There's a lot of anger around our love lives privately held.
But a lot of us go around feeling quite enraged, angry privately, about the way that our love
lives have gone.
My task today is to turn that anger into sadness.
If we -- [ Laughter ]
If we manage to turn rage into grief, we will have made psychological progress.
And this is the task today.
What lies behind rage very often is an unusual quality because we tend to think that very
angry people are sort of dark and pessimistic characters.
Absolutely not.
Scratch the surface of any regularly angry person and you will find a wild optimist.
It is, in fact, hope that drives rage.
Think of the person who screams every time they can't fight their house keys or every
time they get stuck in traffic.
These unfortunate characters are evincing a curious but reckless faith in a world in
which keys never go astray, the roads to mysteriously traffic-free.
It is hope that is turbo charging their rage.
So if we are to get a little bit less sad and -- a little less angry about our love
lives, we will have to diminish some of our hopes.
It's very hard to diminish hope around love because there are vast industries designed
to inflate our expectations of love.
There's a wonderful quote from the German philosopher Theodor Adorno who in the 1960s
said the most dangerous man in America was Walt Disney.
And the reason for his attack on Walt was because he believed that Walt was the prime
agent of hope and, therefore, of rage and, therefore, of bitterness.
And he thought that it was the task of philosophy to let us down gently, which is what I'm going
to be doing today.
So remember the theme of the talk, "Why you will marry the wrong person."
There are a number of reasons why this is going to happen to you or has maybe already
in the privacy of your heart happened to you.
I should say that it's not that bad.
And the reason is that all of us will not manage to find the right person, but we will
probably all of us manage to find a good-enough person.
And that's success as you will come to see.
[ Laughter ] One of the reasons why we are not going to
be able to pull this one hope as successfully as we might have hoped at the early -- at
the outset of our teenage hurdle when we were contemplating love is that we are very strange.
I'm very strange, and you're very strange.
You don't let on.
We're not going to do anything very dangerous, but we are basically psychologically quite
strange.
We don't normally know very much about this strangeness.
It takes us a long, long time before we are really on top of the way in which we are hard
to live with.
Does anyone in this room think that they're quite easy to live with on balance?
Yeah?
Oh, my goodness.
Okay.
I don't want to be rude, but please come see me afterwards.
[ Laughter ] I know -- I know that you're not easy to live
with.
And the reason is that you're Homo sapiens and, therefore, you are not easy to live with.
No one is.
But there's a wall of silence that surrounds us from a deeper acquaintance with what is
actually so difficult about us.
Our friends don't want to tell us.
Why would they bother?
They just want a pleasant evening out.
Our friends know more about us and more about our flaws.
Probably after ten minutes' acquaintance, a stranger will know more about your flaws
than you might learn over 40 years of life on the planet.
Our capacity to intuit what is wrong with us is very weak.
Our parents don't tell us very much.
Why would they?
They love us too much.
They know.
They conceived.
Of course, they followed us from the crib.
They know what's wrong with us.
They're not going to tell us.
[ Laughter ] They just want to be sweet.
And our ex-lovers, a vital source of knowledge.
They know.
Absolutely they know.
[ Laugher ] But do you remember that speech that they
gave?
It was moving at the time when they said that they wanted a little space and were attracted
to travel and were interested in the culture of southeast Asia.
Nonsense.
They thought lots of things were wrong with but they weren't going to be bothered to tell
you.
They were just out of there.
Why would they bother?
So this knowledge that is out there is not in you.
It's out there, but it's not in you.
And so, therefore, we progress through the world with a very -- a low sense of what is
actually wrong with us.