Alain De Botton
speaker
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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You know, they're always looking for attenuating circumstances.
As you say, if a spouse did that, they'll be like, what are you trying to do?
You ruined my life.
And I think that one of the things that my couple learns to do, and the novel is really a story of a couple learning to love.
They learn that love is a skill, not an emotion.
And one of the skills they learn is to treat their partner as if they were a child.
And this sounds odd because it's like, this sounds patronizing.
We're so used to the idea.
that it's patronising to treat someone as younger than they are, that we miss out on the generosity that's also involved in sometimes looking beneath the adult to see the slightly frightened, tired, bolshie little child within that is also fundamentally still okay.
And I think that part of the problem of adults is that we look like adults.
You look at me, I look at you, we both look very grown up.
And that's a problem because actually a lot of us, well, I can't speak for you, I will speak for you.
You know, we've got various bits of us that are quite broken and childlike, etc.
But we don't give ourselves the benefit of the doubt.
And we're quite punitive towards those sides.
And I think we're trying to say, what is love?
Love is the generosity towards the broken, inarticulate, difficult sides of another person.
Absolutely.
It sounds very old-fashioned and whatever, but I think that's generally, look, it can be done with humour.
It doesn't have to be pious.
Showing 721–740 of 1,037 · page 37 of 52
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