The School of Life: An Emotional Education

by The School of Life

Next to the mighty canyon or the vast ocean, even the celebrity or the CEO does not seem so mighty.

Surely a genuine devotion to calm would mean ongoing serenity? But this isn’t a fair judgment, because being calm all the time isn’t ever a viable option. What counts is the commitment one is making to the idea of being a little calmer than last year. We can legitimately count as lovers of calm when we ardently seek to grow calmer, not when we succeed at being calm on all occasions. However frequent the lapses, it is the devotion that matters. 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 have a mistaken picture of what lovers of calm look like if we assume them to be among the most tranquil of the species. Typically, lovers of something are not the people who already possess it but those who are hugely aware of how much they lack it

We can also state at this point that Romanticism has been a disaster for love. It is an intellectual and spiritual movement that has had a devastating impact on the ability of ordinary people to lead successful emotional lives. Our strongest cultural voices have, to our huge cost, given us a very unhelpful script to apply to a hugely tricky task. We have been told, among other things, that: ■ we should meet a person of extraordinary inner and outer beauty and immediately feel a special attraction to them, and they to us; ■ we should have highly satisfying sex, not only at the start, but for ever more; ■ we should never be attracted to anyone else; ■ we should understand one another intuitively; ■ we don’t need an education in love (we may need to train to become a pilot or a brain surgeon, but not a lover—we will pick that up along the way, by following our feelings); ■ we should have no secrets and spend constant time together (work shouldn’t get in the way); ■ we should raise a family without any loss of sexual or emotional intensity; ■ our lover must be our soulmate, best friend, co-parent, co-chauffeur, accountant, household manager, and spiritual guide. Reflecting on the history of Romanticism should be consoling because it suggests that quite a lot of the troubles we have with relationships don’t stem (as we normally, guiltily, end up thinking) from our ineptitude, our inadequacy, or our regrettable choice of partners. Knowing the history invites anot...

We need to replace the Romantic template with a psychologically mature vision of love we might call Classical, which encourages in us a range of unfamiliar but hopefully effective attitudes: ■ that it is normal that love and sex do not always belong together; ■ that discussing money early on, up front, in a serious way is not a betrayal of love; ■ that realizing that we are rather flawed, and our partner is too, is of huge benefit to a couple in increasing the amount of tolerance and generosity in circulation; ■ that we will never find everything in another person, nor they in us, not because of some unique incapacity, but because of the basic operations of human nature; ■ that we need to make immense and often rather artificial-sounding efforts to understand one another because intuition will never be enough; ■ that practicalities matter—so, for example, there is special dignity around the topics of laundry and domestic management. Such attitudes and many more belong to the new, more hopeful future of love.

To get at the peculiar instincts that circulate powerfully in the less noticed corners of our brains, we might try to finish stub sentences that invite us to share what might charm or repel us in others: If someone shows me huge kindness and consideration, I … If someone isn’t entirely convinced by me, I … When someone tells me they really need me, I … Our honest reactions are legacies that reveal our underlying assumptions about the kind of love it feels we are allowed, and are perhaps not an especially good guide to personal or mutual happiness.

The idea that one is in many ways an extremely difficult person to live around sounds, at first, improbable and even offensive. Yet fully understanding and readily and graciously admitting this possibility may be the surest way of making certain that one proves a somewhat endurable proposition. There are few people more deeply insufferable than those who don’t, at regular intervals, suspect they might be so. We are, all of us, hellish. We don’t need to be thinking of anyone in particular to know this is true for everyone. We have all, in one way or another, been inadequately parented, have a panoply of unfortunate psychological traits, are beset by bad habits, are anxious, jealous, ill-tempered, and vain.

A bad argument is a failed endeavor to communicate, which perversely renders the underlying message we seek to convey ever less visible. It is our very desperation that undermines us and ushers in the unreasonableness that prevents whatever point we lay claim to from making its way across. We argue in an ugly way because, in our times of distress, we lose access to all better methods of explaining our fears, frustrated hopes, needs, concerns, excitements, and convictions.

We keep arguing because we never manage to identify and address the key issue we’re actually cross about. Irritability is anger that lacks self-knowledge.

An excessively logical approach to fears discounts their origins and concentrates instead on why we shouldn’t have them, which is maddening when we are in pain. It’s not that we actually want our partner to stop being reasonable; we want them to apply their intelligence to the task of sensitive reassurance. We want them to enter into the weirder bits of our own experience by remembering their own. We want to be understood for being the mad animals we are, and then comforted and reassured that it will all be OK anyway.

A crush represents in pure and perfect form the essential dynamics of Romanticism: the explosive interaction of limited knowledge, outward obstacles to further discovery and boundless hope. We wouldn’t be able to develop crushes if we weren’t so good at allowing a few details about someone to suggest the whole of them. From a few cues only, perhaps a distant look in the eyes, a forthright brow or a generous wit, we rapidly start to anticipate an intense connection and stretches of happiness, buoyed by profound mutual sympathy and understanding.

Every human can be guaranteed to frustrate, anger, annoy, madden, and disappoint us—and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. This is a truth chiseled indelibly into the script of romantic life. 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.

free. In a position of longing for a new person when we are constrained within an existing relationship, we must beware too of the “incumbent problem”: the vast but often overlooked and unfair advantage that all new people, and also cities and jobs, have over existing—or, as we put it, incumbent—ones. The beautiful person glimpsed briefly in the street, the city visited for a few days, the job we read about in a couple of tantalizing paragraphs in a magazine all tend to seem immediately and definitively superior to our current partner, our long-established home, and our committed workplace and can inspire us to sudden and (in retrospect sometimes) regrettable divorces, relocations, and resignations. When we spot apparent perfection, we tend to blame our spectacular bad luck for the mediocrity of our lives, without realizing that we are mistaking an asymmetry of knowledge for an asymmetry of quality: We are failing to see that our partner, home, and job are not especially awful, but rather that we know them especially well.

We should extrapolate what we already know of people and apply it to those we don’t yet.

We hear the offer of friendship as something synonymous with insult because our Romantic culture has, from our youth, continuously made one thing clear: Love is the purpose of existence; friendship is the paltry, depleted consolation prize.

in friendship—the supposedly worthless and inferior state whose mention should crush us at the end of a date—we bring our highest and noblest virtues. Here we are patient, encouraging, tolerant, funny, and, most of all, kind. We expect a little less and therefore, by extension, forgive infinitely more. We do not presume that we will be fully understood and so treat failings lightly and humanely. We don’t imagine that our friends should admire us without reserve, sticking by us whatever we do, and so we put in effort and behave, pleasing ourselves as well as our companions along the way. We are, in the company of our friends, our best selves.

Unfortunately, the lessons that are most important for us—the lessons that contribute most to our increasing wisdom and rounded completeness as people—are almost always the most painful to learn. They involve confronting our fears, dismantling our defensive armor, feeling properly guilty for our capacity to hurt another person, being genuinely sorry for our faults, and learning to put up with the imperfections of someone else.

Almost everything interesting, worth doing or important will meet with a degree of opposition. The greatest plan will necessarily irritate or disappoint certain people while remaining eminently valuable. Every noble ambition has to skirt disaster and ignominy. In their timid inability to brook the dangers of hostility, the good child risks being condemned to career mediocrity and sterile people-pleasing.

There’s a type of underconfidence that arises specifically when we grow too attached to our own dignity and become anxious around situations that seem in some way to threaten it. We hold back from challenges in which there is any risk of ending up looking ridiculous, but these of course comprise many of the most interesting options.

In a concerted bid never to look foolish, we don’t venture very far from our lair; and thereby—from time to time, at least—miss out on the best opportunities of our lives. At the heart of our underconfidence is a skewed picture of how dignified a normal person can be. We imagine that it might be possible to place ourselves permanently beyond mockery. We trust that it is an option to lead a good life without regularly making a wholehearted idiot of ourselves.

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 dumbbell, and an imbecile. One or two more acts of folly should, thereafter, not feel so catastrophic after all.

The root cause of impostor syndrome is an unhelpful picture of what people at the top of society are really like. We feel like impostors not because we are uniquely flawed, but because we can’t imagine how equally flawed the elite must necessarily also be underneath their polished surfaces.

We’re constantly aware of all our anxieties and doubts from within, yet all we know of others is what they happen to do and tell us—a far narrower and more edited source of information.

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.