How to Find Love

by The School of Life

Psychological Relationship: a union where the best insights of psychology are brought to bear on the complex business of finding and maintaining love.

If we intend to get better at relationships, we must attempt to examine the calls of Romantic love rationally. This isn’t a question of abandoning instinct, but of improving upon it.

We might then be powerfully attracted to people who seem to understand the lonely aspects of us.

The Instinct for Completion drives us towards strengths in others that promise to compensate for weaknesses in our own natures. What this means in practice is that, in order to become complete, two things must happen: we need to be willing to learn things and our partner must be willing to teach us things. And vice versa. The success of love will depend on success at learning and teaching.

speak. They will endorse our lonely, confused, hard-to-reach aspects just by intuition. This is very touching, but a huge problem in the long-term. It dissuades us from the difficult but necessary task of explaining ourselves: what we want, how we feel, why we are sad, what irritates us. We start to believe that a good lover should simply know the contents of our minds without us doing anything to share them. The fact that they understood parts of our minds so well, and so naturally, at one particular point leads to the counterproductive feeling that they should therefore understand the whole of our minds at all times – breeding a marked reluctance to explain (it doesn’t feel very Romantic, we might say).

Love aims to be a safe arena in which two people can gently teach and learn how to grow into better versions of themselves. Teaching and learning does not symbolise an abandonment of love: it is the basis upon which we can develop into better lovers and, more broadly, better people.

Those charming early lucky guesses about what our lovers feel should not fool us for too long.

We’re accusing the lover of being in the wrong. But really, the problem almost certainly lies with us. We should consider what is causing us to resort to the words ‘naive’ and ‘needy’. Their alleged naivety is our doing. They think us wonderful, but only because this is the way we have presented ourselves. We have been extraordinarily successful at hiding all our shadow sides from them. It is not they who are naive, it’s we who are good liars. It is normal, during seduction, to throw

What lies behind extreme seduction is self-hatred. We think that, at heart, we are unacceptable people, that no one could really love us if they saw our true selves, and therefore we develop great skill at camouflaging ourselves. This works, at a price of devastating loneliness.

we don’t necessarily have to lie in order to deserve love.

loving another is what we can do only when someone is perfect. Yet we are, of course, all deeply flawed.

Somewhere in the past, a child had to be perfect in order to deserve affection. Tantrums, bad habits and nasty thoughts had to be banished. The child became outwardly ‘good’ and inwardly ashamed and lonely. We need to move towards a more humane and mature model of complex love; a love that tolerates imperfection and ambivalence, that accepts that we can have faults and love ourselves and can see the faults of another person and still love them.

There is a basic truth at the heart of this worry: when we love someone, we risk loss. They could turn against us, succumb to a rare illness, or turn their attentions elsewhere. There is no way these possibilities can ever be entirely eliminated. What is distinctive about the self-saboteur is not that they are aware of the possibilities of loss, but that these possibilities affect them so acutely.

Somewhere in our characters, a deep association has been forged between hope and danger, along with a corresponding preference to live quietly with disappointment, rather than more freely with hope.

we believe – rather wrongly – that there is no one out there ‘good enough’ for us. We feel we could do better, and yet – tellingly – we never do.

saying, can look quite bad and yet we’re actually doing OK, considering the norm. This is a useful attitude to bring to our loves, for they too are unlikely to be perfect. But they are likely to be, in their way (and far more than we sometimes allow), acceptably ‘good enough.’

We don’t need to be so fastidious about the business of choosing. Hence Kierkegaard’s playfully, bleakly exasperated outburst from his book Either/Or: ‘Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it….

Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.’