: Alain de Botton on the true hardwork of love and relationships · 22 May 2026 podcast

It's like, what?

You're trying to be my teacher?

It sounds a bit sterile.

Totally sterile.

But the ancient Greeks, you see, the ancient Greeks thought that love is education.

They thought that you shouldn't just love everything in a person.

You should only love what is good and virtuous and accomplished.

The rest of the stuff you can tolerate it.

But they believed that the purpose of love is for a couple to educate one another, to become the best version of themselves.

And they take it in turns to be pupil and teacher in a rotating circle and that there's constantly something to learn.

Now, this sounds so weird to our modern age.

I mean, if you got together with your partner and then sort of pulled out a list and said, you know, I've been reading some Plato and I really think that it would be important at this point to teach you a long lesson about your faults because I want to try and make you into a better person.

The person would say, you know, my mother's never said that, you know.

what are you saying?

I thought you loved me.

But I think that many arguments and conflicts between lovers are really attempts by both sides, or one side, to try and teach something.

But they're failed teaching lessons.

And they're failed teaching lessons because we don't accept the legitimacy of education within love.

I mean, you know, so we're very nervous teachers when we go into love.

And that's why, you know, because the background of our minds, we've got the thought,

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