4. How Romanticism Ruined Love
13 jun 2020
LOVE & ROMANCE
Soulmates. Enchanted and in love. Happily ever after.
LOVE & ROMANCE
Soulmates. Enchanted and in love. Happily ever after.
we want them to exist. but do they really exist?
so we've learnt from movies, books, cultural ideology that Love & Romance is about finding and being with the "soul mate" or "the one"... but its "romantic" rules, setting and concept realistically destroys our relationships.
Video below: https://youtu.be/sPOuIyEJnbE
The ideology of Romanticism has been fatal to our chances of long-term happiness in modern relationships. Here, School of Life founder Alain de Botton delivers a lecture at the Sydney Opera House charting a wiser course for love.
Some interesting things from this lecture and perspective:
1. some quotes from the video:
romanticism suggests that love is an acceptance of a person as a whole being. so it's likely that in a relationship, one would say "if you love me, why do you criticise me? - so love and criticism cannot exist together, because if they do, it means love has failed. (video @33:30)
ancient greeks on love... they think that love is reserved for the admiration of another human being - for their virtues, their qualities, their accomplishments in their character and their achievements. for the ancient greeks, they think that love should be a process of mutual education in which two people, under the auspices of love, undertake to educate one another to become better versions of themselves. and they do this not to be cruel, not as a way to bring each other down, but because they have the best sincerest interest of the other in their heart and therefore, love is a process where a teacher and a pupil are constantly rotating roles - everyone is a teacher and everyone is a pupil at certain points and has a lot of things to take on board. it is not a sign that love is being abandoned, it is the proof that love is in action.
2. Source: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/how-romanticism-ruined-love/10096750
Alain de Botton is the founder and Chairman of The School of Life. He is the best-selling author of The News: A User's Manual and, most recently, The Course of Love.
To fall in love with someone feels like such a personal and spontaneous process, it can sound strange - and even rather insulting - to suggest that something else (we might call it society or culture) may be playing a covert, critical role in governing our relationships in their most intimate moments.
3. Source: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/14280312-essays-in-love
“Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love
so we've learnt from movies, books, cultural ideology that Love & Romance is about finding and being with the "soul mate" or "the one"... but its "romantic" rules, setting and concept realistically destroys our relationships.
Video below: https://youtu.be/sPOuIyEJnbE
The ideology of Romanticism has been fatal to our chances of long-term happiness in modern relationships. Here, School of Life founder Alain de Botton delivers a lecture at the Sydney Opera House charting a wiser course for love.
Some interesting things from this lecture and perspective:
1. some quotes from the video:
romanticism suggests that love is an acceptance of a person as a whole being. so it's likely that in a relationship, one would say "if you love me, why do you criticise me? - so love and criticism cannot exist together, because if they do, it means love has failed. (video @33:30)
ancient greeks on love... they think that love is reserved for the admiration of another human being - for their virtues, their qualities, their accomplishments in their character and their achievements. for the ancient greeks, they think that love should be a process of mutual education in which two people, under the auspices of love, undertake to educate one another to become better versions of themselves. and they do this not to be cruel, not as a way to bring each other down, but because they have the best sincerest interest of the other in their heart and therefore, love is a process where a teacher and a pupil are constantly rotating roles - everyone is a teacher and everyone is a pupil at certain points and has a lot of things to take on board. it is not a sign that love is being abandoned, it is the proof that love is in action.
2. Source: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/how-romanticism-ruined-love/10096750
Alain de Botton is the founder and Chairman of The School of Life. He is the best-selling author of The News: A User's Manual and, most recently, The Course of Love.
To fall in love with someone feels like such a personal and spontaneous process, it can sound strange - and even rather insulting - to suggest that something else (we might call it society or culture) may be playing a covert, critical role in governing our relationships in their most intimate moments.
3. Source: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/14280312-essays-in-love
“Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love
4. “We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love
5. “love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love
6. “It’s more than mere coyness to refer to what they have done as “making love.” They haven’t just had sex; they have translated their feelings—appreciation, tenderness, gratitude, and surrender—into a physical act.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love
that psychological dynamics are everywhere, even in sex. And so often, we think of sex as just a sort of pneumatic activity, but really, it’s a psychological activity. And if you try to imagine why people are excited by sex, it’s not so much that it’s a pleasurable nerve-ending business; it’s ultimately that it’s about acceptance.
“I accept you. And I accept you in a way that is incredibly intimate and that would be quite revolting with anyone else. I’m allowing you into my private space as a way of signaling, ‘I like you.’” And what really — we call it getting “turned on,” but what we’re really, as it were, excited by is that someone accepts us with remarkable — in all our…
“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.”
“Look, love is a painful, poignant, touching attempt by two flawed individuals to try and meet each other’s needs in situations of gross uncertainty and ignorance about who they are and who the other person is, but we’re going to do our best,” that’s a much more generous starting point.
So, the acceptance of ourselves as flawed creatures seems to me what love really is. Love is at its most necessary when we are weak, when we feel incomplete, and we must show love to one another at those points.
and there is no such thing as a perfect match — but however well-matched, every couple will encounter these problems, that love is something we have to learn, and we can make progress with, and that it’s not just an enthusiasm; it’s a skill.
7. That’s fascinating, because one of the greatest insults that you can level at a lover in the modern world apparently is to say, “I want to change you.” The Ancient Greeks had a view of love which was essentially based around education, that what love means — love is a benevolent process whereby two people try to teach each other how to become the best versions of themselves.
And it requires forbearance, generosity, imagination, and a million things besides. And we must fiercely resist the idea that true love must mean conflict-free love, that the course of true love is smooth. It’s not. The course of true love is rocky and bumpy at the best of times. That’s the best we can manage as the creatures we are, that flawed humanity, the better chance we’ll have of doing the true hard work of love.
8. Practicalities
Romantic novel: In this genre, we have only a hazy idea of who does the housework. It is not seen as relevant to a relationship. Domesticity is a corrupting force and people who care a lot about it are likely to be unhappy in their relationships. We are unlikely to learn a great deal concerning a couple’s thinking on homework or television for the under fours.
Classical novel: Here relationships are understood to be institutions, not just emotions. Part of their rationale is to enable two people to function as a joint economic unit for the education of the next generation. This is in no way banal. There are opportunities for genuine heroism. Especially around laundry.
The Romantic novel is deeply unhelpful. We have learned to judge ourselves by the hopes and expectations fostered by a misleading medium. By its standards, our own relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory. No wonder separation or divorce so often appear to be inevitable.
They shouldn’t be, we merely need to change our reading matter: to tell ourselves more accurate stories about the progress of relationships, stories that normalise troubles and show us an intelligent, helpful path through them.
Alain de Botton is the bestselling author of The School of Life, The Course of Love and many others.
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