We Realize It Too Late! – Why You Will Marry The Wrong Person | Alain De Botton

1. 0:00 – 1:14

   Why you’ll (slightly) marry the “wrong” person—and why that’s the point

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:00

      A few years back, you put out an essay entitled, quite provocatively, "Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person." I thought we'd start off this conversation by interrogating that statement. Why is it we will marry the wrong person? Is it something to do with our own personal failures or a more widespread misunderstanding about the nature of long-term relationships?

   2. ABAlain de Botton0:25

      I mean, just to explain that title, it was an ironic title, basically saying everyone's gonna be slightly wrong. Everyone, even the best person that you get together with, will be slightly wrong, and if you can accept their wrongness, you're actually much further along the way to rightness. That is, where the basis of a good relationship is to accept the humanity and the flawed nature of whoever it is that you are together with, and the insistence on a right person is a kind of deification of other human beings, which actually tends to get you into trouble. So a gracious acceptance of our flawed humanity is actually a better basis with which to approach relationships.

   3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:04

      That was the most read article, I believe, on The New York Times back in twenty sixteen-

   4. ABAlain de Botton1:10

      Mm

   5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:10

      ... when you wrote it. What does that say about-

   6. ABAlain de Botton1:14

      Yeah. I mean-

   7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:14

      ... about us?

2. 1:14 – 2:52

   Why the essay resonated: loneliness, shame, and the hidden normality of relationship friction

   1. ABAlain de Botton1:14

      It was quite remarkable because it was also the year of, um, Trump, the year Trump got elected. [chuckles]

   2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:18

      Yeah.

   3. ABAlain de Botton1:18

      So more people clicked on that article than, you know, Donald Trump becomes president. Um, so it was a stri- quite a striking thing. Um, and I would say that ultimately it has to do with our loneliness around the compromises that we all endure in relationships. I think a lot of us are thinking, "Is this normal? Is, is this level of scratchiness, discomfort, complexity normal?" And the simple answer is yes. [chuckles] So if you're in a scratchy, complex relationship, welcome to relationships. I mean, there is still an enormous gap. Despite all these methods of communication-

   4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:52

      Mm

   5. ABAlain de Botton1:52

      ... there is still an enormous gap between what we know from the inside about what it is to be human and what is generally spoken about. There is still enormous areas of silence and therefore enormous areas where we go through the world thinking, "Is this right? Is this normal? Is this level of whatever it is normal?" And almost always the answer is yes. I mean, if you're feeling it, it's a human, um, condition. But we, we tend to... You know, the word shame comes in. We tend to experience it with a lot of shame. We think, "I can't hear an echo of what I know is inside me inside everybody else from what I'm picking up, therefore, where have I gone wrong?" And I think there's nothing more normal than to think that we have gone wrong in relationships, when in fact we are simply having relationships, and relationships will involve a lot of complexity. I mean, let me expand on, on some of the themes. Um, it's

3. 2:52 – 4:22

   We fall in love with familiarity: childhood templates and the search for the known

   1. ABAlain de Botton2:52

      been one of the great insights of psychotherapy that when we are guided by instinct towards a certain sort of person, what's often happening is we are refinding our way to a quality of love and affection that we knew in early childhood. That what we... You know, when we fall in love, we're actually refinding love, a love that we once knew as children. It's got-

   2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:14

      Mm.

   3. ABAlain de Botton3:14

      It'll have some of the quality. Inevitably, it'll have some of the qualities. And, you know, occasionally this bubbles up to consciousness and people will joke and go, "Ha, you know, my partner remind me a bit of my, my mother or my father." And everybody around the table sort of laughs, and we, we think it's, it's very funny. Um, like many funny things, there's a deep truth in that.

   4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:29

      Yeah.

   5. ABAlain de Botton3:29

      Um, undoubtedly, there is an echo. The, the reason why it gets complicated is that for many of us, perhaps almost all of us, the love that we enjoyed in childhood was not merely an unalloyed joy, not merely, um, uh, you know, based on, uh, generosity, attunement, sympathy, all the good things in, that should be there in love. There might also have been distance, unpredictability, fear, a lack of safety, a yearning for a degree of acceptance that was never quite-

   6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:57

      Mm

   7. ABAlain de Botton3:57

      ... within reach. And I think that very often what happens is we then seek those things in the relationships that we pursue most avidly in adulthood. And that ultimately what we're doing in love very often is not so much searching for fulfillment as searching for a sense of familiarity, which may be the same thing, but may importantly not be the same thing if we happen to have childhoods-

   8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:19

      Mm

   9. ABAlain de Botton4:19

      ... where affection was not particularly linked to our flourishing.

4. 4:22 – 7:50

   Perfectionism as cultural baggage: Western expectations and the American ‘perfectible life’ myth

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:22

      Yeah. It's interesting, that was one of the most read articles on The New York Times, which of course is an American publication. Yes, it's a publication that is read all over the world.

   2. ABAlain de Botton4:32

      Mm-hmm.

   3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:33

      But that sort of cultural understanding of what a relationship is deeply fascinates me. So America, the sort of bastion country of the West, okay, what is it, let's say, broadly speaking in the West, we perhaps get wrong or misunderstand about relationships, which then leads us to this often constant disappointment, high divorce rates, high levels of frustration? Is it that our expectations of what a relationship is are fundamentally flawed?

   4. ABAlain de Botton5:09

      Look, the United States is a very difficult country for people to understand outside it.

   5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:12

      Mm.

   6. ABAlain de Botton5:13

      It, it has a very particular history, and one ignores that history, uh, at one's peril. It was founded, the nation was founded by people who believed that we could make life perfectible in, in this life, and that's quite odd because for most other nations, in most other cultures, um, that's not at all the way it is. You know, if you look at Buddhist culture, Hindu culture, or the, the old European version of Christianity, which was not the American version of Christianity, it's the next world. It's the other world. That's where you can achieve perfection. In this world, it's all broken. Um, there is some, you know, the first Buddhist stricture, life is suffering. Um, you've got it all there. The, the foundation of, uh, Catholic Christianity, um, original sin, the notion of life is broken. Now, these things could be seen as too pessimistic, too extreme, et cetera, but I often think that taken in the right way, they offer us something quite unusual and something that we might need to be alive to in the modern world, which is an acceptance of our flawed nature and of the imperfect nature of, of everything, including human-to-human relationships. Now-Back to the United States. This is a country founded by people who think that human life is perfectible.

   7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee6:23

      Mm.

   8. ABAlain de Botton6:23

      It's an amazing ideal. It's produced, you know, moonshots, it's produced, um, artificial intelligence, produced all, you know, lots of extraordinary things that, um, a more settled view of human possibility would not countenance. This has been possible in the United States, but most people in that nation are also still struggling with the ordinary business of living and dying. Uh, that hasn't gone away. And, um, also the ordinary business of forming relationships. And it's possible that some of the beautiful perfectionism has, at the same time, bled into a kind of intolerance, which is, "What's wrong with my life? What's wrong with my partner?" Um, there's an issue. Rather than thinking, "Welcome to existence," one thinks, "Something's gone fatefully wrong with my life."

   9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:12

      Yeah, it kind of goes beyond relationships, doesn't it? It's, what's wrong with my partner? What's wrong with my job?

   10. ABAlain de Botton7:19

       Mm.

   11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:19

       What's wrong with my life? You know, perfectionism is incredibly toxic for so many aspects of our lives, and what you said was really interesting to me, that it was founded on the idea of perfectionism, so it's kind of woven into the culture. It's, you know, you're the fish swimming with this idea of perfectionism around you. And let me contrast that with something that I didn't really understand growing up, but I, I really do now, and I actually have a newfound

5. 7:50 – 11:10

   Arranged marriage, compromise, and the modern ‘red flag’ reflex

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:50

      respect for it. My own parents and how they got together. So my parents grew up in India. They were immigrants to the UK in the 1960s and the 1970s. I was born in the UK, and I learnt as a child that my mum and dad met for the first time the day before they got married.

   2. ABAlain de Botton8:11

      Mm.

   3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:12

      Okay? So my dad came to the UK, I think, in 1962, and in the early '70s, he took two weeks annual leave, okay? Because his family had found him his wife. So Dad flies back to India. I don't know what day. I think it was a Saturday. He, he meets Mum. Well, you know, he meets his, uh, then-to-be wife-

   4. ABAlain de Botton8:36

      Mm

   5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:36

      ... on the Saturday, right? They have a little meeting. The next day, they get married. Dad comes back a few, like a week later, back to work, and a few months later, my mum comes over, right? Now, growing up in the West, I didn't know what to make of that growing up. I, I don't think I really thought about it. A lot of these things you think about as you become an adult. You think, you know, maybe I was a little bit embarrassed to admit that growing up in the West, you know, that my parents had an arranged marriage. But I guess the point I'm trying to make is, I would imagine that for my parents, the idea of compromise was built in-

   6. ABAlain de Botton9:15

      Mm

   7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee9:15

      ... right from the start. It's not, I'm choosing who I want to marry, it's the person's chosen for me. Therefore, I know going in that I'm gonna have to compromise.

   8. ABAlain de Botton9:26

      Mm.

   9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee9:26

      It's interesting, isn't it?

   10. ABAlain de Botton9:27

       Sure. And, and of course, you know, the inevitable thing that happens in any relation, any new relationship, is at some point you stumble on a problem. So you've been having a great time. Um, it's been, you know, very jolly for the first couple of weeks or something, and then suddenly someone says something and you think, "Oh, I don't agree with that," et cetera. Now, in the modern world, we have this language of red flags. I mean, Instagram, you know, is full of this language whereby if there's a problem, the relationship is toxic. If there's a problem with somebody, it's a red flag. And if there's a red flag, you just jump out. You immediately jump out. And obviously, there are behaviors that, you know, no one would want to condone and that are genuinely problematic. But I think there is also an excessive version of this. I mean, if you really have to eradicate from your life everyone who shows any form of problematic behavior of any kind, um, you'll have a very easy life, but you'll also have a very lonely life. I mean, you simply-

   11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee10:16

       [laughs]

   12. ABAlain de Botton10:16

       ... you know, you'll got rid of everybody. So, so if every last red flag has to be exited, um, you know, welcome to solitude. Um, and I think that, you know, there is something beautiful about saying, "Okay, there is an incompatibility here. There is a problem here, but let's try and work it through. Let me try and align my understanding with your understanding." It doesn't mean to say that we're ever gonna agree, but we're at least gonna see where the other one's coming from. And, and that's a discipline, a knack, a skill and-

   13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee10:47

       A skill.

   14. ABAlain de Botton10:48

       Yeah.

   15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee10:48

       It's a skill, isn't it?

   16. ABAlain de Botton10:49

       Sure.

   17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee10:50

       It's a skill that you have to learn.

   18. ABAlain de Botton10:51

       That you have to learn. And we've got this emotion-based view of love. We think that love is an emotion rather than a skill. It's a feeling that can't be questioned, that's either there or not there, rather than the fruit of labor, which just sounds perverse, but it's, I think, a- acutely true.

   19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee11:07

       Where do these false expectations come from, do you think?

6. 11:10 – 15:00

   Romanticism’s myths: soulmates, mind-reading, and why ‘unromantic’ talk saves love

   1. ABAlain de Botton11:10

      Um, I think we're prey to an unhelpful notion of romanticism, which kicks in in the early 19th century, and it starts off as a movement of ideas in the worlds of poetry and literature, and then spreads to infect, or, or at least affect, um, the whole of humanity. And there are all sorts of assumptions behind this romantic ideal. The notion of a soulmate, the notion that there is one person out there who will fully understand you, that soul- that when soulmates are together, they understand each other wordlessly. It's a huge trope in 19th century poetry that true lovers do not need language. So language is being used to say that if you really love, you don't use words, you just understand. Beautiful idea. Goes right back to childhood, 'cause of course our earliest experience as children is being understood by our parents or by caregivers without speaking. Children can't speak in, in their infancy, and they are, on a good day, understood. But children are also very simple. All they need is milk and, you know, a burp or whatever it is. Of course, by the time you reach adulthood, the notion of another adult fully understanding your views on politics, your taste in curtains, uh, your sense of what a good holiday is, uh, your vision of your mother, your hatred, but also loyalty towards your older sister, but, you know, your, your complex feelings towards your brother-in-law, et cetera, et cetera. They're not gonna understand this wordlessly. They're gonna need to be educated. And that sounds like a really weird word. It sounds, if you like-Unromantic. And whenever something sounds unromantic, in my view, it's almost always a sign that it is actually conducive to love.

   2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee12:40

      Hmm.

   3. ABAlain de Botton12:41

      We've got-- We've twisted our vocabulary. So if you said, "Here are two lovers, they're talking at quite a lot of length about what each of them thinks about how to arrange a cutlery drawer or, uh, the bathroom towels," you might think, "Oh God, what are they doing spending all that time? That's not very romantic." But it is romantic if we allow that word to be used to describe things that are f- aiming to help the flourishing of a relationship. Um, defined like that, it's really romantic to discuss money, to discuss education, to discuss expectations around, you know, how to spend holidays, how to manage family, et cetera. These are so-called boring topics, but we're impatient with them, and I think that romantic culture has helped us to become impatient. So I was just discussing some of the preconditions of the romantic worldview. One of them is two people who love each other understand each other without speaking. That is obvious nonsense. Um, the notion also of one soulmate, there's one person for you. Um, also the idea that you will know that person totally by instinct, that you will find your person, you know, you will be ineluctably drawn to them by a force that you don't understand and can't account for. Is that true? Let's also remember that many, many of the ideals of romanticism were delivered by people who had no jobs. I know that sounds kind of weird.

   4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee14:01

      Hmm.

   5. ABAlain de Botton14:02

      But think of all the poets, et cetera. They didn't seem to have to go to the office or the factory or anything.

   6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee14:06

      [laughs]

   7. ABAlain de Botton14:06

      They were just-- They devoted themselves entirely to the business of love. That gave them quite a skewed view of relationships. They had a lot of time to go and see waterfalls and cliffs and, uh, you know, the evening sky. Very lovely things to do, but not necessarily representative of a, a full life.

   8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee14:22

      Yeah.

   9. ABAlain de Botton14:22

      Also, many of these guys died young. Think of Keats, you know, meets his beloved and then develops a cough and then has to go to I-I-Italy to try and recover, and then dies. And it's so easy to fall madly in love and love someone forever if you've only got six months with them.

   10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee14:35

       [laughs]

   11. ABAlain de Botton14:36

       You know, that's-- It's really easy to love someone forever if you're, you know, on your last breath. So I mean, I'm being facetious, but I'm, I'm trying to deliver an important point, which is, you know, if love is m-meshed with, um, practical things, if love's gonna go on for a long time, if love involves being in a community, uh, managing a family, et cetera, you're not gonna be able to follow these romantic tropes.

7. 15:00 – 22:14

   The pan-by-the-sink lesson: small disagreements as portals to big themes

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee15:00

      Yeah. Something I've been thinking about over the past week, I think i-it's, in some ways, it's a silly thing, but it kind of speaks to what you just said about these mundane things. It's these small, mundane things that are everything, actually.

   2. ABAlain de Botton15:15

      Hmm.

   3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee15:15

      So don't know if I should be saying this on a microphone or not really, but my wife and I, I would say, have a different view on how dirty pans should be left in the kitchen. Okay? So on the face of it, the most ridiculous thing. Okay? But I'll tell you where my mind went when you were just going through that sort of list of mundane things.

   4. ABAlain de Botton15:40

      Hmm.

   5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee15:40

      If a pan has been used and it needs cleaning, but we're not gonna clean it immediately, I like to put it at the side of the sink soaked.

   6. ABAlain de Botton15:48

      Hmm.

   7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee15:49

      So that when the time does come, it's all soaked and the dirt comes off easily. Um, I did that the other day, and I came down in the morning and my wife had moved it, and it was, uh, in my eyes, higgledy-piggledy in the sink-

   8. ABAlain de Botton16:04

      Hmm

   9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee16:04

      ... left dry. I thought, "That's interesting," because now I have to soak it again.

   10. ABAlain de Botton16:09

       Hmm.

   11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee16:10

       That was really interesting. I had a really fun chat with my wife the next morning. I said-- This is what I've learned after nearly eighteen years of marriage that actually said, "Hey, baby, so it's interesting. That's why I left it like this."

   12. ABAlain de Botton16:21

       Hmm.

   13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee16:21

       And she goes, "Well, actually, I don't like it there. I think it gets in the way. I'd prefer that it's in the sink." I was like, "Yeah, but if you put it in the sink at an angle like that, we can't stack anything else in the sink." Okay. But I've been thinking about this during the week, and I've been thinking, okay, that's interesting. In many ways, that example is micro, but represents the macro. We are two individuals who see the world completely differently.

   14. ABAlain de Botton16:48

       Hmm.

   15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee16:48

       Right? Who have legitimately in our brains a reason for why we will put the pan in a different way.

   16. ABAlain de Botton16:58

       Hmm.

   17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee16:58

       And so the thing I've been thinking about this week is, I don't necessarily need to change that. What would life look like if I accepted that? That actually, you know what?

   18. ABAlain de Botton17:08

       Hmm.

   19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee17:08

       That's how Veda likes to do it. Okay. Now, it could be that we have a conversation and come up with a mutual agreement of how we're going to do that. But it's kind of funny, isn't it, that these little things often cause big fights.

   20. ABAlain de Botton17:23

       Hmm.

   21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee17:23

       Right? Well, I don't know, what do you think? Is, is that mundane? I-I-Is, is me discussing that or thinking about that, is it truly a little mundane thing that has no value?

   22. ABAlain de Botton17:34

       Hmm.

   23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee17:34

       Or in some ways, does it represent a big picture view of long-term relationships?

   24. ABAlain de Botton17:41

       I, I think in love, there are no small things. The details always evoke and are connected up with something very large, which is why when you're falling in love with someone, you think, "God, I'm really charmed by the way, you know, they're eating their breakfast cereal or the way that they, you know, are buttering their toast," whatever it is. It's a small thing, and you think, is it possible that some, some very powerful, big feeling is emerging from a small thing? And, and the answer is yes, just as later on in the relationship, irritation and resentments can again coalesce around so-called small details. These things are the conduits to very large themes of life that, um, you know, the large is present in the small. And-

   25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee18:18

       Exactly

   26. ABAlain de Botton18:18

       ... it also evokes that in order for a relationship to function properly, one of the skills that we need in order to be a good lover is the capacity to teach. Now, we think, oh, teachers are a specialized, um, subsection of the population. They go to training college, and they stand in front of classrooms, et cetera.In order to have a good life, in order to have a good romantic life, you have no option but to become a teacher, that all of us need to skill up in the area of teaching. And what that means is an ability to take someone into your experience and convey it without threat, without hysteria, without a viciousness at a time when your audience is likely to understand and likely to be receptive, which means, you know, not at midnight when two people are a bit scratchy and exhausted, et cetera. But, you know, maybe at the beginning of the day when it's not so... You know, as we know, good teaching-- If you want to try and teach someone something, be very sure that you don't need them to understand it, um, in order for you not to lose your composure. You have to be able to tolerate that they won't understand.

   27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee19:19

       Mm.

   28. ABAlain de Botton19:20

       And I think some of the reason why lovers get into such terrible arguments is because they have this-- they box themselves into a position of thinking, "I need you to understand this, and I need you to understand it now and fully. And if you don't understand it, um, it's catastrophic. It will evoke for me that I'm alone, that I am completely abandoned, that you can't love me," et cetera.

   29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee19:39

       Mm.

   30. ABAlain de Botton19:39

       And these things are exaggerations of understandable positions, but they are massive exaggerations. And so we box ourselves in, and it spirals. And I think, you know, if you're going to have a good relationship, starting right from the start of a relationship, you have to be able to explain who you are to the other person. I have a friend who recently met someone. She'd been single for a while, and, um, she met someone who loved going sailing, uh, on a, on a lake, uh, near, near his house. He loved going sailing. And he said to her something like, um, you know, "My last relationship, my partner didn't, didn't like sailing, and that, that really cost us. You know, that was damaging." So me- automatically a sort of an atmosphere started taking hold of like, "If this is gonna work, you have to like this." So she dutifully went out and tried to show what a good sailor she was.
8. 22:14 – 26:58

   Partners as mirrors and coaches: love that supports who we’re becoming

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee22:14

      Yeah. This idea of being a teacher, i- it's quite an interesting one. I know in some of your previous work you've written about the ancient Greeks-

   2. ABAlain de Botton22:22

      Mm

   3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee22:22

      ... and their sort of belief system about relationships, this idea that actually each of you is teaching the other person to become their best selves, which I thought was a really aspirational notion of what-

   4. ABAlain de Botton22:37

      Mm

   5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee22:37

      ... a relationship could be. And in some ways [chuckles] then I thought it sounds like your partner is almost your coach-

   6. ABAlain de Botton22:46

      Yeah

   7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee22:46

      ... in some ways. [chuckles]

   8. ABAlain de Botton22:47

      Yeah. And your partner should, should have a really keen eye for your faults. Now, this is something we find really hard to say. You know, you'll get a lot of sympathy from your friends normally if you say, "Well, you know, I broke up with someone because they didn't really love me for who I am. They didn't really love me just, just as I am." People go, "Oh, that's, that's terrible." Um, but looked at more generously, in a more complex light, you might think, hang on a minute. Does any-- do any of us really deserve to be loved exactly as we are in all our flaws, in all our compromises right now? Isn't it actually more generous towards someone to love them not for who they actually are, but for who they themselves are trying to become, for who they themselves would like to be but need a lot of support in order to try and become? That might be true love rather than the more static acceptance of everything-

   9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee23:39

      Yeah

   10. ABAlain de Botton23:39

       ... that you happen to be today.

   11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee23:41

       So is it, is it us teaching our partners how to be the best version of themselves? Because the wa- the way I think about it, and if I think about my own marriage-

   12. ABAlain de Botton23:58

       Mm

   13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee23:59

       ... I would say that what I've learnt over the years is that it's not necessarily about me teaching Ved or her teaching me. I feel if I use her as a mirror-

   14. ABAlain de Botton24:13

       Mm

   15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee24:13

       ... to find out where I can improve, then I can become a better version of myself, not because she's teaching me, because-- but instead that she's actually reflecting back to me where I can improve.

   16. ABAlain de Botton24:27

       Sure.

   17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee24:28

       It's, it's a subtle difference, isn't it? 'Cause I don't think I'm... And the- and then I think then she might change, not because I'm trying to change her, but because I've changed, and therefore weYou know, in relationships, you know, we- none of us exist in isolation. We're constantly being influenced by the other person

   18. ABAlain de Botton24:48

       It sounds like you guys are very evolved, and I think you, I think I'd like to hold onto the idea that you are actually teaching-

   19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee24:54

       Okay

   20. ABAlain de Botton24:54

       ... and learning, but you're doing it in a very gentle, almost invisible way. But I think it's going on. You know, when you, when you talk about mirroring, that, that, you know, she might mirror a behavior. I'm imagining, let's say, um, you know, you speak in a certain way and it upsets her. She doesn't need to say, you know, "Let me give you a lesson in how you've overstepped a boundary."

   21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee25:14

       [laughs]

   22. ABAlain de Botton25:15

       You just notice that she's upset, and that helps you to think about it, and you take that away and you reflect on it. So there is a lesson going on, but it's, it's a very silent and a very generous... You know, it sounds like you're both learning, but without, you know, delicately. Delicately. But I, I'd still... Look, I think our partners have a ringside seat on our flawed sides, and all of us are flawed. Obviously, we are. We, we come in- into a relationship having not learnt all sorts of things we might have learnt as we developed-

   23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee25:45

       Mm-hmm

   24. ABAlain de Botton25:45

       ... you know, through, through life. All of us, uh, have a lot to learn. By the way, that's a very good starting point. I mean, if two people on a, on an early dinner date can accept that each of them is a work in progress and each of them has a lot to learn, that's a fantastic starting point. There's nothing less romantic than two people who think that they are totally accomplished as, as they are.

   25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee26:08

       Well, that's the problem, isn't it? That's the cultural, uh, norm, and you've written before about how we are obsessed with the run-up to relationships-

   26. ABAlain de Botton26:18

       Mm

   27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee26:18

       ... or to marriage.

   28. ABAlain de Botton26:18

       Mm-hmm.

   29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee26:18

       You know, the, the kind of early days-

   30. ABAlain de Botton26:21

       Mm
9. 26:58 – 33:44

   The hidden terrors of closeness: engulfment vs abandonment and managing distance

   1. ABAlain de Botton26:58

      Mm-hmm. Absolutely, and also an inability to admit the terrors of love. You know, this is a big theme, I think, that we always say everybody wants to fall in love, everybody wants love. Let's accept that for a large section of the population, love is as frightening as it is exciting. Love is something that we want to run towards but also run away from. We can't explain behavior, um, in couples without acknowledging that there is a huge desire for closeness, but also a complicated desire for distance. And every relationship has, you might call, a, a, a sort of e- element of distance management, where people are trying to find the level of distance which makes them feel comfortable. A psychologist once wrote that there are two fears in love, that all love stories can be read through polarity of, on the one hand, a terror of being engulfed, being swallowed by another person, and another, on the other hand, a terror of being abandoned and of being totally solitary. So love happens somewhere between the space of terror of engulfment and terror of solitude, terror of loneliness. Um, and we, each of us have to navigate, and, and within a couple, have to navigate how much we can hold these two elements in, in check. And many relationships collapse because one person is in danger of trying to swallow the other person or make the other person feel swallowed, and the other one is in danger of making the other one feel totally abandoned, and then you get, you know, terrible tension.

   2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee28:31

      Yeah. And we see that certain dynamics build up in relationships over time that help them to work.

   3. ABAlain de Botton28:38

      Mm.

   4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee28:38

      And I remember in the COVID era, where many relationships suddenly were put under new strain-

   5. ABAlain de Botton28:44

      Mm-hmm

   6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee28:44

      ... because there was a dynamic, you know, I guess this is almost the cliché, but the guy in retirement who plays golf three times a week, so is out of the house-

   7. ABAlain de Botton28:57

      Mm

   8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee28:57

      ... for six hours, three times a week, and then going for a drink with his golf buddies afterwards, which we didn't think about.

   9. ABAlain de Botton29:03

      Mm.

   10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee29:03

       But then suddenly, when that's not on the table, and that husband is constantly there, there's r- there was real issues in relationships-

   11. ABAlain de Botton29:12

       Yeah

   12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee29:12

       ... because they'd built up a dynamic that wor- that allowed them to have the closeness-

   13. ABAlain de Botton29:18

       Mm

   14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee29:18

       ... and the distance.

   15. ABAlain de Botton29:19

       Yeah. And, and there are many things like that that, that seem to be obstacles to love, but are quietly supporting love.

   16. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee29:25

       Exactly.

   17. ABAlain de Botton29:25

       So you, you know, you get situations, let's say, with long-distance relationships where people go, "Oh, it's such a pity that, you know, you live in New York and I live in London. What a pity. If only we could live together." And they yearn, and they, you know, and this goes on for years and years. And then finally, they find themselves able to live in the same city, and boom, it breaks up. Or you get this with affairs. Uh, two people might be... You know, one person might be married, and they, they're longing for the person to get a divorce so they can be together, and this goes on for years. And finally, the divorce comes through, and it looks like they can live together and announce their love in front of the world, and boom, the one person leaves and can't take it because their love was actually being held together by distance, by an element of distance. And this speaks of the complexity of our, um, attachment patterns, that we need a certain amount of distance, in many cases, as much as we need closeness.

   18. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee30:12

       Yeah. I'm delighted to announce that AG1, the daily health drink that has been in my own life for over six years now, have updated and improved their formulation based upon the latest science, and to celebrate by giving my audience a very special offer. Some of the upgrades include more magnesium, which supports muscle function and improves the ability of your nervous system to relax, and also five strains of bacteria instead of just two to reflect the latest advances in microbiome science.It also contains key nutrients like vitamin C, biotin, niacin, vitamin B6, riboflavin, thiamine, zinc, and folate in bioavailable forms the body can easily and readily utilize, maximizing their potential benefits. Nutrition can often seem really complicated. What diet should we be following? What supplements should we be taking? And I think that's one of the main reasons I really like AG1. They make it really simple for you to be the best version of you. Over seventy ingredients, one scoop, once a day, for less than a cup of coffee. So if you wanna support your health seven mornings a week, get started with AG1, and right now we have a very special limited time offer worth fifty-eight pounds, which is around eighty US dollars. To get ten free travel packs instead of the usual five and an awesome welcome kit containing your shaker, scoop, and canister with your first subscription, go to drinkag1.com/livemore. I've been wearing a WHOOP band for about a year now, and it has had a transformative impact on my health and wellbeing. I've gained so many different insights, how different types of exercise or life stress affect my recovery, how different evening routines affect my sleep, and overall, it's helped me understand my own body much better. WHOOP is the only wearable that turns your health and fitness data into personalized guidance. And I'm pleased to announce that the all-new WHOOP band is now here, seven percent smaller, and with fourteen-plus days of battery life. The all-new WHOOP includes so many exciting new features, including hormonal insights and on-demand ECG readings. But I think for me, my own personal favorite is health span, as seeing this regularly helps motivate me and keep me on track with my habits. Now, I've been a medical doctor for over twenty years. I think it's really important to use the WHOOP data as a tool to help guide you, not as something to dictate your life. Honestly, I don't think health wearables are necessarily for everyone, but for some people, like me, they can be absolutely game-changing. If you join WHOOP right now, they are giving my audience the all-new WHOOP 5.0 device, plus they are giving you the first month completely free. And if you're still not sold yet, there's also a thirty-day money-back guarantee, so you can try it out for free. Go to join.whoop.com/livemore. In terms of these cultural expectations, these, these ideas we grow up with, which then causes us problems perhaps when we actually do get in a long-term relationship, if we choose to, which of course

10. 33:44 – 38:22

    Stages of long-term love and the skills required to survive each phase

    1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee33:44

       not everyone, uh, chooses to. I think about s- do we need to... Do we need to have a better idea of the stages in a long-term relationship? And I'll tell you for me, o-one thing that really helped me when my mother was seriously unwell a few years ago, when I actually thought she might die-

    2. ABAlain de Botton34:07

       Mm

    3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee34:08

       ... was the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi.

    4. ABAlain de Botton34:11

       Mm.

    5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee34:12

       And it, it really helped me at that time because there was a brutal honesty within it, that all living creatures undergo this cycle, um, you know, creation, birth, growth, uh, decay, and death. And the brutality of that really helped me. I thought, "Oh, this is the natural cycle of all living beings. This is what we go through."

    6. ABAlain de Botton34:38

       Mm-hmm.

    7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee34:38

       "And maybe Mom, at this moment in time, is in the penultimate stage, in decay before death."

    8. ABAlain de Botton34:43

       Mm.

    9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee34:43

       Okay? And although that's not something we like to talk about, because we don't like to talk about death much in this society, it really helped me. I thought the brutal honesty of this is actually helping me deal with the situation. I think a similar concept could potentially apply to relationships, where if I think about my own relationship with my wife, I feel we're probably on our third or fourth relationship now.

    10. ABAlain de Botton35:09

        Mm.

    11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee35:09

        You know, eighteen years in.

    12. ABAlain de Botton35:10

        Mm.

    13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee35:11

        There's, there's different stages.

    14. ABAlain de Botton35:13

        Mm.

    15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee35:14

        And although we don't have the, you know, the kind of intensity of the first few months where, you know, basically screw everything else, all that matters is when am I gonna see Hernette, what we're gonna do.

    16. ABAlain de Botton35:25

        Mm. Mm.

    17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee35:25

        Like, an amazing few months-

    18. ABAlain de Botton35:27

        Mm

    19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee35:28

        ... which led to me proposing after three months. And it, it was just total wild-

    20. ABAlain de Botton35:32

        Mm

    21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee35:32

        ... um, you know, romantic, lost in the bliss of early romance.

    22. ABAlain de Botton35:38

        Mm. Mm.

    23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee35:38

        Obviously, our relationship is better than ever before now, but it's much more grounded and calm-

    24. ABAlain de Botton35:43

        Mm

    25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee35:43

        ... and it's, it's different.

    26. ABAlain de Botton35:45

        Mm.

    27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee35:47

        So I guess, you know, what do you think, Alain? Do you think we need to also do a better job at actually defining the various stages that one goes through-

    28. ABAlain de Botton35:57

        Mm

    29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee35:57

        ... in a long-term relationship?

    30. ABAlain de Botton35:58

        Mm.
11. 38:22 – 44:06

    From trauma to behavior: what trauma is, how it hides, and how it shows up in love and work

    1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee38:22

       And you, I know you've probably been asked this several times before, but you've written again a quite provocative, but I think a very accurate statement about marriage in your previous work. "Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't yet know who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a failure they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating."

    2. ABAlain de Botton38:54

       Mm.

    3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee38:54

       That is so profound, so true, and kind of speaks to this idea of unprocessed trauma-

    4. ABAlain de Botton39:03

       Mm

    5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee39:03

       ... is something we will end up projecting onto our partners unless we do something about it.

    6. ABAlain de Botton39:08

       Mm. I mean, it's worth just stepping back and going, what is trauma? 'Cause it's obviously a word that people are using more and more. It used to be a very technical term used really just among psychologists and psychotherapists, and now it's entered general circulation. People will speak about their trauma.

    7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee39:21

       Mm-hmm.

    8. ABAlain de Botton39:21

       And, um, you know, sometimes critics will go, you know, "Every- everything's a trauma nowadays," et cetera. What is a trauma? A trauma, trauma is really a pain that has left a legacy that's been unexplored and that's having a consequence in present behavior. So trauma can be large or small. It can be as small as, um, you know, you fell off a chair in childhood and you were not comforted in time, or as large as, you know, you witnessed abuse or severe neglect, et cetera. So it, it ranges right across the board, but one thing it's common, uh, uh, that all traumas have in common is that there is a lack of understanding of what the traumatic dynamic was, and then off the back of that mystery comes an inability to explain either to oneself or to other people what the difficulty is. So people who are so-called traumatized, um, go through the world unable to account for some of the things that they do, either to themselves or to others. And so they'll be, for example, um, always failing at challenges. You know, when- whenever an opportunity comes a- around, a big opportunity, they'll find that somehow they manage to miss that opportunity, spoil that opportunity.

    9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee40:25

       Mm.

    10. ABAlain de Botton40:25

        They won't know why. They'll blow up a relationship, blow up a job prospect or something. And they don't know, and no one else knows, um, and it seems quite strange. Now, that can be traced back to, let's say, a trauma around, um, the consequences of succeeding in an environment, an early childhood environment, where that would bring about the rage or jealousy or competitiveness of a parent, which can happen, you know, quite often.

    11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee40:48

        Mm.

    12. ABAlain de Botton40:48

        That, um, so, so that then failing becomes a way of surviving. Y- I've got to fail in order to hold onto the love of someone I care about. Sounds like a perverse dynamic, but it, it, it happens. And I think that, you know, that qualifies as a trauma in the sense that it's a dynamic that's painful, it's difficult, it's not understood, and it's going on to have a legacy in adult life. And, y- you know, one feels immensely for people with something like this.

    13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee41:13

        Yeah. There's, um, in, in chapter two of this new book, the chapter to do with symptoms of trauma, you write, "The central paradox and particular difficulty of trauma is that we tend to have no active awareness that we have experienced it." And I guess what you just said there is quite interesting to me in the sense that jealousy of children-

    14. ABAlain de Botton41:38

        Mm

    15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee41:39

        ... right? So how do we start to identify, you know, what are the symptoms we can look out for in our life that might signal to us, oh man, I've got some unprocessed trauma that I could do with looking at?

    16. ABAlain de Botton41:53

        Mm. I mean, a, a really key question is, how do you feel after something's gone right for you? Right? After, after you've succeeded, after, after this... you've had some good news, et cetera. Some of us, great, we celebrate. There's absolutely no problem. Some of us, we think, hang on a minute, this, something feels a bit eerie. Something feels a bit worrying, that there is something about a beautiful situation. Let's say we started a new relationship, things are going well, or we're promoted at work, or, you know, we get some good news from a friend. And rather than thinking, oh, great, we get a bit worried, and that's often a sign that we've been... th- there's an association somewhere in our minds between powering forward, winning, and upsetting somebody. And it is one of the great secrets, one of the great taboos of, um, parent-child relations that, you know, in a way, as a parent, you want the best for your child, but there are many things that children do that will discomfort a parent unless they are very, you know, honest and quite self-aware. You know, let's imagine that you as a parent have grown up in quite a deprived setting, and you want to give your child everything. You want them to have what you didn't have, and so you manage to give that to them. And then lo and behold, you suddenly think, y- you see your child and they're really smiley and happy and content, and you think-It's great, but at the same time, something might be niggling at you and you think, "My child's maybe a bit entitled," or, "They don't really understand someone like me," or, "They've never bothered to see how painful life is, um, in my childhood," et cetera. And you might get resentful, resentful of your own child for whom you would lay down your own life. Very peculiar, but psychological life is full of these peculiarities, and we have to be ready to catch them, and we have to be imaginative enough to allow them space. There are, there are very unfamiliar and quite alarming-sounding dynamics between parents and children.

    17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee43:45

        Yeah.

    18. ABAlain de Botton43:45

        That's fine. What-- the thing that's not fine is to brush them all under the carpet.

    19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee43:49

        Yeah, that's the key thing, isn't it? If you just heard that and it resonated with you, don't push it away. Don't then distract yourself. Don't go and start scrolling something else or pouring yourself a glass of wine. There's the opportunity. There's the opportunity to learn something about yourself, right?

12. 44:06 – 47:10

    Taboo family dynamics and ‘silent seduction’: Freud, boundaries, and emotional misuse

    1. ABAlain de Botton44:06

       Do you wanna go somewhere really dark and complicated?

    2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee44:08

       I would love to.

    3. ABAlain de Botton44:09

       Let's talk about Freud and sexuality in families. Okay? It's a really delicate topic. Freud's enormous insight... I mean, the clichéd version of Freud is Freud said little boys fall in love with their mothers, uh, little girls fall in love with their fathers. It's, it, you know, and that sounds quite patterned, just quite strange. Um, looked at more imaginatively, what Freud is telling us is a story about healthy human development. He proposes that in order to develop well, a, a little boy or girl has to feel from its opposite sex parent that it has a capacity to charm and delight. I'm using those words carefully, charm and delight, not seduce, charm and delight. In other words, um, there will be a moment in an ordinary development where a child will get a terrific sense of validation that their mum thinks that they're really, you know, really a charming and lovely, uh, little person, and ditto with, with the daughter. Now, there are two dangers in this. The parent is not able to give validation to their child. They, they're unable to recognize the child's strengths and charms. They just hold them at bay, and they have to be very cold. This robs a child of confidence and makes the child feel that they don't have legitimate powers in the world. Um, but there's another e-extreme, which is that the parent, God forbid physically, but much more commonly emotionally-

    4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee45:34

       Mm

    5. ABAlain de Botton45:34

       ...slightly seduces the child, slightly says, "Oh, you know, let's not tell Mum about this. We're just having a special moment," or, "Your dad doesn't like us, um, uh, chatting like this, but we'll..." You know, maybe the marriage is not going well-

    6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee45:45

       Mm

    7. ABAlain de Botton45:45

       ...and the child is invited to, um, compensate, uh, the parent for some of its missing emotional nourishment. Very dangerous territory. The child then grows up with a feeling of, "I've got too much power here." That's not comfortable.

    8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee46:00

       Mm.

    9. ABAlain de Botton46:00

       The child will then have to rein in that power and will feel that there's a boundary that's being... that's in danger of being crossed, and that child then won't be able to grow into someone who feels expansive and powerful. So these are just some of the delicate things that are going on in so-called ordinary-

    10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee46:18

        Yeah

    11. ABAlain de Botton46:18

        ...families, and they're reliant on a lot of maturity and a lot of health, which is not always present.

    12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee46:26

        Yeah. Have you read the book Silently Seduced?

    13. ABAlain de Botton46:29

        No.

    14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee46:30

        No, it's, it's a pretty provocative book, but it's... I can't remember the author now.

    15. ABAlain de Botton46:34

        Mm.

    16. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee46:34

        It's absolutely fantastic. It really sort of showcases, in a very blunt way, some of these dynamics that can exist. And again, there's no blame-

    17. ABAlain de Botton46:45

        Mm

    18. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee46:46

        ...right, about this stuff. I mean, even, you know, if when this stuff happens, it's often driven by unconscious needs and, and, and sort of parents' own traumas from-

    19. ABAlain de Botton46:56

        Yeah

    20. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee46:56

        ...from their young age, right?

    21. ABAlain de Botton46:57

        Yeah.

    22. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee46:57

        Once you get into trauma, you're like, you know, your parents are playing out their trauma.

    23. ABAlain de Botton47:01

        Mm.

    24. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee47:02

        You're playing out your par- You know, it's all sort of gets passed on. But these things I think are really, really important to talk about.

    25. ABAlain de Botton47:10

        Mm.

13. 47:10 – 1:04:51

    Breaking the cycle as a parent: triggers, bullying dynamics, and the risk of over-correcting

    1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee47:10

       Flipping it then onto parents-

    2. ABAlain de Botton47:12

       Mm

    3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee47:13

       ...because if we're saying that a lot of the reason that relationships or long-term relationships in the twenty-first century are fraught with problems is because we project unprocessed trauma onto our partners-

    4. ABAlain de Botton47:29

       Mm. Mm

    5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee47:30

       ...then following on from that, it's important to think about, well, what can I as a parent do to prevent traumatizing my own children?

    6. ABAlain de Botton47:44

       Right. First of all, if you're even asking that question, that's a fantastic starting point. You know, there's, there's an idea which is very dangerous, that, that the only thing you need to do to be a good parent is to provide materially and show up every now and then. Of course, these things are extremely important and, you know, great accomplishment, and many people haven't had even that. But that's only the beginning of the story, not, not the end. Um, y- an awareness that you might be passing things onto your children, that there are unresolved things in you which will transmit to the next generation. Let's, let's just look at some of the things that parents can be doing without knowing they're doing. Let's imagine a parent who at a young age had to shut down their vulnerable sides, and they had to be very brave, very stoic, and powerful through, through life. We can be sympathetic to that, but let's imagine they are then in charge of a very tiny, very vulnerable person. A great temptation of that, of that parent can be to bully their own vulnerable child for their fragility and to start to say essentially, "Don't cry. You're a little boy. You're a little girl. This is not allowed. It's not, it's not right. Um, let's go and do athletics together. Let's go and be strong together." In a way, they're so worried about their own weakness that when they see weakness in a child, they turn against it. Children are a kind of mirror to us. Everything that we're afraid of, all of our shadow sides show up in a child. So if you're-

    7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee49:12

       Yeah

    8. ABAlain de Botton49:12

       ...if you're worried about being weak or not intelligent or not popular or, um, not sporty enough or not intellectual enough or whatever, it's all gonna appear in your relationship to your child. It's just gonna appear. So you will be threatened by certain things in your child. A good exercise might be to say-Just i-imagine if you hadn't had children and you, you stop and you say to yourself, "What might I be threatened by in my own child?" Just in the abstract, ask yourself that question.

    9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee49:40

       Mm.

    10. ABAlain de Botton49:40

        See what comes up for you. And those are things almost inevitably that you've not dealt with in yourself or that you've had to, you know, shut down because your own development was challenging.

    11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee49:51

        Yeah. It's interesting, before we were talking about long-term partners potentially being teachers to each other.

    12. ABAlain de Botton49:58

        Mm.

    13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee50:00

        But I would argue that you could even go one step beyond that and say that your children can be the very greatest teachers you will ever come across if you allow them to be. You know, and certainly on my own, um, in, in my own life, I would say from a young age, as a, as a father, a real drive for me to sort out my inner world and my unprocessed traumas was, "Oh, wow, I don't want to pass this on to the kids."

    14. ABAlain de Botton50:29

        Mm.

    15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee50:30

        Right? [chuckles] You know, sometimes, uh, children showcase a behavior that you don't like, but you're like, "Well, you know, I've sort of got that behavior myself."

    16. ABAlain de Botton50:39

        Yeah.

    17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee50:39

        Right? So I can either tell them not to do it-

    18. ABAlain de Botton50:42

        Yeah

    19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee50:42

        ... or I can work [chuckles] on myself so I no longer display it.

    20. ABAlain de Botton50:46

        Mm.

    21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee50:46

        And I think, yeah, children can be the best teacher, can't they?

    22. ABAlain de Botton50:49

        Absolutely. You know, we have to notice what, what's triggering us in their behavior.

    23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee50:52

        Mm.

    24. ABAlain de Botton50:52

        Uh, in other words, what's provoking a, an outsized level of emotion? And it might be, you know, my child is sobbing, is... They're crying. Why are they doing that? I'm s- I'm getting annoyed with them. Or my child is a bit slow in some area, or they're a bit precocious in an area.

    25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee51:08

        Mm.

    26. ABAlain de Botton51:08

        And that seems to be provoking us. So there'll be all sorts of things, different things, but almost always they relate to something in you. And there is... You know, let's talk about the psychology of bullying. Parents bully their children, um, not necessarily overtly, but covertly. And what do we mean by bullying? We mean, you know, we know bullying from the playground. What happens in bullying is something intolerable is occurring inside you and, um, you can't bear to see an echo of it in somebody else, and you just evacuate it, and you say, "That person's got the problem," um, rather than, "I've got the problem." You make a scapegoat.

    27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee51:42

        Mm.

    28. ABAlain de Botton51:42

        And this, this happens in, in relation to, uh, uh, to, to, to people's own, own children, and it can be very subtle, but nevertheless a kind of, of bullying.

    29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee51:52

        A lot of children's sports coaches will, you know, talk about parents often putting their unrealized dreams onto their children-

    30. ABAlain de Botton52:07

        Mm
14. 1:04:51 – 1:22:29

    Sex, intimacy, and the fear of closeness: why desire, kinks, and perversions often map to trauma

    1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:04:51

       ... especially if those expectations are unrealistic based on Hollywood and romance and poetry. I think one thing we don't often talk about enough in public is the role of sex-

    2. ABAlain de Botton1:05:04

       Mm

    3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:05:05

       ... in relationships. And it's interesting, as a, as a parent now of children who are fifteen and twelve, it very much seems to me that society, even at that young age, like it's, it's become quite a sexualized society. I think that the media people are consuming, even what is shown on so-called family shows on television, I think there is a o- certainly to me, an over-sexualization going on that kids are being exposed to at younger and younger ages. I'd love to get your perspective on that, but also, you know, more broadly, what do you think the role of sex is in a long-term relationship?

    4. ABAlain de Botton1:05:52

       Um, look, sex is incredibly, an incredibly serious topic that we don't yet fully know how to talk about as a, as a society. Um, there's incredible shame around it. There's a sense... Also, the topic is either obvious or silly or not worthy. So it kind of... We, we, we-

    5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:06:11

       Mm

    6. ABAlain de Botton1:06:11

       ... hit this topic from many different angles, but the s- the sum total is that we often don't discuss it properly. Um, it is a conduit to i- intimacy, true intimacy, and it's also, you know, one of the strangest things that, that people do. If you think about what kissing is, I mean, the very act of a kiss is hugely bizarre. A mouth that's normally used to, um, either, you know, chew mashed potato or utter words is for a moment open to another person, that they can enter your mouth and you theirs. I mean, you laugh and it-- but it's... I mean, if you were showing a visiting alien from, you know, planet Kepler-32b, and you said, "You know, this is what we do here on this planet," they would think this is highly alarming, but also, why is this being fetishized? Why is this more interesting than eating an oyster or playing tennis? What, what's going on here? And we'd need to explain... You see, there is always serious-- there are always very important and serious things going on in all sexual activity. I, I think that, you know, intimacy is based on the idea of doing something with someone in a very privileged way that could be shocking, disgusting, and repulsive with anyone else. It's a way of marking out someone as unique to you, that you're able to do something that you wouldn't think, think of doing with-

    7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:07:24

       Yeah

    8. ABAlain de Botton1:07:25

       ... anyone else. Um, so many things are very, um, cathartic that go on in, in the, in the sexual realm. If you think of the whole area of kinks, you know, why, why does somebody have a kink? People will tend to discover that there are certain things that turn them on more than others, and it's quite a mystery, you know. And we, we know some of the sort of classic ones. Oh, so and so likes to, you know, dress up in this kind of uniform or, or likes to have this sort of practice. And, you know, we've got, we've got sort of a map of what that might look like. But in fact, if you boil it down, people tend to have really particular areas of excitement, et cetera. Let me give you my theory of where these zones of excitement come from. I think that excitement is almost always sitting on an area of life that was once quite painful and is an area of tension. And what sex allows two people to do, or more, um, uh, but let's imagine a couple, two people to do, is to revisit an area of difficulty without-Some of the limitations of ordinary life in order to have a little cathartic, joyful moment. Let's imagine somebody who has to assert authority all day, every day in their day-to-day life. It's exhausting, it's tiring, it's kind of difficult, kind of traumatic. They might enjoy in sex letting go of all their authority and of surrendering to somebody else-

    9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:08:47

       Mm

    10. ABAlain de Botton1:08:47

        ... in order to refind a kind of balance that's been lost in ordinary life. Let's imagine somebody who has a really hard time with some of the gender roles that's been assigned. Maybe they feel that they're being asked to play the role of a man or a woman in a way that's ended up feeling quite uncomfortable for them. It's, it's, it's excessive. But again, in their sexuality, they're able to find a better balance where they can visit a, a less gendered, a less stereotypical role and, and discover, rediscover a kind of balance as well.

    11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:09:16

        So, so you're saying that could be a good thing?

    12. ABAlain de Botton1:09:19

        I think at its best, sex allows people to rebalance themselves and to refind qualities that are absent from day-to-day life. And so one of the things to always observe is i-i... you know, in people, what is it that's turning them on particularly, and how does that relate to areas of deprivation or struggle or difficulty in their day-to-day life? Because you can draw very interesting-

    13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:09:39

        Mm

    14. ABAlain de Botton1:09:39

        ... lines of, of connection. And as I say, behind every so-called turn-on tends to be something that was unusually difficult for that person.

    15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:09:50

        My wife and I were discussing this week kissing-

    16. ABAlain de Botton1:09:52

        Mm

    17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:09:53

        ... and the idea that it really speaks to what you just said actually about the actual act of kissing. And what we were discussing is, is kissing there in all cultures or do we kiss because we've seen it in films, right? So I don't know-

    18. ABAlain de Botton1:10:12

        Mm

    19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:10:12

        ... if you, you've done any research on this, but-

    20. ABAlain de Botton1:10:14

        Mm

    21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:10:14

        ... do all cultures around the world kiss?

    22. ABAlain de Botton1:10:16

        Mm.

    23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:10:17

        Or is it unique to certain cultures?

    24. ABAlain de Botton1:10:19

        Mm.

    25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:10:20

        'Cause it, 'cause you're right, on the face of it, it's quite a bizarre thing.

    26. ABAlain de Botton1:10:23

        Yeah. Uh, there's a lovely quote from the French 17th century philosopher La Rochefoucauld who said, "There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they hadn't heard there was such a thing." So that speaks of the socialized nature of love.

    27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:10:36

        Mm.

    28. ABAlain de Botton1:10:36

        That love, of course, sets parameters. It says, you know, "When you're in love, you will feel this." And then you think, "Oh, do I feel this?" And sometimes you might feel it, but not have a word for it, and your culture provides that word. And sometimes you may not feel it at all, but pretend you're feeling it because you think, "Oh, that's what I'm supposed to feel." And is there some of this in relation to th- something like kissing? Sure, there probably are some people who don't like kissing at all, and they end up doing it because that's what you're told that you like to do. And one of the great struggles in life is to try and find a way of loving that is true to us. And, you know, even if you don't like kissing, you'll probably like something that's a bit intimate and cozy and private. And it might be, you know, enlacing your toes, whatever it is, um, or holding hands or-

    29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:11:22

        Yeah

    30. ABAlain de Botton1:11:22

        ... something like this. But it is important to be able to think, "Am I enjoying this or am I not?" Many couples I've spoken to recently have had this issue around sleeping together. It's seen as an absolute proof of love that you're able to share a bed with someone. But many people privately think, "This is really difficult, really annoying. I like to, you know, wake up in the early morning, do some reading, do some..." whatever it is. And they can't tell their partner because they're under an ideological, um, sort of stricture that says, "If you love, you must share a bed with someone," even if they snore, even if it's uncomfortable. And I think one of the freedoms of, of true adulthood should be able-
15. 1:22:29 – 1:57:20

    Healing, meaning, and the environment: love as the antidote to trauma—and what to avoid/aim for

    1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:22:29

       Do you think a good quality long-term relationship can help us heal our trauma?

    2. ABAlain de Botton1:22:38

       It's essential. I mean, really what we're saying is that the cure for trauma is love. And, you know, what does that mean, love? Love means somebody who's in tune with us, somebody who follows us. What's the most romantic thing you can say to somebody is, "Listen, I hear you." To say, "I hear you. I'm, I'm listening to you. I hear you." To feel heard and to feel that all the difficulties, all the shameful bits of us are meeting with an audience. This is emotional nectar. This is what we all need.

    3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:23:09

       Mm-hmm.

    4. ABAlain de Botton1:23:09

       This is what we go crazy without. You know, why, why is solitude difficult? 'Cause there's no one mirroring you. There's no one hearing you. There's no one confirming that what you're feeling is okay. Um, and-

    5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:23:20

       When you say solitude, can I just clarify what you mean? To me, there's a difference between solitude and loneliness.

    6. ABAlain de Botton1:23:26

       Mm.

    7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:23:26

       When you say solitude, what exactly do you mean by that?

    8. ABAlain de Botton1:23:30

       That's a good distinction. I mean, I'm, I'm... I do-- I mean loneliness.

    9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:23:33

       Okay.

    10. ABAlain de Botton1:23:33

        I mean loneliness. 'Cause you're right, of course, there is the, the good sort of solitude. But, um, you know, loneliness is an enormous problem, both in relationships and outside of relationships. And it's important to stress it exists in relationships as well. Um, you are lonely whenever you're sitting with someone and they say, "I don't understand," or, or-

    11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:23:52

        Yeah

    12. ABAlain de Botton1:23:52

        ... "That's wrong," or, "You're illegitimate for feeling that," et cetera. And you're also lonely when you have no one at all. But it's both those things. It's-- There are as many lonely people in relationships as there are outside of relationships.

    13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:24:05

        If love can heal trauma or if love is really the only thing that truly heals trauma, I guess we need to specify what kind of love we're talking about-

    14. ABAlain de Botton1:24:18

        Right

    15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:24:18

        ... if indeed there are different types. So-

    16. ABAlain de Botton1:24:20

        Yeah

    17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:24:21

        ... the love we would ideally have for our children is unconditional love.

    18. ABAlain de Botton1:24:25

        Mm.

    19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:24:26

        I love you without any conditions. And the more you sort of sit with that statement, the more you realize that many people did not actually feel unconditional love growing up. But I guess I, I'm really fascinated by the difference between... You know, there's some obvious differences between the love we have for our children and romantic love.

    20. ABAlain de Botton1:24:50

        Mm.

    21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:24:50

        Okay? You know, obviously in terms of intimacy, for example, or what that intimacy may look like, right? But is it possible, do you think, to unconditionally love your romantic partner?

    22. ABAlain de Botton1:25:08

        I think that conditions don't always have to be the bogeymen in this. I think it's possible that a condition is a loving thing to lay down. To be able to say to someone, "There are things that you could do that would break my trust," that's actually a way of respecting the other person's intelligence, possibilities for maturity, and so on. I think to, to say anything is possible as an action is a difficult and slippery slope. I think that, you know-

    23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:25:39

        Can you do that with your children?

    24. ABAlain de Botton1:25:40

        Well, see, I think that children are not made happy by boundaryless childhoods. If you say to a child, "I love you so much, you can go to bed at any time. You can eat anything you like. You can do anything you like," they will panic. It's, it's-

    25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:25:51

        Yeah

    26. ABAlain de Botton1:25:51

        ... an act of love to say, "Bedtime's at 7:00 and no later." To say, "You can't..." You know, children will panic if they feel they have got so much power over their parents that they could allow anything to happen. It's hugely containing to know that the other person will at some point say stop, and a little bit of that happens in an adult relationship as well. To know... You know, a lot of the way in which people treat us is to do with the signals that we've unconsciously sent to them about the kind of behavior that we will tolerate, and if we send out a signal that we'll tolerate anything, the other person is almost frightened by our, our, our level of license. You know, it's, it's, it's scary to be with someone who has no boundaries. It's, it's a relief to know that they have boundaries 'cause that helps us to discover our boundaries, and a boundary is a very important part of psychological health.

    27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:26:45

        Is there a risk that in talking about love and trauma and relationships using words that we over-intellectualize things?

    28. ABAlain de Botton1:26:58

        Hmm. Look, I would love that we could get there by intuition alone. I would love that we could just ditch words and all this-

    29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:27:05

        [laughs]

    30. ABAlain de Botton1:27:05

        ... chat, etc., and just do it by instinct. But I don't think... You know, I think, you know, we've left the Garden of Eden, where things just happened spontaneously.

Episode duration: 1:57:21