[ Applause ]
>> Thank you.
Thank you so much.
What a pleasure to be back in Australia
to be back at the Opera House.
Thank you so much for coming out tonight.
As Ann's just said, I've written a novel, but I don't want
to talk particularly specifically about the novel.
Please buy it after if you feel inclined.
But what I really want to do is talk about some
of the ideas behind the novel.
And some of these people say to me you know,
'why did you even bother to write a novel?
I thought you were supposed to be a nonfiction writer.
And the reason I wrote a novel is that I believe that many
of our ideas on love come from reading novels.
Also, songs, films, etcetera.
But essentially we are very shaped
by the love narratives that we read.
And this could seem a little cruel.
We tend to think that we love spontaneously
that we're not influenced by what we read and by what we see,
but I think that we are.
We love within a very historical social context.
It's that lovely biting aphorism from La Rochefoucauld he says
"There are some people who would never have fallen in love
if they hadn't heard there was such a thing."
That's a little extreme, but you get the idea that really
when we love we're taking a lot of our cues
from the outside world.
We honour certain feelings that we experience
because other people are telling us to honour them.
We suppress other feelings because people have told us not
to pay them particular attention.
Now we are nowadays firmly in a very distinctive era
in the history of love.
We are living in the era of Romanticism.
Romanticism is an intellectual movement
that began the swallows, studies,
garrets of European poets, novelists,
writers in the middle end of the 18th century and nowadays even
if you've never heard of a single romantic poet or novelist
from any garret in old Europe
and you're just having your love life here
in Sydney you are influenced.
Because we all are by romanticism.
So whether you don't necessarily know about it, or feel it,
or touch it, it is all around us.
In the ether.
We are living, ladies and gentleman
in the era of Romanticism.
Now what does Romanticism tell us about love.
It has a very distinctive set of arguments
about what love is like, what we should expect from love
and how relationships should go.
And let me run you through a few romantic assumptions.
I think first, and most central assumption is that for all of us
out there, there is most definitely a soul mate.
We may not have met them already, we may be swiping left,
right furiously in order to try and locate them.
They exist.
And eventually if we keep going hard enough we will find them.
And when we find them our soul will fuse with theirs.
All areas that have previously been confused
and lonely will be redeemed.
We will no longer feel ourselves worthless, agonising,
melancholic for the mysteries
of existence we have found a true friend
and loneliness will be banished.
This, ladies and gentleman, is the person waiting
for us somewhere out there.
The soul mate.
How are we going to find this person?
Well, big question.
The dominant answer of romanticism is by instinct.
You know for most of history the way that people were matched
up was by the elders of the community, by parents,
by other people than the couple themselves.
It was what was known as a marriage of reason.
And there were reasonable criteria.
So-called reasonable criteria, which is maybe
that you had a goat and they had a sheep.
Or you had a plot of land and they had an adjoining part
of land or whatever it was.
And it was on that basis
that the so-called domestic marriages were made.
And that was the way in which people married, have married
for thousands of years, really since the beginning of time.
But along comes Romanticism and says no, we're going to marry
in a different way, we're going to marry by instinct.
And the instinct is
that somewhere along the line you will feel a special feeling.
A very, very special feeling inside.
Kind of excitement.
And you don't know when it will strike you.
Maybe you're at the bar, maybe you're at the swimming pool.
Maybe you're just waiting in line for something,
you'll spot somebody and without necessarily knowing too much
about them de the romantics will quack in on it happening
without knowing anything about them other
than simply seeing their face.
You will know that's your soulmate.
And so, that special feeling has become venerated.
And whoever, first of all you don't question
that special feeling so, you know if you said
to your parents, and they go, all right tell me about your,
you just say I've had that special feeling
and everyone just, you know the waters part
and the couple moves forward
because there's been that special feeling.
So once the special feeling has been announced,
you raise the flag, the special feeling has happened
and that's terrific.
Of course if you don't feel
that special feeling it's a bit embarrassing.
Is there something wrong with me, etcetera, so you may start
to fake the special feeling, kind of like someone can fake
that you've had this romantic special feeling.
And so Romanticism is very into the notion of the crush,
and the immediate sensation of certainty
that you have met someone very special.
Romanticism goes hand and hand with the developments
of the railways in Europe in the 19th century.
And an awful lot of these meetings happened
on trains in fiction.
In Russian fiction alone,
fiction alone you could build a library of stories
in which the hero and heroine meet on a train
and without much knowledge, let's say just the sight maybe
of an ankle, an elbow, curvature of a cheek,
you will know that's a soulmate and that's how it begins.
So that's how you're going to find your life partner.
The romantics are very keen on the notion
of happily ever after.
That love is not just a passing phase, it is forever.
Until death do us part.
Strikingly many of the romantics die quite young [laughter].
And so often the story begins, couple falls madly in love
and then [coughing], somebody got a little cough
and then tuberculosis and [coughing]
and it's you know it's a beautiful love story
but it does end after a few months.
But nevertheless it's forever in a sense.
And Romanticism is also very keen on suicide,
ending things dramatically.
So death has a curious relationship with love
in the romantic point of view.
The other essential thing about the romantics is
that generally no one really has a job.
None of the romantics really have jobs.
So they can devote a lot of time to love.
And they're spending a lot of time just in each other's arms,
and also going for walks.
Nature is incredibly important for the romantics.
Going out into nature for long, long walks,
very particular places.
Waterfalls, very romantic place.
Also places where the ocean meets the land, dramatic cliffs,
pounding of seas,
very quintessentially romantic places.
Romantic times of day.
Dusk is a quintessentially romantic time.
Especially when you know there are a layer of clouds,
and the underside of the clouds are lit up by the shafts
of the dying sun turning the sky a purple-pink hew,
very romantic sort of moment.
A moment to enforce love through the help of nature.
The romantics have a very distinctive take on sex.
People have obviously been having sex for all
of human history and there's been some love.
But what the romantics do is a remarkable fusion
of love and sex.
They basically consecrate sex as the summit of love
and the ultimate expression of love.
So far from being merely a mechanical action,
it becomes this most sincere expression of your feelings
for another person, almost define expression
of tenderness for another person.
Very beautiful.
It has a slight drawback, which is that it turns adultery
into a tragedy, a catastrophe, because if you believe,
as the romantics do that sex is the crowning expression of love,
then any interest outside
of the couple will be catastrophic in nature.
And that's why almost every great novel of the 19th century
in Europe is about adultery, in one form or another.
Starting with Flaubert's "Madame Bovary", moving on to Tolstoy's
" Anna Karenina" and on, and on.
People have been having adultery for all of human history.
It's been happening all the time,
but what's new is the weight that's put on it.
And as I say it is a violation of everything
that the romantics believe that love is.
Now, I should say that many
of these romantic ideas are very beautiful.
They're very exciting and we all live through them
and it would be naive to someway dismiss them
as irrelevant to the way we live.
They are everywhere and they are the centre
of how we approach love.
But I also want to insist
that Romanticism has been a catastrophe for our capacity
to have good long-term relationships.
And if we want to have a chance of succeeding at love,
we will have to be disloyal to many of the romantic emotions
that got us into relationships in the first place.
Romanticism has spelt trouble for our capacity to endure
and thrive in long-term relationships.
Why do I say that?
Well let me run you through a few of the areas that I believe
that Romanticism has spelt difficulty
for us in relationships.
So Romanticism replaced an earlier vision of human nature,
which tended to stress how fragile,
broken and very sinful we all were.
An old Christian idea.
And Romanticism comes along and dismisses this attitude
as hopelessly pessimistic and insists instead on the purity
and good nature of every human being.
For the romantics, the romantics place an awful lot
of emphasis on children.
And children, for the romantics are always good,
they're always sweet.
It begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau
in the mid-18th century.
The child is the purest expression of human kind
and the only thing that makes a child bad is societies.
Only society corrupts children.
But basically it's a sign that we are born good.
And the older view, which was associated
with Christian theologians like St. Augustine,
which stressed the fundamental sinfulness.
You know, St. Augustine argued that all of us bear
within us the original sin of Adam and therefore all of us.
It's good to speak like this at a pulpit
to an audience, but [laughter].
But all of us, all of us are sinners, or potential sinners,
and therefore need to be at the mercy of others
and of the divine, in order, I'm a secular Jew, but the divine,
in order to endure life.
Now Romanticism does away with this and says to us that all
of us are angelic by nature.
The interesting thing is that Romanticism coincides
with the decline in organised religion.
So just as religion is declining Romanticism rises,
and it's in many ways a replacement,
a secular alternative.
So when we get together in love.
You know what's fascinating, is the beginning of the use
of the word angel to refer not to those winged creates
up in the sky, but to refer to other human beings.
And there's a marked increase of this in the age of Romanticism.
And nowadays of course, many
of us will cheerfully call our partner angel.
So we are all of us, in a sense, and through the lens
of Romanticism, good people,
our wings have been temporarily put aside,
but essentially we're pretty perfect people not particularly
tainted by original sin.
Now, I think this is highly troubling for relationships.
because it leads that absolute problematic dynamic
with any relationship which is self-righteousness.
If you think that you're quite perfect,
and that your partner is quite perfect too.
That's trouble anyway.
And if you start a relationship,
you'll soon start hitting upon things which will lead you
to think that actually maybe they're not that perfect.
Now what do you do with that feeling, if you're operating
against an ideology that says that everyone,
and that your partner particularly is by nature good.
Very unhelpful backdrop in which
to negotiate the troubles of relationships.
It's far better, I believe to insist that all of us are
in various ways deeply, and I don't mean this in any
as an insult, deeply crazy [laughter].
I may not know exactly how you're crazy,
I can tell you later how I'm crazy.
I won't, well I might.
But basically all of us, and none of us get
through the gauntlet of early childhood, adolescence,
etcetera, with our sanity entirely intact.
We are all of us warped,
distorted in very distinctive ways.
It may take us 50 years to work
out exactly how we're distorted, but we are distorted.
And this is a fundamental piece of knowledge,
which we should be taking with us into relationships
with a big warning sign over us.
Now why are we so unable to conceive of ourselves as damaged
and crazy and therefore so [inaudible] self-righteousness.
Well, part of the problem is that all
of us have very low levels of self-knowledge.
And self-knowledge is really, really hard to come by.
Partly because there's almost a conspiracy of silence around us.
People don't quite tell us what they think of us.
And therefore we can go through live
where the average person who's met us
for 20 minutes has a deeper insight into many of our flaws
than we might achieve over a lifetime [laughter].
Why don't people tell us this?
Well there's really no motive for them
to tell us this at many stages.
Our parents are not going
to tell us certain things that they know.
They can see things about us, but they're not going
to tell us, because they're very kind, they wish us well.
It's not really their business they're not going to go into it
and maybe they're blinded by their own affection for us.
There's our friends, well of course our friends are not going
to tell us certain things about our characters,
the ways in which we're difficult in particular,
because all they really want from us is a person
to evening out [laughter].
They just, they don't care.
You don't.
You really have to care about someone to be bothered to go
into all that stuff about their true character.
And our friends, certainly, you know they can't be bothered.
They don't like us enough [laughter].
So it leaves then, that other category, our exes.
Well, our exes you could expect
that they will somewhere along the lines have told us,
but the thing on the whole it's not really worth their
while either.
And so they tend to take their leave by saying things
like they need to spend more time on their own,
they need to develop their character,
they'd like to go travelling.
Nonsense. Of course not.
They see certain things about you.
But again, they're not going to go through it,
they can't be bothered.
They just want out, let somebody else sort that out [laughter].
So, so the thing is that we go
through life, not really knowing.
I mean it's very tender and poignant how sometimes some
of us feel, probably some of you in the audience feel
that broadly speaking, you're quite easy to live with.
I mean does anyone here think that they're,
kind of broadly speaking easy to live with,
if only they met the right person.
Like [laughter].
A few people.
You know that's a very poignant combination whereby a very
romantic combination.
I spent my early 20s absolutely convinced that the only thing
that was missing was really the right person.
And so long as I met the right person then all would be well.
So this notion that we might be easy to live
with is deeply misleading and should be stamped out.
Of course we're not.
Everybody from close-up is trouble and we need to put this
in mind, bear this in mind.
If I was running the world, one of the key questions
that we would always ask each other on an early dinner date
without anything pejorative meant
by it is how are you crazy?
So I'm crazy like this, how about you?
And then we'd be expected to have a really thoughtful
and kind of well thought through, non-defensive,
non-hysterical answer to that question to be able
to share with another person.
Think of how much time we would save.
We don't need people in relationships to be perfect.
We need them to have a handle on their imperfections
and to be able to warn us and prepare us
for more noxious sides of their personalities outside
of those critical moments
when those personality distortions have deeply
upset us.
But it's very hard to do.
And most of the time we come upon discoveries
about other people at moments
when those discoveries have pained us deeply,
and therefore we are not likely to be in any way sympathetic.
So the calm explanation of one's insanities
to another person is one of the greatest gifts.
And I think one of the best wedding presents that any
of us could give one another is a large book called,
you know 'My Insanities' that you would give.
Each person would give 'My Insanities' to their partner.
And think how much time I think we would save.
You know the other thing
that Romanticism really gets wrong is this emphasis
on instinct right, so you know the old marriage,
marriage of reason, marriage by the family etcetera.
And then you know the romantics tell us this is marriage
by instinct, that special feeling.
Well, the thing about it is that you know you don't need
to accept or even know much about psychoanalysis
and psychotherapy to just take
on board the one key central idea of psychotherapy
which is the way that we love as adults is a reflection
and deeply connected to the way that we learnt
about love as children.
That is the foundation stone of psychotherapy.
So you look at an adult, you look at how you are
in adult relationships and there are a million connexions
that you can make with how we learnt about love as children.
And the problem with this is that the way that we learnt
about love as children is likely to have been a bit problematic.
It's likely that we received affection certainly.
But that in one way or another without necessarily meaning to,
our parents did us a great disservice.
In some ways they damaged us.
Not necessarily meaning to.
And this has very particular consequences for our capacity
to find love as adults.
Because often of what we're trying to do
in adult love is re-find a kind of love
that we knew as children.
But the kind of love that we knew
as children was not necessarily problem free, indeed,
it was very particularly and interestingly distorted
and laden with all sorts of difficulties.
And these become the new criteria which we search
for in our adult partners.
So when people say that in love what they're looking
for is someone to make them happy, to make them content,
to bring them happiness, we can't necessarily believe them.
Really what we're searching for when we search
for an adult partner is someone who feels familiar.
And very often the kind of people
that we meet don't feel familiar in the level of care, generosity
and goodness that they're bringing to us.
It just feels a little bit odd.
We think I don't necessarily feel at home
with this kind of treatment.
You know how it is when you sometimes set up a friend
and on paper, you know two people are completely perfect.
You know the two CDs match exactly.
And you set them up and then you know you have hopeful
expectations for the date, and then they come back to you
and you say, you know, 'how did it go?
How did the date go?'
And they say, 'I don't know.
You know they're really nice, I just you know we've got so much
in common in a way, all our interests,
we do all the same sports and read the same books,
but I don't know something was missing.
And I don't know if it's chemistry, something.'
And very often the thing is that our unconscious has recognised
that this simple very nice person is perfect,
except for they won't make us suffer in the way that we expect
to be made to suffer in love.
So they've got to be dismissed.
They're just not going to make me unhappy in the way
that I've learnt to expect that love should make me unhappy.
And you know we know the situation
in its most extreme form.
So you know somebody who can only take someone
who will hit them, who will strike them.
But even without the extremes of violence, there are many ways
in which we are attracted to people not so much
for their positive sides but because they feel, as I say,
familiar in the degree to which they will frustrate certain
of our aspirations for ourselves.
There's another problem you know with Romanticism.
And that's really to do with the idea of honesty.
You know Romanticism had extremely high regard
for the concept of honesty and that a relationship,
the whole point of a relationship is
that you can be honest with another human being.
Most of the time we've got to lie all the time
about who we are, what we feel.
'How are you?'
'I'm fine.'
And you're breaking down inside etcetera.
You know we're all in tears inside we're broken.
We've got to put up a front,
that's what society demands of us.
But finally we can meet someone
and with them the drawbridge can come down, the walls can come
down and we can be ourselves.
And there are wonderful moments in the early moments of love,
in the early phase of love when we really do feel
that we have found someone who could accept all of us.
And take on board everything that we are,
we need to have no more secrets.
We can be properly ourselves.
And the truth is that being yourself, fully yourself
around another human being is a truth
that you should probably spare anyone that you claim
to love [laughter] because it's really a little problematic.
Now, often it goes a bit like this, you know,
look let's be honest, I think no kids
in the room often it's a little bit around sex.
So, in the early days of love,
you know you've been a bit lonely
in all areas including sex and you meet somebody and you say,
you know, 'do you like?
You know that thing that you could do like with a rope,
and like handcuffs, like imagine if,
have you ever been interested?'
And they go, 'wow, yeah I've always wanted to try that
and that's always, but I've never dared to tell anyone.'
And there's that wonderful sense of intimacy based
on the no longer needing to be shamed.
We no longer need to be ashamed of ourselves.
We can be ourselves in the bedroom, etcetera.
And this is a very ecstatic discovery.
And it really makes us feel so powerful in the world
because we no longer have to be hunchback figure we can now go
out into the world and feel that some
of our darkest secrets have acceptance, an endorsement
from another human being.
This lovely phase tends to last
about three months [laughter] until,
until normally the moment goes like this.
Not the same for everybody, but a version
of this tends to happen.
So you've been sharing everything,
you've been sharing you know the thing,
and the thing, and the handcuffs.
And it's all fun.
And then you're sitting in a café with you know
with your lover with whom you've opened your soul,
and they've opened their soul.
And you spot a really quite interesting member
of the waiting team, and you go, 'see the waiter over there,
like wouldn't it be fun if like you know the thing
with the you know thing that we do,
what about tonight if they got involved?
If we asked them to get involved?
And like gave a number and they could come
and then you could be watching and then.'
And then you turn to your partner and rather
than being this kind of open, they're actually look
in quite a big state of distress.
They look kind of unhappy and miserable.
And you go, wow, wow I better stop right there.
And you're a fork in the road and one fork in the road leads
to the path of honesty,
and another path leads to the path of love.
And you've got a choice to make [laughter].
You've got a choice to make, are you going to carry
on this anecdote, this fantasy,
or are you just going to shut up?
And most of us are going to shut up at that point.
And that's the beginning of a very fundamental moment
when we realise that of course we cannot entirely ourselves.
Not because we're trying to retain a nasty secret
from our partner, but because in the name
of love we cannot be entirely ourselves.
We have to accept the role of editing.
Because the full disclosure of who we are and what we are
at every moment another human being will probably
destroy them.
And therefore we need in the name of love
to hold back and to edit a lot.
None of this Romanticism prepares us for.
Indeed, it makes it look like a betrayal.
So it sets up a huge, it's a very, very unhelpful backdrop
in which this scenario happens.
Because Romanticism insists on authenticity,
it's by being totally authentic that you are true to love.
Anything else is a betrayal of love.
And well, the facts on the ground are seriously I believe
in conflict with that romantic commandment
and causes a lot of difficulties.
I'm not through with my reservations about Romanticism.
Another thing about Romanticism that never really talks
about is Romanticism never really talks
about the practical side of life.
In the 19th century no one, no romantic poet, writer, artist,
etcetera ever mentions laundry.
There's absolutely no mention of the fact
that every couple who's been together any amount
of time will have to spend a lot of time doing laundry,
housework, cleaning, raising children, etcetera.
This just goes unmentioned.
And this causes us real difficulties because it sets
up an expectation that you know intelligent, sensitive,
soulful people don't really bother about these things.
And therefore there's no particular emphasis
on making an accommodation, a preparation for some
of the difficulties that might come in this area.
So at some point in a relationship a version
of this happens, this kind of scenario happens.
Not exactly this, but a version of this happens,
which is that a couple who you know are very much committed
to love and you know disagree with their parents and some
of their more petty attitudes, the things like you know,
etcetera where the salt and pepper should go and etcetera.
They will suddenly have an argument in the bathroom
that goes a bit like this.
One of the couples will say, 'what's that towel doing there?'
And the other person goes, 'I just had a shower.'
'Yeah but what's it doing on the floor?'
'Well I just threw it on the floor
because I got to go and meet Bill.'
And you go, 'No, no I know you've got to meet Bill,
but what's it doing on the floor?'
And, the other one goes, 'Well,
how do you mean what is it doing on the floor?
It's just on the floor.'
And suddenly there's a kind of new turn of impatience.
Basically because both partners think that they're very clever.
And they're not petty, they're not going to argue
about petty things like towels on the floor.
They associate that with their grandparents or something.
You know if you're a true romantic you don't worry
about these things, you don't make no accommodations,
you are too clever to have this sort of argument.
And when two people convinced that they're too clever
to have this sort of argument,
you know the argument will be bitter [laughter].
And so very often there is no accommodation
with this sort, this aspect of life.
You know think of Paul "Madame Bovary" in Flaubert's novel.
Madame Bovary has been brought up in ideas of love drawn
from romantic fiction.
So she believes that love is all about guys on horseback
and castles and walks through the mist, etcetera.
And then she gets married to this quite nice,
but you know pretty ordinary regular kind of guy,
but on the whole, okay.
And suddenly she realises that a lot of her time has got
to be spent doing the laundry, organising the milk,
and the cheese, and sitting
down with her husband while he's doing the accounts.
And she's supposed to be organising her domestic order
in the evenings and he's reading the newspaper.
And she thinks that her life has gone terribly wrong.
That it's a disaster, what has happened.
She thought that she was marrying for love.
And now she's ended up with this kind of domestic situation
and these doubts unleash a series of processes in her mind,
which will lead eventually to her suicide and death.
That essentially the belief that the practical side
of life has no place in a good love life is central
to Romanticism and a disaster for our chances of love.
So, towels, more on that in a minute.
The other thing that the romantics very much believe is
the romantics believe that you shouldn't necessarily talk too
much to your lover and that talking is often a sign
of not understanding somebody.
So very privileged space is given in Romanticism
to that account that we sometimes get in the beginning
of relationships that two people have understood one another
without needing to talk all the time.
So, people will say things like, you know it was amazing,
you know we were there, we were by the waterfront,
we were chatting, and then you know sometimes we were just
quiet because we just understood.
We just knew, you know.
I would say one thing and it was amazing, he knew.
You know he'd been there before.
She understood.
It was like we had travelled immediately down the same path,
we don't need to explain ourselves in the way that I had
to in that horrible last relationship.
In this one I just, I can be myself and we're a bit wordless.
And the Romanticism generally believe that too much analysis,
too much putting of words on top of feelings is a bad thing,
a quintessential romantic belief is that you destroy feelings
and emotions by thinking too much about them.
I don't know if anybody in the audience feels,
some people feel this.
That if you think too much you break things.
That thinking too much is,
I should have weeded those people out.
But a few people have come here nevertheless.
This is a disaster for a philosopher it's like what?
Hang on [laughter].
Nevertheless, there are people, erratic's, I'm being nasty
but we've all, we all have that feeling sometime
that words can break things.
And so in a way one of the nicest stories of love
that romantics tell us is intuitive understanding
of one person by another without the medium of words.
Again, over the long-term a catastrophe,
short-term, charming.
Long-term catastrophe.
One of the things that it leads to is an outbreak of sulking.
Romanticism was responsible for a worldwide, enormous increase
in the prevalence of sulks [laughter].
Now, what is a sulk?
A sulk is a feeling of hurt with another person,
a wound that the other person has given you
that you are not going to explain to them,
for the simple reason that they're supposed to love you.
And if they love you they're supposed to know.
So of course you could explain what's wrong with you,
but if you had to explain
that would be a prove they didn't love you because love is
by its nature wordless.
True love is wordless.
And that's why let's say you're coming back from the party
where that offensive thing happened, and you're kind
of silent in the car, deliberately, you're not going
to say what happened, because you're a romantic
and they should know.
And they say, they're going to make a few attempts
and they go, 'is anything wrong?'
'Nope.' And then so you go up, you know you go up the stairs,
you go home, you go into your apartment and they say,
you know, 'come into the bedroom.'
And you go, 'nope.'
And you go into the bathroom and you bolt the door.
And they go, 'come on.'
And they're knocking at the door, and 'Just come
on tell me what it is.'
And you're like, 'nuh uh.'
And the reason is that as a romantic you believe
that a true lover should be able to intuit the contents
of your soul through the bathroom panel door [laughter].
Through the surface of your body and into your interior.
And they should know.
So why would you ever bother telling them.
So this is a disaster.
Because unfortunately even the most well-meaning people simply
cannot understand all of us.
They can understand bits of us, how we felt maybe
when we were humiliated by our father at an early age.
Or how it felt to join a new school at a certain point.
Some things they can just get.
But a lot of things, particularly
over the long-term, just no one can get.
You cannot expect the other person to be a mind reader.
And yet Romanticism places the ability to mind read precisely
at the kernel of its vision, the core of its vision
of love, deeply problematic.
Deeply problematic.
Here's another thing that Romanticism talks to us about.
It talks to us about the way in which we really love somebody.
You love everything about them.
Of course you love the amazing things about them, but oddly
and touchingly you quite love the slightly imperfect things
about them.
And that's why in the early days of love, there's a lot of kind
of tenderness and excitement around the discovery of the less
than perfect sides of somebody that are used to feed into love
and that intensify love.
Maybe your partner's got a slight gap
between their two front teeth.
Not a problem.
I mean a problem for an orthodontist,
but for you it's charming [laughter].
It's charming.
Maybe there's that old pair of pyjamas
that their mother gave them and they put it on on cold nights
and it's got bear prints on it.
It doesn't look that glamorous,
it wouldn't win any fashion awards, but it's them
and it's theirs and it's incredibly sweet
and you love them all the more for it.
So in a way in the early days of love, the fragilities
and the vulnerabilities of another person are part
of what makes that person so loveable until [laughter].
You're getting the hang of this now [laughter].
Until maybe about three months in a version
of the following scenario happens.
So maybe you've been out for a big night, etcetera
and it's morning, it's dawn and you're having some breakfast.
And you're having some cereal, maybe they've picked out a kind
of granola-ish, so quite nutty kind of cereal.
And next to you they're eating their cereal
and you're eating yours and you just turn to them
and you go 'are you cow or something' [laughter]?
'This just sounds disgusting.
Just shut your mouth or something.'
And you know this person suddenly turns around,
and they say, 'hang on a minute this is like the third thing
that you're criticising me for in 24 hours.
Well, I thought you loved me.'
And you go, 'I do love you
but you're eating like the bovine way.
I mean just stop it.'
And they get terribly offended
and they go no one's ever told me that before.
And you want to go, 'yeah because why would they?
I mean your friend was not going to tell you.
Your parents aren't going to tell you.
And your ex probably knew it but went off to India' [laughter].
'So the point is no one's going to tell you
and you sound like a cow.'
At which point you've got a problem on your hands
because Romanticism doesn't allow
for this sort of situation.
It suggests that love is the acceptance of the whole being.
And therefore, at one point
in the relationship one person is likely to say
to another 'if you love me why do you criticise me?'
So it's that criticism is here.
Love is here.
They should never be together and if they are ever together,
it's a sign that love has failed.
This, again is a disastrous philosophy.
The idea that another person could spend time with us
and not spot a whole lot of things that are problematic,
is really the hype of sentimentality.
Of course there's lots, I mean are you perfect?
If you're not perfect how on earth do you expect someone not
to notice the imperfections and not mind them?
But nevertheless, Romanticism tells us
that no this has no place.
Look, let's look away from that rather unhelpful philosophy
to an earlier version of love.
This one developed by the ancient Greeks.
Which I think is a lot more helpful.
The ancient Greeks very focussed on love, as we are.
But had a very different vision of what love is.
They felt that love is admiration for the perfect sides
of another human being.
For the virtues, the qualities, the accomplishments
in the character and achievements of another person.
There's other stuff of course.
There's flaws and things, and you may be generous toward them,
and you may be forgiving of them.
But you don't love them.
The word love is reserved for admiration for what is virtuous
and accomplished in another person.
And for the ancient Greeks, the whole notion of love is
that love should be a process of mutual education
in which two people under the auspices of love undertake
to educate one another to become better versions of themselves.
And they do this not to be cruel, not as a way
of bringing each other down
but because they have the sincerest best interest
of the other at their heart.
And therefore love is a process whereby teacher
and a pupil are constantly rotating roles.
Everyone is the teacher and everyone is the pupil
at certain points and has lots of things to take on board.
This is not a sign that love has been abandoned, it is the proof
that love is an action.
Now this sounds so weird in a modern age.
I mean if you said to somebody, if you said to your partner,
'well I went to listen to this guy at the Opera House,
and yeah he's got some various ideas and he's written a book
and on this basis I would
like to teach you certain things [laughter].
I would like to deliver a short seminar,
short but to the point seminar on your character,
achievements and nature.'
This would be so weird.
They'd be like, 'what?
What I thought you loved me,' etcetera.
Now, why are we such bad teachers?
You know a lot of relationship arguments can essentially be
seen as failed teaching moments.
There's something you want to say and it goes terribly,
terribly wrong on the journey to your listener.
Why does it go so wrong?
Why does the teaching lesson fail so badly?
Partly because we don't think it's legitimate to teach.
So if someone's telling you, your job is not legitimate,
you'd be a bit panicked, like, 'oh wow, if I'm not supposed
to be this, how do I?'
So you're not relaxed.
The other thing of course, what makes a good teacher is
that they're calm, is that they're relaxed.
And one of the best ways to be a calm teacher is not
to mind too much if your lesson doesn't really get
through to the other person.
So you know a great math teacher, you know they're calm
in the classroom, because there's not that much at stake.
Of course they want their, you know pupils to pick up a bit
about trigonometry or whatever, but if they don't
and if they flunk their exams,
well there'll be a new lot coming next year,
it doesn't really matter.
There's not that much at stake.
The thing is that in love's classroom,
we are much more tense.
We are much more on edge.
And the reason is that so much seems to depend on it
and the background
of our thoughts is the most terrifying spectre
as we're trying to teach.
And the terrifying spectre goes
like this 'I think I've married an idiot.
I think I've got to spend the rest of my life with someone
who doesn't understand very basic, very important things
that matter so much to me and this person is not listening.'
And because they're not listening we're going to ramp
up the pressure and the tension.
And we're going to start to be rude.
And we're going to start to humiliate,
and we're going to start to swear.
And the terrible problem is that no one has ever, ever managed
to teach anyone anything by humiliating them.
By the time you are humiliating your partner in order
to each them something, forget it, bye-bye.
The lesson's over you are never going to get through that way.
As we know from HR departments in offices,
if you want to teach someone something,
it's got to be 99% honey and tiny,
tiny little criticism at the very end.
You know I love this, I love that, I love that.
Did you know that thing that?
That's maybe how you've got a chance of getting through.
But we don't do this.
So in love's classroom we do not accept
that love should be a process of mutual education.
We know so much about our partners
that no one else every does.
We've got a ringside seat on their charming sides
and on their insanities in a way that no one ever will.
But because we think it's a betrayal of love
that knowledge can't be shared, used and grown with.
Because we are so brittle and defensive as students
of this we simply fail to accept that the other person,
if somebody tries to give us a simple lecture,
we might even use the pejorative term.
You know, 'are you trying to give me a lecture?'
And you know of course Plato would say, 'Yeah I'm trying
to give you a lecture because I love you.
Because I love you I'm going to give you a lecture
and hope tomorrow you'll give me a lecture.'
And that's the way it works, but the romantics are like,
'oh no I'm not going to stay with her,
she gives me lectures all the time, oh I must leave her.'
And so what happens when love's classroom has failed?
Well then the couple, things get rather brittle and rather
than trying to teach, the couple descends into a cycle
of mutual nagging and shirking.
What is nagging?
Nagging is what happens on the other side
of an attempt to teach.
You're no longer going to try to teach,
you're just going to insist.
You're going to force the person to believe and to listen.
You're going to get very controlling.
And ministerial.
And you're going to insist that they're back at a certain time.
That they do this thing.
And you don't really care whether you're going
to charm your way into their minds or not, you just insist
that it's done that way.
And meanwhile nagging always has the counterpart in shirking.
The shirking knows that tone, oh well they're going to pick
up the newspaper go upstairs.
They're not going to listen.
So there's a mutual deafness.
Teaching and learning has gone completely wrong and that,
unfortunately is very often what happens in relationships
under the aegis of Romanticism.
Now, are we all to despair?
Where's this going to go?
Can we rescue this nosedive of feelings?
Yes, we can.
I think there's lots of things to be hopeful about.
Sometimes people say to me things like,
'well you are not really hopeful about love.
Are you saying that like we should just reduce
our expectations?'
No, no we shouldn't reduce our expectations.
I really believe that we should go into relationships
with very high expectations.
The problem is that Romanticism defined,
very rightly certain high expectations,
but then gave us no way
of reaching those expectations securely.
It's like it set the bar, but then gave us no way
of exceeding to that bar reliably.
So, the task before us I think is to build the steps to get
to the high place that we've accorded to love.
Not to necessarily bring down love, but to try to find a way
and as Ann says one of the characters in the book
at some point says you know it takes them a long time
to realise, but they do realise
that ultimately love is not just something that you feel.
It is ultimately a skill that needs to be learnt.
And it sounds very odd because we're so in love with the notion
of the intuitive relationship in which everything just comes sort
of by nature and if it doesn't come by nature then it is wrong.
And it's so contrary to the way we do other things.
You know we are an incredibly procedural society that believes
that there are rules, and techniques, and tricks,
and ways of making things happen.
But somehow in the area of love we insist stubbornly
on intuition.
And it sounds so odd if you compare it with other things.
I mean imagine if I said to you, you know I'm going to fly a 777
down to Melbourne tomorrow.
I'm going to land it by intuition, or I'm going
to perform a piece of brain surgery by intuition.
They'd be like, what that's crazy.
Nevertheless, in the area of love we are ready to embark
on you know 50-year marriages
by intuition just hoping it's just all going to go well.
So what are some of these skills that we might need to develop.
Well let me give you just a few, and I'll throw these out
and there will of course be so many more.
But I think one of the things that can help,
and it sounds rather odd, but one of the things
that can really help is to learn
to see your partner as a small child.
Probably between the ages of 2 to 3-1/2.
Basically to imagine that your partner is of roughly that age.
Now, the reason I say this is that all
of us nowadays are really pretty good
around 2 to 3-1/2 year olds.
So just imagine you've got one of those things at home
and you're cooking a dinner
and I don't know you've made some schnitzel,
potatoes, broccoli.
You give the kid the dinner, and he just goes 'no'
and throws the whole dinner on the floor.
'No' like this.
And now you don't hit the child.
You don't go I've had such a hard day at work and now this,
are you trying to bring me down, are you trying
to crush my character?
You go, 'oh no, you've got a sore tooth.
You must be quite tired.'
Or, 'maybe it's that jealousy
with your sibling it is getting to you.
It's hard to share your toys.'
Listen we come up with very gentle explanations
of why a piece of behaviour has appeared on the horizon
that seems pretty mean.
We don't necessarily believe of that age are mean,
we simply feel that they're in some ways hurting, anxious,
damaged, in some way and we want to help them.
We're generous.
Our adult love affairs do not find us in that kind of mood.
I mean there's we're constantly going, you're trying
to bring me down, you're trying to humiliate me.
You haven't given me that attention I need.
We very much take everything extremely personally.
You know part of the problem is
that we don't look like children.
I mean this is really unhelpful.
Like one of the great things about children is
that they look like children.
So you kind of just know that they are a child.
But if you look at me,
or someone else you know you think this guy's an adult.
He sort of looks like an adult.
So it's quite counterintuitive to go like maybe parts
of his character are about 2-1/2 years old.
You just can't really believe it.
But the thing is that you sort of have to believe it.
I mean the problem with psychological wounds
and distortions is that you can't see them.
I mean literally it's as simple as that.
You can't see them.
If I've got a broken arm, right?
Everyone can see that I've got a broken arms and you start to go,
okay the guys like messed up his speech because he's got a bit
of a broken arm, he must be in pain.
And when he's going to walk through the door,
we'll hold the door, and we'll make some special accommodation
because we know he's not all that well in some way.
I mean It's just obvious he's got a problem.
The thing is all of us are kind of like
that broken inside in various key ways.
But there's no easy way of signalling it right?
We can't signal that we've got these wounds
and breakages, etcetera.
And so our partners don't necessarily give us the
accommodations that they would.
And so that's why it's so important to realise
that of course, wandering
through the world everybody gets very severely broken and in need
of a lot of forgiveness, and generally on the whole,
not mean, just frightened.
Most people are very, very scared.
And most appalling pieces of behaviour, normally have fear
at the heart of them rather than evil.
The other thing that's quite key,
I think it is a real achievement of love is
to learn to see your partner.
You know most of us after a while start to see our partners
as idiots they just are a bit of an idiot.
It's just like, 'oh God
that idiot thing has happened again,' with our partner.
Now, this is why, this is why part of the reason why comedy
and humour is so important in a relationship.
You have to find a way to access the comedic part of all of you.
Now the interesting thing about comedy is
that in comedy many comic heroes are total idiots.
I mean if you think of someone like David Brent or Larry David,
I mean these guys are just total, total idiots,
but when we're watching the shows we kind
of do this amazing thing.
Which is we both know they're idiots,
but we kind of like them.
We do this amazing metamorphosis.
We start to see them as loveable idiots.
Kind of loveable idiots.
And that is such a piece of ethical imagination.
To turn someone to an idiot to a loveable idiot
in your imagination is a major piece of maturity.
And if we're able to achieve that even sometimes
in love we will have learnt very much how
to temper our more punitive interpretations of who it is
that we've got together with.
You know the other thing that we need of course is
to really reckon with our habit of getting into crushes.
It was very charming
at a certain point how easily we developed crushes on people.
And you know for a time it was thrilling
and you know it really kept us going through certain years.
But like you really have to get over the crush thing.
Because the thing is you don't need to know someone at all well
to know, even though they look completely charming,
and it was lovely to see them in the airline queue,
or at the supermarket briefly, etcetera,
and that's why you got a little touchy when you got home.
Just because there was a link in your imagination there was kind
of an angel walking around the aisles of the supermarket,
or at the airport, and now you have to go home, no, sadly.
But there was this angel.
We got to get over it.
And the reason we can get over it is
by absolutely some scientific certainty,
which is that there are no angels.
They're only human beings.
And every human being wandering the earth is very,
very problematic from close up.
You don't know how this person is disturbed
and would drive you mad.
But you know, you have to know and take
on board that they would.
They just would.
If you knew them better, despite their charms.
And honestly their you know ankles look lovely,
and that little bit of conversation that you had
at the conference was just very promising.
But the point is deep down,
they will cause you immense trouble because,
not that they're evil.
They're human and everybody does this.
So, in a way you know we're so obsessed nowadays.
Partly because of technology with the idea
of finding the perfect person, the right person.
We're all the time swiping left and right in the search
for that right person.
You know the truth is there is no such character.
Everybody is going to be wrong in substantial areas.
There is no such thing.
Compatibility ultimately is an achievement of love.
It isn't and can't and shouldn't be, it's preconditioned.
And therefore the notion that we could only really get together
with somebody when we have found somebody
who matches us entirely.
The person who is right isn't the person who agrees
and condones every aspect of our character.
It's somebody who negotiates the differences between two people
in a particular way, with a particular generosity
and dare I say it sometimes, humour.
This is the so-called right person.
But not that they are in some ways, magical ways perfect.
Look, the other thing, I should mention it just very quickly,
around sex.
You know we live in an age
with very high expectations around sex.
Eroticism has prepared us for very high things.
And well, the whole subject is a little bit of a vail
of tears to be honest.
There are really two things that we want in this area
and they run in completely opposite directions.
All of us want safety.
We want to be really safe and loyal with somebody.
And loyalty brings with it safety.
So we really want safety.
And the other thing we really, really want is excitement.
And the two just point in completely different directions.
And but you know periodically,
it happens on about a 20-year basis, people come along
and go uh, uh, uh I found a solution to this kind
of like safety excitement thing.
You go, yeah what is it?
So in the sixties it was always, it's called free love.
So basically the deal it you get a bit of both,
you get like safety in one corner and you get
like excitement too and it's really great.
And nowadays we're deep in the age of polyamory.
So a lot of people go, there's this thing I've heard,
it's called polyamory and it's great, it gives you everything.
And you know jealousy is just this thing that's dreamt
up by capitalism and [laughter] just you know and out there.
Well, ladies and gentlemen.
It just, it just is not true.
These two things are deeply incompatible.
I'm not going to go in to too much why, we can discuss
that later if you'd like, but essentially you really have
to make a choice between varieties of suffering.
What kind of suffering do you want to go for?
Like do you want to go for you know, and also what kind
of upside is more important to you?
Do you want to go for like the safety, loyalty thing?
Which is terrific, you have you know fantastic,
kind of cosiness, really sweet,
but you know you will be missing out.
And sometimes in the suburbs on a Saturday night you'll be like,
oh wow, you know what's going on in the bars, and the kind
of swinging places of the city and it's not for you.
See, you've made your choice.
And then of course, of course there's the other choice
which is excitement, which is terrible thrilling
and new people all the time, and the first time you undress them
and it's all thrilling, thrilling.
But of course it's utter chaos.
Your life is full recriminations,
full of jealousy, full of confusion,
the children are in a mess.
But you know there's the excitement.
So really the choice before us is what variety
of suffering do you want to go for?
Do you want to go for the chaos bit or the kind of bored
and stultification bit?
Which one?
Because that's your choice.
And you know it's funny.
It's good you're laughing because I [laughter].
I recently went to the United States and did a book tour
and it didn't happen so much on the east coast.
Which is like more closer to a kind of European sensibility.
But by the time I got to California,
but the time I was talking
about this there was literally a stun silence in the room.
Like what?
What? You're saying you can't make things perfect?
What? We live in LA.
Like What?
But of course you know I think one of the great contributions,
you know Britain is not responsible for very much,
that's totally perfect.
But one of its greatest exports.
One of the greatest British exports is
melancholy [laughter].
And melancholy is a really kind of useful emotion sometimes.
Because it's not fury, it's not rage, it's like, yeah.
Like you know life's imperfect but I'm dealing with it.
I'm coping with it.
You know I've got Morrissey, I've got Bach I'm handling it.
It's under control.
And I think this is an area, yeah.
This is an area where we may want to have recourse
to that peculiar British gift to humanity.
Look, you know am I saying
that we should always stick with people?
You know are we in danger of saying that in
that case anyone is worth sticking with?
Look, I don't want to say that.
In many ways, you know marriage is a pretty nasty thing to do
to somebody that you claim to love.
It's putting them through some pretty difficult stresses.
And there are undoubtedly sometimes people
that you should leave.
Some relationships which should be broken up.
How can you tell?
How do you know whether you should leave somebody?
And you know I think there's always kind
of a simple rule of thumb.
I think that you know if you can look at your life,
honestly survey it's good and bad sides
and if you can honestly pinpoint all the things
that are making you profoundly unhappy to your partner.
If you look around and you think, okay yeah all the things
that are really bringing me down, it's them.
It really is them.
It's them.
Leave. If you really can feel that, just leave.
All right then you should leave.
But if you honestly take an audit of your sources
of unhappiness and the many causes
for which they're you know reverberating through your soul
and you look at your partner and you go, I'm not sure
if I can fully blame them for everything, then stay.
Stay [laughter].
Because what you may have encountered is some
of the unhappiness of existence in the company
of another person rather than because of another person.
So easy to merge the two.
I mean Great Britain, Britain has done exactly this
with its marriage to the European Union [laughter].
It very much believed that all
of its unhappiness could be pinpointed to this thing,
by getting rid of it it would be happy
and now it's discovering a lesson that many people
in relationships have also discovered.
When it's too late.
[ Applause ]
Should we even bother with marriage?
My novel is about marriage in a way.
It's very much a novel focussing
on long-term relationships, with a marriage.
Is there any point to it anymore?
You know many articles, normally about one a week
in a major broad sheet newspaper is always
about is marriage still in?
Is it still relevant?
And of course it doesn't really make sense
from all sorts of points of view.
Like if you take a completely sober look at marriage.
It's completely insane.
It's like I don't know I'm going to give half
of all my belongings, and you know still nowadays people don't
invest heavily in lawyers to make things easy.
We kind of jump headlong into marriage and we still do it just
by all the reasons why we might not.
So why do we do this and is it just a kind of insanity.
Well, I don't think so.
I think that the very fact that we make ourselves go
through marriage and we invite all our friends.
And we have a huge wedding.
So it would be so embarrassing if we had
to call them all up go you know what?
You know that TV you bought me?
Really sorry.
It's only been three months but I'm quitting, right?
Why do we publicly betroth ourselves to another person?
Because I think a mature part of us knows that we benefit
from the cage of marriage.
It is a cage.
But we put ourselves in it.
We lock ourselves, and we throw away the key ourselves.
Not because we're crazy, but because we realise
that there are sides of our character
that really can only develop in an environment in which neither
of us can quit the room immediately.
Actually the ability to run away so tempting, though it is,
is not always a benefit to the things
that we've got to work through.
So we willingly encage ourselves, because we realise
that there is some kind of piece of maturity,
some piece of growing up that is going to happen
when we are locked together in a situation
which we can't immediately, except at a huge cost
and a huge embarrassment.
Embarrassment is very important.
We're willingly entering into a situation
which it would be deeply embarrassing to leave.
We're not simply crazy.
We're aware of the debt that maturity owes
to being slightly locked into a situation.
So look, I do believe that it is possible
to have long-term relationships.
I just think we need to run through kind of check lists.
When are we ready something crazy world
where debt maturity is to being slightly locked into a situation
so I do believe that it is possible long-term relationships
I just think we need to run through kind of checklist
when we ready for love?
When we ready to really embark
on this long-term business of love.
I think you're ready to really go for it in love
when you finally and conclusively accept
that you really are crazy.
And you have a really quite a good handle on your craziness.
And not least, you have a really good handle
on your partner's craziness.
And you have an absolute awareness that anyone you meet,
even the most charming person on a train is going
to be very imperfect because that's human nature.
When you're ready to do the laundry.
When you're ready to discuss towels, add in for an item.
When you're ready, not merely to insist
that others will guess what's in your heart,
that you may even have to use words to spell it out, very,
very patiently over long periods.
And you're ready to, are you ready to believe that all
of this with a dose of humour,
belongs to a sincere relationship, then,
ladies and gentlemen, I think you are ready for love.
And I would commend you to move forward on it.
That's all from me, we've got a bit of time for questions.
Thank you so much.
[ Applause ]
Thank you so there are some mics and do approach them
with a question, a confession, a vulnerability.
We're among friends.
Yes? Brave lady here number two.
>> Thank you very much.
My question is about tools that you spoke of.
The craziness quotient you talked
about that we all should be adopting and acknowledging.
Is there a system that you think you could be developing,
just like we have for job interviews and those sorts
of things and for [inaudible] if you got a dating sites
that aren't just related to how big certain bits are,
but about the compatibility?
Because as you referenced earlier time gone
by we had arranged marriages, we had elders.
So with the absence of that system, is there a new portal.
A new dropdown menu?
>> Yeah, you know essentially
because in a way Silicon Valley is very romantic
as a current institution and very much believes in helping us
to find the right person.
And if you look at most of the technological tools
that have appeared in the last 15 years,
an enormous number are designed to increase on choices
and to try and direct us toward this person called the
right person.
And I tried to hint that in a sense that's useful.
And in a sense it's unhelpful.
Because this emphasis on rightness and this notion
that just with us a superior piece of technology
and algorithm we will get to a person
with whom there will be no friction,
sets us up rather dangerously for the reality of love,
which is that everybody is a different person.
We've all come from a womb, let's remember.
We've all come from a womb in which we didn't have to speak.
In which our needs were met as it were just automatically
through an umbilical cord.
And it takes a good long time, a good 50 years
or so before we realise that we have actually left
that environment [laughter]
and that no one can fully understand us.
That we're, you know if you're lonely
with say 40% of your life only.
You're doing really well.
But I mean the idea that you're not going
to be lonely is very misguided.
And therefore, I would be wary of utopian experiments
with matching and constant attempts to match.
What we really need is you know absent bit of technology
that teaches patients.
That teaches resourcefulness.
And a resourcefulness that teaches forgiveness.
That teaches humour.
To date that hasn't happened at all.
There are no apps.
You know it's interesting I was invited
to a Google conference the other day in the UK.
And Eric Schmidt the chairman of Google was talking
about what Google was planning in the next 15 years.
And it was like putting people on Mars and curing cancer,
and like you know x-ray vision,
I don't know all sorts of things.
Amazing things.
And then somebody
in the audience said you know Mr. Schmidt, is there anything
that you think Google can't do?
Like things that are beyond the technology?
And he laughed and he went, well we're not exactly
about to invent an app to teach people to be more forgiving.
He laughed.
And anyway.
I still like what a mad thing.
So then, like what a mad thing.
So then fortunately, I saddled up to him
at the reception afterwards and said Mr. Schmidt,
you're curing cancer, but you think it's impossible
to create a piece of technology which will assist us in the task
of being more forgiving.
I profoundly disagree with you.
And we had a kind of conversation.
But I think that look, to some extent my book is a piece
of technology, very old fashioned,
glued together it doesn't move, or sing, or light up.
But it's essentially a tool, a piece of technology.
I don't like entertainment.
I don't like entertaining people for the sake of it.
I'm a teacher and I've written this novel.
It's not boring really.
Well, nothing happens in it really [laughter]
but really it's following two people in their attempt.
They go from being romantics who believe
that love is just a feeling to slowly, slowly,
slowly they realise they're going to break up
and they're going to create a disaster
in their lives unless they learn some lessons of love.
And the novel is you know taking you through that journey.
It's an attempt to teach through the medium of a novel.
And I think that we need that sort
of intervention into our lives.
And Ann very kindly mentioned The School
of Life which is opening.
The School of Life is dedicated to trying
to skill people up in this area.
It sounds so unromantic.
And I apologise for it sounding so unromantic.
If you said I've just come back from a class
in which I've learnt how
to interpret the moods of my partner.
Think, oh my God, that sounds horrible.
Really? You went to that, poor you.
And of course the old thing is when people go, oh,
you know I'm seeing a therapist.
Everyone goes oh no poor you.
The relationship, we're seeing a marriage therapist, oh my God,
well it's clearly about to be over.
Because of course there is no surer sign
that a relationship is on safe ground
than that a couple has taken the step to try
to examine it logically.
So, anyway, I'm rambling.
But I hope that in some what answers your question thank you
so much.
[ Applause ]
>> Hi. I just wanted to know what are your thoughts
on the search for love through things like Tinder?
>> Yes. Okay let's go back to that.
I think that Tinder, again excites us
because it makes the choosing of people, it places the emphasis
on the story of love at a very particular moment,
which is the moment of choice.
And it's not surprising because our culture is so obsessed.
Most love stories are not love stories.
They're the stories of two people finding each other.
Overcoming certain obstacles and getting together.
It then ends.
The story then ends.
So, I don't really have a problem
with Tinder I'm sure it's fun.
The thing is if you have a bit of a high profile
and you're married, sadly you can't go on Tinder [laughter].
So, I have no idea.
I have no idea about Tinder.
But, that was a joke.
That was a joke [laughter].
Joke. Joke.
But it places the emphasis on the wrong place,
which is it leads to an impatient search.
You're throwing a lot of human beings away.
Look, I as a secular Jew I love the Christian idea.
That once you know about love you could love anyone.
And Christianity really emphasises this point,
like you could love anyone.
You could love a leper.
You could love someone with leprosy.
So imagine Twitter breaks down
and goes actually stop this choice,
we've chosen you a leper, please love them.
You're like oh no.
I don't want to love a leper.
I can't swipe.
You're trying to swipe and the thing doesn't swipe.
You're stuck with the leper.
Right? Wouldn't necessarily be bad.
It would teach us a lot of things.
And I think the more you know about love,
the less important it is who you're loving.
I don't mean that you haven't noticed
that you're loving a particular person.
But you realise that everyone,
and the act of loving anyone is going to require many
of the same resources.
And I think that our technological Tinder-ish age has
deeply forgotten that lesson.
It is the lesson of art, you know.
If you think of, what are the novels of Dostoevsky,
but a constant attempt to take us behind the scenes.
I think it would look pretty disgusting at first swipe.
Like you wouldn't go oh [inaudible] you lovely match.
Or you murderer, murderer,
and the poignant visionary and egomaniac.
You wouldn't have gone on a date right?
But Dostoevsky takes you behind the scenes
and goes you know behind this profile is a human,
and discovers the humanity behind the profile.
And I worry that our age is getting every less adept
at that manoeuvre, but for me that manoeuvre is love.
Okay. Three?
[ Applause ]
>> Is there a particular model for your notion
of revealing your insanities to a perspective partner,
or is that something that you expect would just emerge
naturally in conversation?
>> No, I think it's, look I think it's very important
to do it at a time when your insanity has not wounded the
other person.
The reason why most of us are so unforgiving to the flaws
of others is because we encounter those flaws at moments
when they've damaged us.
So it's like, look I know about your father
and how horrible he was, or your mother
and how you know she didn't love you enough,
but frankly I don't care because right now you've ruined
my weekend.
So like I'm not really in a mood to listen to that stuff.
It's like I don't care that you were once a small child
who was you know tender, because actually frankly you just
destroyed my relationship with my best friend
out of some weird misguided feeling of jealousy
and I don't know where it comes from but I don't care.
So in other words, you are not going to be sympathetic
when it's damaged you.
So, the time to do it is when the other person feels relaxed,
tender, and you need to find some strategy.
You know the art of timing.
Most of the time, we are so,
because there's not a teaching culture
within relationships we feel that we've got to get our lesson
out at the very moment when we fell it.
It's like because the romantics are all about authenticity.
So it's like you know there's all this cult
of being authentic to your feelings.
You've got to be true to your feelings, that's the, you know.
I mean really?
You really want to be true to all your feelings.
Oh, that's going to be trouble.
It's like I think you're looking a little ugly today.
Oh, I just had to express that because I'm a romantic.
So [laughter], you know your thighs are looking a little fat,
but I'm a romantic so I had to tell you.
Jean Jacques Rousseau told me to tell you
that your thighs are a little fat.
So, that's really where I'm coming from.
So do it, yeah, do it when they're calm
and do it strategically and trying not
to hurt somebody with your insanity.
You'll find a better result.
Number four.
>> Hi. Oh, God that's loud.
Sorry. I just wanted to ask.
This is a bit of an uncomfortable question.
But money.
Is it, well, I've got to start again.
I'm under strict instruction I'm going to go
to art school next year and I'm under strict instruction
to not fall in love with another person who wants
to become an artist because I will end
up being poor, and sad, and lonely.
And I just wanted to ask the question if practical things
such as money, houses, towels,
whatever can actually really break up a relationship,
or if those are negotiable things?
>> Okay that's such a good question because it really sets
on top of this romantic, classical divide
if you like, in the view of love.
The last writer to talk head on about love
and money is Jane Austen in European fiction.
And her novels are obsessed with money.
Not at the detriment of everything else.
But they take a really fast steady look.
I mean you know the way it works with Jane Austen novels,
very often you'll be told that such
and such a character was worth 20 pounds a year
and you fiercely look back at the number, what was that?
Twenty pounds, like what does that mean?
That doesn't sound like very much.
And then someone says like worth 40 pounds,
and they've got an annuity and they've got,
like so you're totally told the financial status
of all the characters.
And this can sound quite weird because we are romantics.
And romantics believe, as you correctly suggest that love
and money have nothing to do with one another.
That true love has absolutely nothing to do with money.
That love is a feeling and money is this horrible dirty thing.
And Jane Austen is the last person
to have an intelligent sane view of money
because she doesn't say, there are characters in her novels,
in "Mansfield Park" there are these characters whose names I
now forget.
I forget her name.
There's one couple that gets together primarily for money,
because they're financially interested
and only financially interested.
And they have a terrible life.
And but Fanny Price, the heroine, has got,
she's a little bit interested in money.
In other words, she sensibly knows that money has got things
to contribute to a good relationship.
And she doesn't see this as a sign that she's an evil person.
She simply sees it as a practical recognition
of what money can do and what practical sides
of life do to emotions.
And you know I would recommend a Jane Austen view
of your dilemmas in art school.
In other words, it's not
that you're a bad person that you think of it.
And frankly, yes.
I mean you know there are plenty of extremely nice people
who are making a miserable dry, brittle living
in the financial sector who would love to infuse their soul
with a more artistic temperament [laughter].
And I would recommend you that.
[ Applause ]
Yeah?
>> I have a very simple question to say.
My question actually is how do I bring the Romanticism
in my marriage after being married 37 years today?
>> Right. Well, congratulations.
>> And our marriage actually was an arranged marriage according
to our culture, our parents chose each other for us
and we blindly accepted it even though we had our own personal
views, but we said yes because our parents said, he's stable,
he has his own business he will keep you safe and secure.
Money, money being the issue.
>> Yes. Well, look I think that some of the things
that happens is that when you love somebody.
You want to lay claim to them.
You want to own them.
You want to possess them.
But to a great extent I think we don't appreciate things
or people that we possess.
We don't appreciate what we have.
And I think that you know the question
that you're asking is not really about Romanticism,
it's about appreciation.
And I think it holds true not just
for relationships but for everything.
You know Marcel Crouse was once asked
by newspapers were doing silly questionnaires even then
and he was asked by a newspaper how he would feel if he heard
that a meteorite was heading for the earth
and would soon destroy civilisation.
This was like 1919.
And he said that it would be a marvellous thing
because suddenly everything in life would be so full
of meaning, beauty, charm.
He would rush to go to museums that he hadn't been to.
He would undertake journeys.
He would fall in love.
He would appreciate his friends.
All of these things.
And he said rather poignantly, the thing that prevents us
from noticing all of these things is the feeling
that it's forever and that we already possess them.
When in fact, all of us might die this evening, he says.
He was a hypochondriac, but a good one [laughter].
But I think we can take a little lesson from [inaudible] book.
Imagine you and your husband might die this evening.
That's the single most romantic,
this might be your last evening [laughter].
That's what you should do.
[ Applause ]
We've got about 14 seconds for the last question
so this is the last question.
>> I want to thank you for speaking to use tonight,
but also my question relates to what you spoke
about in the beginning, which is you said we're in an age
of Romanticism right now.
What do you think has caused the persistence of the age
of Romanticism, just like for centuries.
What do you think the next evolution is for love
and just in relationships?
>> Look I don't want to sound like one of those guys,
but to some extent it is to do
with the commercial system we live within.
It's so much easier when you're trying
to sell someone toothpaste to sell it
with that initial heaty ecstatic moment of love.
There's a huge interest in talking about that.
Look, it's deeply exciting.
The moment two people get together is one
of the most exciting things in the world.
So no wonder we keep scratching that bit of human nature.
It's no surprise.
If I was making a Hollywood moving
and I was spending 100 million pounds and the choice was
between you know a long term relationship
or that heaty moment, you know you go for the heaty moment.
I mean the only filmmaker who's ever made a sensible film
in the last like 10 years about marriage is Richard Linklater's
with his beautiful film "Before Midnight" which is
about the only adult description of love.
And it was a very small grossing movie, but please go and see it
if you can because it's one of the great films.
But you know we're surrounded by people who have a lot interest
in exciting us around the early moments of love.
But the fight back begins and it begins here.
And it begins with a novel I've written, and [laughter]
and with you listening.
So I encourage all you to come and see me afterwards,
get your book signed
and to begin a new way of approaching love.
Not in a cold way, not with cynicism or with pessimism.
But with a healthy belief that the best way
to get our relationships to go well is to overcome certain
of our romantic illusions.
Thank you so much.
[ Applause ]