How to Find Love

by The School of Life

places we call ‘beautiful’ (like the people we call ‘attractive’) are often those that have qualities we want but don’t yet have enough of.

We don’t want to change; change is painful. So although we’re attracted to strengths in others, we don’t necessarily accept that we have to correct the weaknesses in ourselves that fired our attractions in the first place.

we believe that we should direct our efforts to changing the way we characteristically deal with the difficulties we are attracted to. At present, the way we tend to deal with the difficulties we are attracted to is in the manner of the children we once were. Our pattern of response is riddled with some of the problems that a young person might make. For example: we over-personalise issues that we are not principally responsible for; we don’t explain our distress; we panic; we retreat into silence; we sulk.

What may be making our relationships awful is not simply that (for instance) we’re attracted to someone who is a bit fiery, distant or manically busy, but that we continue to react to these issues as we did when, long ago in childhood, we first met with them. There is a properly grown-up – less agitated, less fragile – response that in principle we could have and that would make almost all the difference.

Understanding what we like in a person – what gives us pleasure – is therefore a central anti-fixation move. By strengthening our attachment to qualities, we are weakening our attachment to specific individuals.

Part of properly growing up is knowing the difference between seeming nice and being nice – the latter requiring one to do things to a lover that will for a time enrage and devastate them. For real kindness, we need to have the courage to allow ourselves to be hated. The psychological imperative to appear nice at all costs will guarantee that we’ll be nothing other than quietly, exceptionally cruel. We owe it to those we no longer love to kill all hope and allow them to hate us, confident that we can withstand their anger. In the end, that is true kindness.

We trust that it is an option to lead a good love life without regularly making a complete idiot of ourselves. It isn’t.

A favorite perhaps

The way to greater confidence isn’t to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; it’s to grow at peace with the inevitable nature of our ridiculousness. We are idiots now, we have been idiots in the past, and we will be idiots again in the future – and that is OK. There aren’t any other options available for human beings.

In the meantime, we should strive to make ourselves as much at peace as we can be with the idea of being alone for a long time. Only then do we stand a chance of deciding to be with someone on the basis of their own merits.

‘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.’

The real skill is not always to strive to make better choices; it’s to know how to make our peace with our necessarily bad choices. We keep on supposing that our lives would turn out well if only we could somehow make an ideal right decision.