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But in order for the birds to settle, Plato understood that we need periods of purpose-free calm. Staring out of the window offers such an opportunity. We
Window daydreaming is a strategic rebellion against the excessive demands of immediate, but in the end insignificant, pressures in favour of the diffuse, but very serious, search for the wisdom of the unexplored deep self.
This hopeful scenario has been the source of extraordinary and unnecessary suffering. There are many
At this moment, nature seems to be sending us a humbling message: the incidents of our lives are not terribly important. And yet, strangely, rather than being distressing, this sensation can be a source of immeasurable solace and calm.
Today and tomorrow are essentially the same. Your existence is a small, temporary thing. You will die and it will be as if you had never been.
We are truly minute and entirely dispensable.
A central task of culture should be to remind us that the laws of nature apply to us as well as to trees, clouds and cliff faces. Our goal is to get clearer about where our own tantalizingly powerful yet always limited agency stops: where we will be left with no option but to bow to forces infinitely greater than our own.
Furthermore, it is a psychological law that those who are most attracted to calm will almost certainly also be especially irritable and by nature prone to particularly high levels of anxiety. We
Typically, lovers of something are not the people who already possess it but those who are hugely aware of how much they lack it – and are therefore especially humble before, and committed to, the task of securing it.
It probably isn’t in our remit to locate a wholly
This is because the success or failure of a relationship doesn’t hinge on whether the other is deeply flawed – they are. What matters is how we interpret their failings; how we understand the reasons why they have previously been and will again in the future be very difficult to be with.
We are ready for relationships not when we have encountered perfection, but when we have grown willing to give flaws the charitable interpretations they deserve.
A charitable mindset doesn’t make it lovely to be confronted by the other’s troubles. But it strengthens our capacity to stick with them, because we see that their failings don’t make them unworthy of love, rather all the more urgently in need of it.
The discipline involved in growing up into a good person seeks occasional alleviation, which is what sex can provide in those rare moments when two partners trust one another enough to reveal their otherwise strictly censored desires to dirty and insult. Though defiling sex seems on the surface to be about hurting another person, really it’s a quest for intimacy and love – and a delight that, for a time at least, we can be as bad as we like and still turn out to be the object of another’s affection.
It is emotional closeness, not curfews, that guarantees the integrity of couples.
The more we can tell our partners what we are annoyed and disappointed about, what we long for and are made anxious by, and the more we can feel heard for doing so, the less we will bear grudges, keep our distance and seek revenge by stripping naked with someone else. Few
affair should naturally induct us into the full scale
The tragedy of every sorry argument is that it is constructed around a horrific mismatch between the message we so badly want to send (‘I need you to love me, know me, agree with me’) and the manner in which we are able to deliver it (with impatient accusations, sulks, put-downs, sarcasm,
agitation and aggression, we should come to recognize the very distinct kinds of rows in operation.
Irritability is anger that lacks self-knowledge.
People don’t change when they are gruffly told what’s wrong with them; they change when they feel sufficiently supported to undertake the change they – almost always – already know is due.
No one gives a damn about an admirable company that has hurt our feelings through its success.
Our sense of whether we’re attractive or not isn’t a reflection of what we actually look like; it follows a pattern that goes back to childhood and how loved we were made to feel by those we depended on. The fear of public speaking is bound up with long-standing shame and dread of others’ judgement.
We are nursing an emotional injury far too shaming to mention to others, let alone ourselves, the only ones not to be having sex in a happy, sex-filled world. Our anger
aggravates our injury and traps us in cycles of hostility. Perhaps they don’t want us in the night because we have been so vile in the day; but so long as our hand goes unwanted, we can never muster the courage to be anything but vindictive in their presence. It hurts more than being single, when at least the neglect was to be expected. This is a sentence without end. We can neither complain nor let the issue go. We feel compelled to fight by proxy about anything we can lay our hands on – the washing powder and the walk to the park, the money for the dentist and the course of the nation’s
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The absence of sex matters so much because sex itself is the supreme conciliator and salve of all conflict, ill feeling, loneliness and lack of interest. It is almost impossible to make love and be sad, indifferent or bitter. Furious perhaps, in a passionate and ardent way. But not – almost never – truly elsewhere or beset by major grievances. The act forces presence, vulnerability, honesty, tenderness, release. It matters inordinately because it is the ultimate proof that everything is, despite everything, still OK.
As ever, so much would change if only we could be helped to find the words to fight our way past our shame and not feel so alone (this should be proof enough that we aren’t); if we could point to the problem without fury, without humiliation, without defensiveness; if we could simply name our desperation without becoming desperate; if the one who didn’t want sex could explain why in terms that made sense and were bearable and the one who felt cast aside could explain without giving way to vindictiveness or despair.
Love begins with the discovery of harmony in very specific areas, but widespread disagreement, misunderstanding, boredom, a certain amount of rage and loneliness are what happens when love finally truly succeeds.
Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is therefore merely a case of identifying a specific kind of dissatisfaction we can bear rather than an occasion to escape from grief altogether.
Domestic preoccupation isn’t really a sign of the death of love. It’s what awaits us when love has succeeded. We
Love can seem founded on the idea of an absence of secrecy.
Love begins with a hope of – at last – being able to tell someone else everything about who we are and what we feel. The
Couples who compromise may in reality not be the enemies of love; they may be at the vanguard of understanding what lasting relationships truly demand.
our most unfair accusations, our most wounding insults. It is to our lovers that we direct blame for everything that has gone wrong in
To marry is to recognize that we require structure to insulate us from our urges. It is to lock ourselves up willingly, because we acknowledge the benefits of the long-term – the wisdom of the morning after the storm.
is an arrangement that protects us from what we desire and yet know, in our more reasonable moments, that we don’t truly need or want.
Marriage is a means by which people can specialize – perhaps in making money or in running a home. This can be hugely constructive. But it carries a risk. Each person (especially if one stays at home) needs to be assured that they will not later be disadvantaged by their devotion. Marriage sets up the
Over time, the argument for marriage has shifted. It’s no longer about external forces having power over us: religions, the state, the legal idea of legitimacy, the social idea of being respectable …
Tethering ourselves to our partner, via the public institution of marriage, makes our unavoidable fluctuations of feeling have less power to destroy a relationship, one that we know, in calmer moments, is supremely important to us. The point of marriage is to be usefully unpleasant – at least at crucial times. Together we embrace a set of limitations on one kind of freedom, the freedom to run away, so as to protect and strengthen another kind, the shared ability to mature and create something of lasting value, the pains of which are aligned to our better selves.
The good child has been deprived of one of the central ingredients of a properly privileged upbringing: the experience of other people
The desire to be good is one of the loveliest things in the world, but in order to have a genuinely good life, we may sometimes need to be (by the standards of the good child) fruitfully and bravely bad.
We would become free to give things a go by accepting that failure and idiocy were the norm. And every so often, amid the endless rebuffs we’d have factored in from the outset, it would work: we’d get a hug, we’d make a friend, we’d get a pay rise.
The road to greater confidence begins with a ritual of telling oneself solemnly every morning, before embarking on the challenges of the day, that one is a muttonhead, a cretin, a dumb-bell and an imbecile. One or two more acts of folly should, thereafter, not feel so catastrophic after all.
The solution to the impostor syndrome lies in making a leap of faith and trusting that others’ minds work basically in much the same way as our own. Everyone is probably as anxious, uncertain and wayward as we are.
Traditionally, being a member of the aristocracy provided a fast-track to confidence-giving knowledge about the true characters of the elite.
‘No man is a hero to his valet,’
The desire for fame has its roots in the experience of neglect and injury.
No one would want to be famous who hadn’t also, somewhere in the past, been made to feel extremely insignificant. We
great signs of good parenting: that a child has no desire to be famous).
What is common to all dreams of fame is that being known to strangers will often be the solution to a hurt. It presents itself as the answer to a deep need to be appreciated and treated decently by other people.
