Alain De Botton

And so this is why relationships are often so complicated because we're on a track to recreate patterns of suffering that we don't understand we're interested in recreating.

and which we're unconsciously repeating.

So this is why relationships are so strange.

We used to get into relationships because our parents would fit them in, or society would arrange marriage.

Now we have marriages and relationships by instinct.

We get drawn to people.

But those instincts are so much more complicated than we like to think because we're not merely pulled by a desire to be happy.

We're pulled by a desire to rework many of the challenges of our past.

I mean, Freud put it at its best.

His view was that we're looking to...

recreate painful situations that we experienced at the hands of our parents, but give them a better ending.

So for example, someone might be, let's imagine a woman who finds herself very often getting together with angry, intemperate, slightly out of control men.

You say, okay, why is this happening?

Might discover that the past of this person includes a father who was very much like this.

And we might say, goodness, this sounds awful.

This is ever going to end.

The hopeful

psychotherapeutic answer is yes, because what the person's doing is not looking to suffer forever.

What they're looking is to understand the pattern and solve it, ideally with somebody that they can go on a journey with, which is why if you had an angry father,

And you come across a completely calm person.