Alain De Botton

Or is there someone who would be rather frightened if you were better at maths?

So families are difficult places and dynamics occur that really go way beyond what we're ordinarily prepared to tolerate.

What does love mean?

If you mean kind of adult romantic relationships, adult romantic relationships are a kind of litmus test of our emotional development.

And that's why very many of us find them very, very hard.

They're also...

a moment where your past catches up with your present.

Because the way in which we love as adults owes a huge amount to the way in which we experience love as children.

You could say that what we're looking for in adult romantic relationships is often a sense of familiarity, not so much happiness.

People go, oh, I'm looking to be happy.

Steady.

Maybe not.

Maybe what you're really looking for is a sense of familiarity, which might be

it might be that what you're really looking for is suffering, neglect, feeling that you're not that important to somebody, feeling that somebody's got something more important to do other than be with you.

I mean, this is why people make such, as it were, strange choices in relationships.

I mean, I'm sure we've all had situations where

You recommend that a good friend of yours goes out with another good friend of yours to go on a date.

Yes.

And you think, these people really should match.

And they've both got so much to offer the world.