Alain de Botton on doing love wrong
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Why does Alain de Botton say we’re doing love all wrong?
The hookup. Love and
honey all On Triple J. Hey, welcome to the Hookup. I'm Sarah McVee, filling in for Hannah Riley. And tonight we're gonna talk all about love. Our guest is one of the most famous living philosophers in the world, Alain de Baton. He says, we're doing love all wrong.
When it comes to love, we just think you just go with the flow, you go with the feeling. And relationships often go wrong 'cause there are strangely things you should learn in order to become a better lover.
He says we've got a warped view of love and it's time to do away with romanticism.
Romanticism is the ideology behind most novels, films, love songs. And I think a lot of the reason why our relationships go wrong is that we've been reading the wrong books and watching the wrong films and listening to the wrong songs. And what I mean by wrong is not that they're bad. Sometimes they're just amazingly good and exciting and thrilling and seductive, but they give us a misleading picture of love, and it's a picture of love that leads us to panic when we are actually in a relationship and we think, hang on a minute, this is not anything like I expected it would be, or not very much like. And you know, as creatures we're very prone to deciding on whether we're happy or unhappy, depending on what we think of as normal.
Are you trying to lower everyone's expectations?
No, not at all. I think the name of the game is not lowering your expectations. It's knowing how to reach the expectations that you have. And I think that we live in a society where we think that so much has to be planned and uh learnt for. So like if I said I was gonna learn to fly a plane, um you'd think that was totally rational. And if I said I'm just gonna pick it up by feeling, I'm just gonna follow my fe I I'm gonna do some brain surgery by my following Following my feelings, you think like this man's mad. So in areas like piloting or brain surgery, we know there are rules, we know that there are principles you've got to learn. When it comes to love, we just think you just go with the flow, you go with the feeling.
And relationships often go wrong 'cause There are strangely things you should learn in order to become a better lover. I don't mean by that like Kama Sutra better lover, but but I mean just in the broader sense, there are things you need to know in order to navigate the world of relationships. And you don't get taught them at school. Uh no parent tends to mention them to kids, and they just you know, where are you supposed to pick this stuff up?
You're listening to The Hook Up, a show all about sex and relationships, and we're talking about how to pick a partner with the British philosopher Alain de Baton. Alain, you say picking someone based on love is a new idea.
It's new and it's tricky because, you know, most of us we enter adulthood and we're not able to love just anyone. All of us we we know this in the physical area where we say we've got types, like, you know, they've gotta have, I don't know, brown hair or they've gotta be short or they've gotta be tall or whatever it is. So we know we've got types physically, but we've also, of course, got types psychologically. And most of the time we don't really understand why. But we just know that certain people are kind of right and certain people are kind of wrong. And You know, very basically This this these types have a slightly sinister or complicated origin. Most of the time, we love as adults according to patterns that were set in childhood.
Adult love is always built upon childhood love. And most of us, when we're looking for a partner, we're looking for someone who will feel familiar. Not someone who will necessarily treat us right, but someone who will feel familiar. And there could be a difference between some Someone loving us and someone feeling familiar, and most of us grew up and had childhoods where without anyone wishing to be mean to us, there was something a little bit difficult in that childhood. Something which means that nowadays, as adults, when we look for love, we're not necessarily looking for the partner who can treat us totally nicely and sweetly, etc.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why does Alain de Botton say we’re doing love all wrong?
0:03–4:54
2
How does romanticism distort our expectations of relationships?
4:54–8:57
3
What early‑life patterns shape the partners we choose as adults?
8:57–13:25
4
Which questions should you ask a new crush to avoid future problems?
13:25–18:10
5
When is it time to end a relationship according to de Botton?
18:10–22:51
6
How can we balance the desire for excitement with the need for loyalty?
22:51–27:19
7
What role should honesty and constructive criticism play in a healthy partnership?
27:19–31:04
8
Why does de Botton view marriage as a useful ‘cage’ and what purpose does it serve?
31:04–36:21