openpolitics.com

One of the things you point out about When Harry Met Sally or Four Weddings and a Funeral, one of the things that’s wrong with all of that is that a lot of these just take us up to the wedding. They take us through the falling and don’t see that — I think you’ve written somewhere, “A wiser culture than ours would recognize that the start of a relationship is not the high point that romantic art assumes; it is merely the first step of a far longer, more ambivalent, and yet quietly audacious journey on which we should direct our intelligence and scrutiny.”

MR. DE BOTTON: That’s right. We are strangely obsessed by the run up to love. And what we call a love story is really just the beginning of a love story, but we leave that out. But most of us, we’re interested in long-term relationships. We’re not just interested in the moment that gets us into love; we’re interested in the survival of love over time.

.. a wise Jewish mother who had said to them, “Men marry women with the idea that they will the stay the same. Women marry men with the idea that they will change.”

.. My view of what one should talk about on a first date is not showing off and not putting forward one’s accomplishments, but almost quite the opposite. One should say, “Well, how are you crazy? I’m crazy like this.” There should be a mutual acceptance that two damaged people are trying to get together because pretty much all of us — there are a few totally healthy people — but pretty much all of us reach dating age with some scars, some wounds.

.. when we are in love with people and they’re in love with us that we take particular offense when they get things wrong. Because the kind of the governing assumption of the relationship is, this person should know what’s in my mind ideally without me needing to tell them.

.. what we should be aiming for is not perfection but a “good enough” situation. And it’s wonderfully downbeat. No one would go, “What are your hopes this year?” “Well, I just want to have a good enough relationship.” People would go, “I’m sorry your life is so grim.” But you want to go, “No, that’s really good. For a human, that’s brilliant.” And that’s, I think, the attitude we should have.

.. And another way of looking at love is connection. We’re all the time, we are hardwired to seek connections with others. And that is, in a sense, at a kind of granular level, what love is. Love is connection. And insofar as one is alive and one is in relatively buoyant spirits some of the time, it’s because we are connected. And we can take pride in how flexible our minds ultimately are about where that connection is comingAnd another way of looking at love is connection. We’re all the time, we are hardwired to seek connections with others. And that is, in a sense, at a kind of granular level, what love is. Love is connection. And insofar as one is alive and one is in relatively buoyant spirits some of the time, it’s because we are connected. And we can take pride in how flexible our minds ultimately are about where that connection is coming

.. forgetting that in our intimate lives, and in our love lives, in our circles of family and friends, and in our marriages, and with our children, there are things about the people we love the most who drive us crazy that we do not comprehend. And yet, we find ways to be intelligent, to be loving, because it gets a better result. 

.. And we’re highly socialized creatures who really take our cues from what is going on around us. If we see an atmosphere of short tempers, of selfishness, etc., that will bolster those capacities within ourselves. If we see charity being exercised, if we see good humor, if we see forgiveness on display, it will lend support to those sides of ourselves. And we need to take care what we’re exposing ourselves to, because too much exposure to the opposite of love makes us into very hostile and angry people.

.. my wife used to say to me, in the early days of our marriage, she sometimes would say to me things like, “My father would never have said something like” — I would say something, or it’s not my turn to make the tea or something. She’d go, “My father would never have said it. He would always to do this for us.”

And then I had to point out that she wasn’t comparing like with like. She was comparing this man, her father, as a father but not as a lover. In the end, what I did end up saying to her was, “In a way, I’m probably behaving exactly like your father, but just not the father that you saw when he was around you.”

MS. TIPPETT: The way he behaved towards your mother. [laughs]

MR. DE BOTTON: [laughs] That’s right. Exactly. And so one of the things we do as parents is to edit ourselves, which is lovely, in a way, for our children. But it gives our children a really unnatural sense of what you can expect from another human being because we’re never as nice to probably anyone else on Earth as we are to our children. I’m saying this is the cost of good parenting.

.. The things you’ve been pointing out about how love really works, that people don’t learn when they’re humiliated, that self-righteousness is an enemy of love. I’m thinking a lot right now these days about how and if we could apply the intelligence we actually have with the experience of love, not the ideal, but the experience of love in our lives, to how we can be as citizens moving forward. There’s a lot of behavior in public — I’m speaking for the United States, but I think there are forms of this in the U.K. as well — where we’re kind of acting out in public the way we act out at our worst in relationships. [laughs]

.. But I think that a functioning society requires two things that, again, don’t sound very normal, but they require love and politeness. And by “love” I mean a capacity to enter imaginatively into the minds of people with whom you don’t immediately agree, and to look for the more charitable explanations for behavior which doesn’t appeal to you and which could seem plain wrong, not just to chuck them immediately in prison or to hold them up in front of a law court but to…

MS. TIPPETT: Or just tell them how stupid they are, right?

MR. DE BOTTON: Exactly. We’re permanently — all sides are attempting to show how stupid every other side is. And the other thing, of course, is politeness, which is an attempt not necessarily to say everything, to understand that there is a role for private feelings, which if they were to emerge, would do damage to everyone concerned.

But we’ve got this culture of self-disclosure. And it spills out into politics as well. The same dynamic goes on of, “If I’m not telling you exactly what I think, then I may develop a twitch or an illness from not expunging my feelings.” To which I would say, “No, you’re not. You’re preserving the peace and the good nature of the republic, and it’s absolutely what you should be doing.”

.. But we have this habit and this capacity in public — and we know that our brains work this way — to see the other, to see those strangers, those people, those people on the other side politically, socioeconomically, whatever, forgetting that in our intimate lives, and in our love lives, in our circles of family and friends, and in our marriages, and with our children, there are things about the people we love the most who drive us crazy that we do not comprehend. And yet, we find ways to be intelligent, to be loving, because it gets a better result. [laughs]

..  And we need to take care what we’re exposing ourselves to, because too much exposure to the opposite of love makes us into very hostile and angry people.

MS. TIPPETT: Yes. And I think it’s also such an important thing to bear in mind that the import of our conduct, moment to moment, that that is having effects that we can’t see.

.. Let’s not forget that one of the things that makes relationships so scary is we need to be weak in front of other people. And most of us are just experts at being pretty strong. We’ve been doing it for years. We know how to be strong. What we don’t know how to do is to make ourselves safely vulnerable, and so we get we tend to get very twitchy, preternaturally aggressive, etc., when the moment has come to be weak.

..  I have to say one thing I really love and appreciate and learned from in your writing is your reflection on flirting as an art, the art of flirting, that it can be something edifying, a pleasurable gift. You have this phrase, a “good flirt.” So would you describe what a “good flirt” is?

.. Well, if you think about what flirtation is, in many ways, flirtation is the attempt to awaken somebody else to their attractiveness. I think it would be such a pity if we had to drive something as important as validation and self-acceptance and a pleasant view of oneself through the rather narrow gate of sex.

.. Flirtation is kind of an act of the imagination. What’s fun about flirtation is that it often happens between really quite unlikely people. Two people meet, and maybe they’re both with someone, or there’s a difference in status or background, etc., and they can find that they’re in a little conversation about the weather, and both parties will recognize that there’s something a little bit flirtatious going on. And it’s got really nothing to do with sex as such. It’s just two people delighting in awakening one another to the fact that they’re quite nice people, and they’re quite attractive, and that that’s OK.

If you think about — why is it exciting to kiss someone for the first time? It’s probably more fun eating an oyster or flossing your teeth or watching T.V. than kissing. It’s a bit weird. What’s this odd thing we call kissing? It’s like we’re trying to inflate somebody else’s mouth. And it’s just odd.

Nevertheless, we like it. Not because of its physical feeling, but because of what it means, the meaning we infuse. And the meaning we infuse into it is, “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.’”