The School of Life: An Emotional Education

by The School of Life

The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation. The emotionally intelligent person awards themselves the time to determine what gives their working life meaning and has the confidence and tenacity to try to find an accommodation between their inner priorities and the demands of the world.

The entire self-help category has become synonymous with sentimentality, idiocy, and hucksterism. To go by many of its examples, this caustic verdict is not especially unfair. The book covers are frequently garish and the promises overblown. But to dismiss the idea that underpins self-help—that one might at points stand in urgent need of solace and emotional education—seems an austerely perverse prejudice.

Our loves unfold against a cultural backdrop that creates a powerful sense of what is “normal” in love:

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.

The post-Romantic attitude is just as ambitious about good relationships, but it has a very different sense of how hope can be honored.

We are necessarily going to bring an awesome amount of trouble into someone else’s life. We tend to be shielded from this unwelcome news through a mixture of sentimentality and neglect.

to evolve a clear-eyed and unpanicked view of the grave failings of one’s partner is among the most generous actions we are capable of in love.

Our partner suffers from the disadvantages of incumbency: of having been in our lives for so long that we have had the opportunity to be patiently introduced to the full range of their inadequacies.

Acceptance is never a given; reciprocity is never assured. There can always be new threats, real or perceived, to love’s integrity.

Love should be a nurturing attempt by two people to reach their full potential, never just a crucible in which to look for endorsement for the panoply of present failings.

none of us approaches sex as we are meant to, with the cheerful, sporting, non-obsessive, clean, loyal, well-adjusted outlook that we convince ourselves is the norm.

A number of qualities are required to ensure that a couple know how to argue well. There is, first and foremost, the need for each party to be able to pinpoint sources of discomfort in themselves early and accurately: to know how to recognize what they are unhappy about and what they need in order to flourish in the couple.

One needs to know how to formulate one’s complaints into a convincing, perhaps even humorously framed point

It matters in all this that one both feels attached to the partner and at the same time has an active impression that one could walk away from them were matters ever truly to escalate. Feeling that one has options, does not therefore have to cling, and deserves good treatment ensures that one’s voice can be measured and that the status quo will remain manageable.

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.

The fact that we are blaming our partner in ridiculous ways is a heavily disguised but authentic mark of the trust we have in them.

The one putting forward the “logical” point of view shouldn’t be surprised by the angry response they receive. They are forgetting how weird and beyond the ordinary rules of reason all human minds can be, theirs included.

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.

We cannot be entirely wrong, there are surely genuine virtues to hand, but the primary error of the crush is to ignore the fact that life will in important ways have twisted us all out of shape. No one has come through completely unscathed. The chances of a perfectly admirable human walking the earth are nonexistent. Our fears and our frailties play themselves out in a thousand ways—they can make us defensive or aggressive, grandiose or hesitant, clingy or avoidant—but we can be assured that unfortunate tendencies exist in us all and will make everyone much less than perfect and, at moments, extremely hard to live with.

Passion can never withstand too much exposure to the full reality of another person. The unbounded admiration on which it is founded is destroyed by the knowledge that a properly shared life inevitably brings.

Domestic preoccupation isn’t really a sign of the death of love. It’s what awaits us when love has succeeded. We will only be reconciled to the reality of love when we can accept without rancor the genuine dignity of the ironing board.

Our partner is stumbling in the dark around needs that are immensely subtle, far from obvious, and very complicated to fulfill.

an inability to compromise does not always have to be the courageous and visionary position it is held to be by our impatient and perfectionist ideology. It may just be a slightly rigid, proud, and cruel delusion.

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.

Walt Whitman gave our multiplicity memorable expression: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” By this he meant that there are always so many interesting, attractive, and viable versions of oneself, so many good ways one could potentially live and work, and yet very few of these ever get properly enacted in the course of the single life we have. No wonder that we’re quietly and painfully conscious of our unfulfilled destinies, and at times recognize with a legitimate sense of agony that we really could well have been something and someone else.

If we were to align the world’s largest corporations with the pyramid, we would find that the needs to which they cater are overwhelmingly those at the bottom of the pyramid. Our most successful businesses are those that aim to satisfy our physical and simpler psychological selves:

Decisions must not always be probed too hard, or moods un-packed. We should respect and not tinker with emotions, especially as they relate to love and the spiritual varieties of experience. We need to fall silent—more frequently than we do—and simply listen. Sometimes the best way to honor the ineffable is through unclear language and obscure modes of expression.

Winnicott developed a charming phrase: “the good enough parent.” No child, he insisted, needs an ideal parent. They just need an OK, pretty decent, usually well-intentioned, sometimes grumpy but basically reasonable father or mother. Winnicott wasn’t saying this because he liked to settle for second best, but because he knew the toll exacted by perfectionism, and realized that in order to remain more or less sane (which is a very big ambition already) we have to learn not to hate ourselves for failing to be what no ordinary human being ever really is anyway.

The word may sound abstract and lofty, but wisdom is something we might plausibly aim to acquire a little more of over the course of our lives, even if true wisdom requires that we always keep in mind the persistent risk of madness and error.