In Plato’s eyes, love is in essence a kind of education: you couldn’t really love someone if you didn’t want to be improved by them. Love should be two people trying to grow together – and helping each other to do so. Which means you need to get together with the person who contains a key missing bit of your evolution: the virtues you don’t have. This sounds entirely odd nowadays when we tend to interpret love as finding someone perfect just as they are. In the heat of arguments, lovers sometimes say to one another: ‘If you loved me, you wouldn’t try to change me.’ Plato thinks the diametric
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