Alain de Botton on 'The Hard Work of Love'

I'm putting a few excerpts which I found nicely articulated......and while this is in the context of romantic love, several thoughts would fit any other relationships of love as well.

"One of the greatest insults that you can level at a lover in the modern world apparently is to say, “I want to change you.” The Ancient Greeks had a view of love which was essentially based around education, that's what love means. Love is a benevolent process whereby two people try to teach each other how to become the best versions of themselves"

"Of course by the time we’ve humiliated someone, they’re not going to learn anything....the problem is that the failures of our relationships have made us so anxious that we can’t be the teachers we should be. And therefore, some often genuine, legitimate things that we want to get across come across as insults, as attempts to wound, and are therefore rejected, and the arteries of the relationship start to fur"

"We don’t need people to be perfect, we just need people to be able to explain their imperfections to us in good time, before they’ve hurt us too much with them, and with a certain degree of humility. That’s already an enormous step"

"We must fiercely resist the idea that true love must mean conflict-free love, that the course of true love is smooth. It’s not. It’s no fault of mine or no fault of yours; it’s to do with being human. And the more generous we can be towards that flawed humanity, the better chance we’ll have of doing the true hard work of love"

"Psychological dynamics are everywhere, even in sex. And so often, we think of sex as just a sort of pneumatic activity, but really, it’s a psychological activity. And if you try to imagine why people are excited by sex, it’s not so much that it’s a pleasurable nerve-ending business; it’s ultimately that it’s about acceptance.

And the meaning we infuse into it is, “I accept you. And I accept you in a way that is incredibly intimate and that would be quite revolting with anyone else. I’m allowing you into my private space as a way of signaling, ‘I like you.’ We call it getting “turned on,” but what we’re really excited by is that someone accepts us .....takes delight in us. That’s what’s exciting about it."

"It’s when we are in love that we take particular offense when they get things wrong. Because the kind of the governing assumption of the relationship is, this person should know what’s in my mind ideally without me needing to tell them. And that’s such an extraordinary demand."

When people always say, “Communicate,” we have to be generous towards the reasons why we don’t. And we don’t because we’re operating with this mad idea that true love means intuitive understanding. No one can intuitively understand another beyond a quite limited range of topics.

It’s the work of love. 

"The work of love is to try, when we can manage it — we can’t always — to go behind the front of this rather depressing, challenging behavior and try and ask where it might’ve come from. Love is doing that work to ask oneself, “Where’s this rather aggressive, pained, noncommunicative, unpleasant behavior come from?” If we can do that, we’re on the road to knowing a little bit about what love really is.

And our friends don’t tell us because they just want a pleasant evening with us. So we’re left with a bubble of ignorance about our own natures. And often, you can be way into your 40s before you’re starting to get a sense of it"

"Let’s not forget that one of the things that makes relationships so scary is we need to be weak in front of other people. And most of us are just experts at being pretty strong. We’ve been doing it for years. We know how to be strong. What we don’t know how to do is to make ourselves safely vulnerable, and so we tend to get very twitchy, preternaturally aggressive, etc., when the moment has come to be weak.

But we feel often conflicted about it. "

"There’s a lot of fear of slippery slopes. In many situations, we can hang on on the slippery slope. It’s OK. It's about getting the tools to hang on in there."