BITESIZE | Why Modern Relationships Feel So Hard (And What We've Been Getting Wrong) | Alain de Botton #692

We live in a culture that often celebrates the ‘perfect’ relationship but does little to prepare us for the reality of long-term commitment. Modern life is filled with idealised images of love and marriage – but the truth, as today’s guest suggests, is far more human, messy and ultimately hopeful. Today’s Bitesize is from episode 574 of the podcast with author, internationally renowned philosopher, and founder of The School of Life, the wonderful Alain de Botton. In this clip, Alain shares a refreshing perspective on relationships, why he believes love is a skill rather than just a feeling, and how changing our expectations could help us build deeper, more lasting connections. There’s something deeply reassuring in knowing that love doesn’t have to look like the stories we grew up with. And by letting go of these cultural myths and by embracing each other’s flaws, we improve not only our relationships, but also how happy and contented we feel. Thanks to our sponsor https://heights.com/livemore Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/574 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts ⁠⁠https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore⁠⁠ For other podcast platforms go to ⁠⁠https://fblm.supercast.com. DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 0:42Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 1:20Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 1:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of inspiration, insights and practical ideas to help you live well and thrive. Each episode brings you some of my favourite moments, useful tools and inspiring ideas from the many incredible conversations I've had on my podcast. Today's bite size is from episode 574 of the podcast with author, internationally renowned philosopher and founder of the School of Life, the wonderful Alan de Botten. In this bite size, Alan shares a refreshing perspective on relationships,

• 2:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  why he believes love is a skill rather than just a feeling, and how changing our expectations could help us build deeper, more lasting connections.

• 2:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  A few years back, you put out an essay entitled, quite provocatively, Why You Will Marry The Wrong Person.

• 2:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  I thought we'd start off this conversation by interrogating that statement. Why is it we will marry the wrong person? Is it something to do with our own personal failures? Or a more widespread misunderstanding about the nature of long-term relationships?

• 2:53Speaker 01

  I mean, just to explain that title, it was an ironic title, basically saying, everyone's going to be slightly wrong, everyone, even the best person that you get together with will be slightly wrong. And if you can accept their wrongness, you're actually much further along the way to rightness. That is, where the basis of a good relationship is to accept the humanity and the flawed nature of whoever it is that you are together with. And the insistence on a right person is a kind of deification of other human beings, which actually tends to get you into trouble. So a gracious acceptance of our flawed humanity is actually a better basis with which to approach relationships.

• 3:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  That was the most read article, I believe, on the New York Times back in 2016 when you wrote it. What does that say about about us?

• 3:43Speaker 01

  It was quite remarkable. And I would say that ultimately it has to do with our loneliness around the compromises that we all endure in relationships. I think a lot of us are thinking, is this normal? Is this level of scratchiness, discomfort, complexity, normal? And the simple answer is yes. So if you're in a scratchy, complex relationship, welcome to relationships. I mean, there is still an enormous gap, despite all these methods of communication. There is still an enormous gap between what we know from the inside about what it is to be human and what is generally spoken about. There is still enormous areas of silence and therefore enormous areas where we go through the world thinking, is this right?

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Is this normal? Is this level of whatever it is, normal? And almost always the answer is yes. I mean, if you're feeling it, it's a human condition. But we, we tend to, you know, the word shame comes in. We tend to experience with a lot of shame. We think, I can't hear an echo of what I know is inside me, inside everybody else, from what I'm picking up. Therefore, where have I gone wrong? And I think there's nothing more normal than to think that we have gone wrong in relationships, when in fact, we are simply having relationships and relationships will involve a lot of complexity. I mean, let me expand on some of the themes.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  It's been one of the great insights of psychotherapy that when we are guided by instinct towards a certain sort of person, what's often happening is we are refinding our way to a quality of love and affection that we knew in early childhood. That what we, you know, when we fall in love, we're actually refinding love, a love that we once knew as children. It's got, it'll have some of the quality, inevitably, it'll have some of the qualities. And you know, occasionally this bubbles up to consciousness and people will joke and go, huh, you know, my partner, it reminds me a bit of my, my mother or my father. Everybody around the table sort of laughs and we think it's, it's very funny. Like many funny things, there's a deep truth in that. Undoubtedly, there is an echo. The, the reason why it gets complicated is that for many of us, perhaps almost all of us,

• 5:55Speaker 01

  the love that we enjoyed in childhood was not merely an unalloyed joy, not merely, you know, based on generosity, attunement, sympathy, all the good things in, that should be there in love. There might also have been distance, unpredictability, fear, a lack of safety, a yearning for a degree of acceptance that was never quite within reach. And I think that very often what happens is we then seek those things in the relationships that we pursue most avidly in adulthood. And that ultimately what we're doing in love very often is not so much searching for fulfillment as searching for a sense of familiarity, which may be the same thing, but may importantly, not be the same thing if we happen to have childhoods

• 6:38Speaker 01

  where affection was not particularly linked to our flourishing.

• 6:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's interesting. That was one of the most read articles on the New York Times, which is of course is an American publication. Yes, it's a publication that is read all over the world. But that sort of cultural understanding of what a relationship is deeply fascinates me. So America, the sort of bastion country of the West, okay? What is it, let's say broadly speaking, in the West, we perhaps get wrong or misunderstand about relationships, which then leads us to this often constant disappointment, high divorce rates, high levels of frustration?

• 7:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is it that our expectations of what a relationship is are fundamentally flawed?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Look, the United States is a very difficult country for people to understand outside it. It has a very particular history and one ignores that history at one's peril. It was founded, the nation was founded by people who believed that we could make life perfectable in, in this life. And that's quite odd because for most other nations, in most other cultures, that's not at all the way it is. You know, if you look at Buddhist culture, Hindu culture, or the, the old European version of Christianity, which was not the American version of Christianity. It's the next world. It's the other world. That's where you can achieve perfection. In this world, it's all broken. There is, you know, the first Buddhist stricture, life is suffering. You've got it all there.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  The, the foundation of Catholic Christianity, original sin, the notion of life is broken. Now, these things could be seen as too pessimistic, too extreme, et cetera. But I often think that taken in the right way, they offer us something quite unusual and something that we might need to be alive to in the modern world, which is an acceptance of our flawed nature and of the imperfect nature of, of everything, including human to human relationships. Now, back to the United States, this is a country founded by people who think that human life is perfectable. It's an amazing ideal. It's produced, you know, moonshots, it's produced artificial intelligence, but all, you know, lots of extraordinary things that a more settled view of human possibility would not countenance.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  This has been possible in the United States. But most people in that nation are also still struggling with the ordinary business of living and dying. That hasn't gone away. And also the ordinary business of forming relationships. And it's possible that some of the beautiful perfectionism has at the same time bled into a kind of intolerance, which is what's wrong with my life? What's wrong with my partner? There's an issue, rather than thinking, welcome to existence. One thinks something's gone faithfully wrong with my life.

• 9:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it kind of goes beyond relationships, doesn't it? It's what's wrong with my partner? What's wrong with my job? What's wrong with my life? You know, perfectionism is incredibly toxic for so many aspects of our lives. And what you said was really interesting to me, that it was founded on the idea of perfectionism. So it's kind of woven into the culture. It's, you know, you're the fish swimming with this idea of perfectionism around you. And let me contrast that with something that I didn't really understand growing up, but I, I really do now. And I actually have a newfound respect for it, my own parents and how they got together. So my parents grew up in India.

• 10:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  They were immigrants to the UK in the 96s, the 97s. I was born in the UK and I learnt as a child that my mum and dad met for the first time the day before they got married. Okay, so my dad came to the UK, I think in 1962. And in the early seventies, he took two weeks annual leave. Okay. Because his family had found him, his wife. He meets his then-to-be-wife on the Saturday, right? They have a little meeting, the next day they get married. Now, growing up in the West, I didn't know what to make of that growing up. I don't think I really thought about it. A lot of these things you think about as you become an adult.

• 11:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  You think, you know, maybe I was a little bit embarrassed to admit that, growing up in the West, you know, that my parents had an arranged marriage. But I guess the point I'm trying to make is, I would imagine that for my parents...

• 11:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  The idea of compromise was built in right from the start. It's not I'm choosing who I want to marry. It's the person has chosen for me. Therefore, I know going in that I'm going to have to compromise. It's interesting, isn't it?

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Sure. And of course, you know, the inevitable thing that happens in any relation, any new relationship is at some point you stumble on a problem. So you've been having a great time. It's been, you know, very jolly for the first couple of weeks. And then suddenly someone says something and you think, oh, I don't agree with that, et cetera. Now, in the modern world, we have this language of red flags. I mean, Instagram, you know, is full of this language whereby if there's a problem, the relationship is toxic. If there's a problem with somebody, it's a red flag. And if there's a red flag, you just jump out. You immediately jump out. And obviously there are behaviours that, you know, no one would want to condone and that are genuinely problematic. But I think there is also an excessive version of this. I mean, if you really have to eradicate from your life, everyone who shows any form of

• 12:17Speaker 01

  problematic behaviour of any kind, you'll have a very easy life, but you'll also have a very lonely life. I mean, you simply, you know, you've got rid of everybody. So if every last red flag has to be exited, you know, welcome to solitude. And I think that, you know, there is something beautiful about saying, okay, there is an incompatibility here, there is a problem here, but let's try and work it through. Let me try and align my understanding with your understanding. It doesn't mean to say that we're ever going to agree, but we're at least going to see where the other one's coming from. And that's a discipline, a knack, a skill.

• 12:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  A skill.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's a skill, isn't it?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 12:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's a skill that you have to learn.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  And we've got this emotion based view of love. We think that love is an emotion rather than a skill. It's a feeling that can't be questioned, that's either there or not there, rather than the fruit of labour, which just sounds perverse, but it's, I think, acutely true.

• 13:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Where do these false expectations come from, do you think?

• 13:17Speaker 01

  I think we're prey to an unhelpful notion of romanticism, which kicks in in the early 19th century. And it starts off as a movement of ideas in the worlds of poetry and literature, and then spreads to infect, or at least affect, the whole of humanity. And there are all sorts of assumptions behind this romantic ideal. The notion of a soulmate, the notion that there is one person out there who will fully understand you, that when soulmates are together, they understand each other wordlessly. It's a huge trope in 19th century poetry, that true lovers do not need language. So language is being used to say that if you really love, you don't use word, you just understand. Beautiful idea, goes right back to childhood, because of course, our earliest experience

• 14:01Speaker 01

  as children is being understood by our parents or by caregivers without speaking. Children can't speak in their infancy and they are, on a good day, understood. But children are also very simple. All they need is milk and, you know, burp or whatever it is. Of course, by the time you reach adulthood, the notion of another adult, fully understanding your views on politics, your taste in curtains, your sense of what a good holiday is, your vision of your mother, your hatred, but also loyalty towards your older sister, but you know, your complex feelings towards your brother in law, et cetera, et cetera. They're not going to understand this wordlessly. They're going to need to be educated. And that sounds like a really weird word. It sounds, if you like, unromantic. And whenever something sounds unromantic, in my view, it's almost always a sign that

• 14:44Speaker 01

  it is actually conducive to love. We've twisted our vocabulary. So if you said, here are two lovers, they're talking at quite a lot of length about what each of them thinks about how to arrange a cutlery drawer or the bathroom towels, you might think, oh God, what are they doing spending all that time? That's not very romantic, but it is romantic if we allow that word to be used to describe things that are aiming to help the flourishing of a relationship. To find like that, it's really romantic to discuss money, to discuss education, to discuss expectations around, you know, how to spend holidays, how to manage family, et cetera. These are so called boring topics, but we're impatient with them.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  And I think that romantic culture has helped us to become impatient. So I was just discussing some of the preconditions of a romantic worldview. One of them is two people who love each other, understand each other without speaking. That is obvious nonsense. The notion also of one soulmate, there's a one person for you. Also the idea that you will know that person totally by instinct, that you will find your person, you know, you will be ineluctably drawn to them by a force that you don't understand and can't account for. Is that true? Let's also remember that many, many of the ideals of romanticism were delivered by people who had no jobs. And that sounds kind of weird, but think of all the poets, et cetera. They didn't seem to have to go to the office or the factory or anything.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  They were just, they devoted themselves entirely to the business of love. That gave them quite a skewed view of relationships. Also, many of these guys died young and it's so easy to fall madly in love and love someone forever if you've only got six months with them. That's, it's really easy to love someone forever if you're, you know, on your last breath. So, I mean, I'm being facetious, but I'm trying to deliver an important point, which is, you know, if love is enmeshed with practical things, if love's going to go on for a long time, if love involves being in a community, managing a family, et cetera, you're not going to be able to follow these romantic tropes.

• 16:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 16:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Something I've been thinking about over the past week, I think it's, in some ways, it's a silly thing, but it kind of speaks to what you just said about these mundane things. It's these small mundane things that are everything, actually. So I don't know if I should be saying this on a microphone or not really, but my wife and I, I would say, have a different view on how dirty pans should be left in the kitchen. Okay, so on the face of it, the most ridiculous thing, okay? But I'll tell you where my mind went when you were just going through that sort of list of mundane things.

• 17:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  If a pan has been used and it needs cleaning, but we're not going to clean it immediately, I'd like to put it at the side of the sink soaked, so that when the time does come, it's all soaked and the dirt comes off easily. I did that the other day and I came down in the morning and my wife had moved it and it was, in my eyes, higgledy piggledy in the sink, left dry. I thought, that's interesting because now I have to soak it again. That was really interesting. I had a really fun chat with my wife the next morning. I said, this is what I've learnt after nearly 18 years of marriage, that actually, so, hey baby, so it's interesting, that's why I left it like this. And she goes, well, actually, I don't like it there. I think it gets in the way.

• 18:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'd prefer that it was in the sink. I was like, yeah, but if you put it in the sink at an angle like that, we can't stack anything else in the sink. Okay. But I've been thinking about this during the week and I've been thinking, okay, that's interesting. In many ways, that example is micro but represents the macro. We are two individuals who see the world completely differently, right? Who have legitimately in our brains, a reason for why we will put the pan in a different way. And so the thing I've been thinking about this week is, I don't necessarily need to change that. What would life look like if I accepted that? But actually, you know what? That's how they'd like to do it.

• 18:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay. Now, it could be that we have a conversation and come up with a mutual agreement of how we're going to do that. But it's kind of funny, isn't it, that these little things often cause big fights? Well, I don't know, what do you think? Is me discussing that or thinking about that, is it truly a little mundane thing that has no value? Or in some ways, does it represent a big picture view of oneself in relationships?

• 19:27Speaker 01

  I think in love, there are no small things. The details always evoke and are connected up with something very large, which is why when you're falling in love with someone, you think, God, I'm really charmed by the way, you know, they're eating their breakfast cereal or the way that they, you know, buttering their toast, whatever it is, it's a small thing. And you think, is it possible that some very powerful, big feeling is emerging from a small thing? And the answer is yes, just as later on in the relationship, irritation and resentments can again coalesce around so called small details. These things are the conduits to very large themes of life, that, you know, the large is present in the small.

• 20:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  And it also evokes that in order for a relationship to function properly, one of the skills that we need in order to be a good lover is the capacity to teach. Now, we think, oh, teachers are a specialised subsection of the population, they go to training college and they stand in front of classrooms, et cetera. In order to have a good life, in order to have a good romantic life, you have no option but to become a teacher, that all of us need to skill up in the area of teaching. And what that means is an ability to take someone into your experience and convey it without threat, without hysteria, without viciousness, at a time when your audience is likely to understand and likely to be receptive, which means, you know, not at midnight when two people are a bit scratchy and exhausted, et cetera.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  But, you know, maybe at the beginning of the day when it's not so, you know, as we know, good teaching, if you want to try and teach someone something, be very sure that you don't need them to understand it in order for you not to lose your composure. You have to be able to tolerate that they won't understand. And I think some of the reason why lovers get into such terrible arguments is because they have, they box themselves into a position of thinking, I need you to understand this and I need you to understand it now and fully. And if you don't understand it, it's catastrophic. It will evoke for me that I'm alone, that I am completely abandoned, that you can't love me, et cetera. And these things are exaggerations of understandable positions, but they are massive exaggerations.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  And so we box ourselves in and it spirals. And I think, you know, if you're going to have a good relationship, starting right from the start of a relationship, you have to be able to explain who you are to the other person. I have a friend who recently met someone, she'd been single for a while. She met someone who loved going sailing on a lake near his house. And he said to her something like, you know, my last relationship, my partner didn't like sailing and that really cost us, you know, that was damaging. So automatically a sort of, an atmosphere started taking hold of like, if this is going to work, you have to like this. So she dutifully went out and tried to show what a good sailor she was. And, you know, even though the boat was actually quite tiny and it was leaking and all the

• 22:14Speaker 01

  rest of it, very uncomfortable, sure, I've got to keep going. And so she started to suppress her needs. And after three days of this sailing trip, she broke down and she said, I can't take this anymore, you know. And of course, Then things got heated and, you know, there was an argument, et cetera. They get back on track, but what it shows is in order to be a good lover, you have to be able to say, this is what I can tolerate. This is what makes me happy. This is what I like, this is what I don't like. And to be able to say it gently, compassionately, calmly, but, but also quite firmly, quite firmly. This is me, this is me. I don't like going for long country walks. I'm not into cold water swimming.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  I don't like the poetry of T S Eliot. I like to be in bed quite early. You know, these are things, and of course, all these things have an antecedent. You know, if we've had a childhood where it's always somebody else's needs that came first, if we'd never be able to express who we really are. We don't have a training in this. A good parent will be able to say to their child, if you need to go to the bathroom during class, put up your hand, just ask the teacher, explain what's going on and, you know, they should be able to understand. Or when you go to your friend Sophie's house for her birthday party, if you don't like the cake, ask your mum for a slice of bread. That'll be fine. In other words, it's okay to be who you are. If you can explain it politely, that's fine. And another person should understand. And as importantly, if they don't understand,

• 23:43Speaker 01

  you've got every right to politely, gently say, I'm not sure I'm happy here. I might, I might need to walk away here. And these are skills that, again, I mean, they should be teaching us this alongside, you know, geography and physics from a young age.

• 23:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. This idea of being a teacher, it's quite an interesting one. I know in some of your previous work, you've written about the ancient Greeks and their sort of belief system about relationships. This idea that actually each of you is teaching the other person to become their best selves, which I thought was a really aspirational notion of what a relationship could be. And in some ways, then I thought, it sounds like your partner is almost your coach.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 24:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  In some ways.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think our partners have a ringside seat on our flawed sides. And all of us are flawed, obviously we are. We, we come into a relationship having not learnt all sorts of things we might have learnt as we developed, you know, through, through life. All of us have a lot to learn. And your partner should, should have a really keen eye for your faults. Now, this is something we find really hard to say, you know, you'll get a lot of sympathy from your friends normally. If you say, well, you know, I broke up with someone because they didn't really love me for who I am. They didn't really love me just, just as I am. People go, oh, that's, that's terrible. But looked at more generously, in a more complex light, you might think, hang on a minute,

• 25:12Speaker 01

  does any, do any of us really deserve to be loved exactly as we are in all our flaws and all our compromises right now? Isn't it actually more generous towards someone to love them not for who they actually are, but for who they themselves are trying to become? For who they themselves would like to be, but need a lot of support in order to try and become? That might be true love, rather than the more static acceptance of everything that you happen to be today.

• 25:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  I really hope you enjoyed this week's Bite Size. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why don't you go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest? I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my new conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Size next Friday.

• 26:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  I am really excited to share that I am bringing my Thrive Tour, Transform Your Health and Happiness, to Canada and Europe this September and November. It's a live, interactive, uplifting show that over 20,000 people came to last year across the UK and Australia. I'll be sharing powerful stories, life-changing insights and simple tools that will inspire you to feel better, think clearer and live with more intention and joy. To get your tickets right now and see all of the dates and venues, go to drchatterjee.com/live. I really hope that you can join me.