Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person – Alain de Botton

[Genevieve Simperingham]

These quotes may seem a bit heavy, but Alain has a way of presenting with an element of humour and humility that makes for a very engaging talk about some of the pitfalls of romantic relationships, and hence the perspective shifts we need to make if we’re to truly reduce the suffering and increase the harmonious relating in our core attachment relationships with a partner. “The way we love as adults sits on top of our early childhood experiences.” “Quite a lot of our early experiences of love are bound up with various kinds of suffering”. “We think we’re out to find partners who will make us happy, but we’re not, we’re out to find partners who will feel familiar, and that isn’t a good thing because familiarity may be bound up with particular kinds of torture.” “We’re not merely on a quest to find happiness, we’re on a quest to find a partner who feels familiar, and this radically undermines our capacity to find a good partner.” “We believe that a true lover will guess what’s in our minds, this is one of the great errors that humans make”.

In this talk Alain talks about the difficulty to know ourselves, hence the importance of focusing more time in self-reflection. Partners can see the faults in each other, it’s easier to avoid the truth of that which is difficult and hence build up avoidance and aversions, the temptation when giving feedback is to do so in a blunt and harsh way. “Maturity is about the capacity to know that the person you love is a mixture of the good and the bad”. He talks realistically about the complexity and imperfectness of humans.

Luckily, there are some very skilled relationship experts who have worked out how to make it easier for couples to be honest without being harsh, to be vulnerable instead of shutting down, pushing away and becoming emotionally unavailable, to be intimate without being intrusive, to share problems rather than simply blaming.

[Cleo Webster]

Haha…. thanks for the video link. I liked it very much.”you’ll choose the partner that causes the same pain you went through as a child trying to be loved” the painful comfort zone! A very clear reminder.

[Marie-Yianna Kalekas]

So good! A wonderfully clear and humourous reminder to choose carefully what we attend to, and to examine why we do.

[Author]

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