The School of Life - How to Find Love

How to
Find Love

Other books in this series:

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

On Confidence

Why We Hate Cheap Things

Self-Knowledge

The Sorrows of Work

The Sorrows of Love

How to
Find Love

Published in 2017 by The School of Life

70 Marchmont Street, London WC1N 1AB

Copyright The School of Life 2017

Designed and typeset by Marcia Mihotich

Printed in Latvia by Livonia Print

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without express prior consent of the publisher.

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The School of Life offers programmes, publications and services to assist modern individuals in their quest to live more engaged and meaningful lives. Weve also developed a collection of content-rich, design-led retail products to promote useful insights and ideas from culture.

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ISBN 978-1-9997471-3-8

Contents

I
Introduction: From Reason to Instinct

II
Why We Fall in Love with Particular People

III
Our Problems With the People We Are Attracted To

IV
Improving Our Problematic Instincts

V
Obstacles to Finding Love

VI
Conclusion: Realism

We should feel sympathy for ourselves. The challenges of finding love are highly complex, seldom systematically explored, and relatively new. We have been looking for love the way we do now for, at best, only 260 years. We are still at the dawn of determining how to get into good relationships. Signs of our missteps are all around us.

For most of history, relationships were very different in two main ways. Firstly, people didnt marry for love. They did so for reasons of status, money, household skills and beauty. We didnt expect to love our partners; we hoped at best to tolerate them. We made Marriages of Reason. Secondly, we didnt have to find our partners ourselves. The task of locating a spouse was left to our families or society more broadly. We would wait to be presented with options vetted for us according to objective criteria.

Then, in the middle of the 18th century in Europe, a revolution of ideas began that has now spread around the world; a movement known to us today as Romanticism. Romanticism declared that the only real foundation for a relationship was an intense bond of love. All practical considerations (heirs, status, property) were deemed either negligible or irrelevant. The Marriage of Reason gave way to the Marriage of Feeling. We were now left to choose our own partners, without reference to the wishes of anyone else, be it family or society. The ideal lover was to be found by Instinct, not by Reason.

The idea of following an Instinct took on an enormous role in the story of love. Far from being a passing folly, the feeling of being in love was now interpreted as a supremely reliable guide to half a century or more of conjugal happiness. The arrival of this feeling was understood to be a little mysterious: one couldnt predict it, justify it, or wish it to occur at will. It would simply descend upon us in the presence of certain people for reasons that lay outside conscious understanding. It had elements in common with a religious visitation. One would become aware of a variety of symptoms, amply described in literature and art: a quickened heartbeat, a sense of having alighted on The One, difficulty sleeping, an urge to speak (to almost everyone) about the beloved and a desire to listen to music and go into nature, together with The One.

Romanticisms faith in the power of instinctive attraction has been touching and at points exhilarating, but it has also proved enormously problematic. In comparison with the hopes we harbour of love, the way most of our lives turn out can appear extremely disappointing. When we take into account the statistics on marital unhappiness and divorce, we must conclude that raw instinct alone cannot be judged an especially reliable method of locating the right partner. Our belief in instinct has been no friend of our chances of happiness. We cant go back to the Marriage of Reason, but we may need to look for a future beyond the Relationship of Instinct. At The School of Life, we anticipate and are trying to create tools for what we call a Psychological Relationship: a union where the best insights of psychology are brought to bear on the complex business of finding and maintaining love.

It is tempting to describe our instinctive attractions to particular people as simply mysterious. It feels, as we put it tellingly, Romantic not to analyse our feelings, and merely to follow their dictates with awe and abandon.

However, our feelings are not the mysterious yet intelligent lodestars we might wish them to be. They are, for the most part, plainly misleading. A sense of being in love with someone is seldom a prelude to long-term contentment. If we intend to get better at relationships, we must attempt to examine the calls of Romantic love rationally. This isnt a question of abandoning instinct, but of improving upon it.

The most notable aspect of our instinct in love is its particularity. We arent capable of falling in love with just anyone; we are powerfully led by our types. We may reject many good candidates who, on paper, could sound perfect. We may not be able to explain much more about their inadequacies other than to say weakly that they didnt feel right. Alternatively, we can be powerfully impelled towards other candidates, this time less clearly suitable, for reasons wholly beyond our conscious command. We are extremely, fascinatingly choosy.

Why, then, do we fall in love with particular people and not others? Why do we have the types we do? What guides our attractions? We can identify three components:

One of the most powerful forces within love is the Instinct for Completion. All of us are radically incomplete: we lack a range of qualities in our characters, psychological but also physical. We might be missing calm, creativity, practical know-how, wit, strength or sensitivity. It is as if, somewhere within us, we recognise this incompleteness and experience an attraction whenever we enter the orbit of someone who possesses a complementary quality. Through love, we seek to make good a defect and to complete ourselves.

As all of us have very different kinds of incompleteness, it stands to reason that we will find very different people attractive. Certain candidates will have qualities that leave us cold, because we have these in spades already: we may not need, for example, someone who is as calm as we are. Things would threaten to get dangerously quiet. We might need an injection of creativity and irreverence instead. Our tastes will be as varied as our deficiencies.

This mechanism of attraction in love is similar to the mechanism of attraction we have around styles of architecture and design. When it comes to buildings and interiors, we also operate with an instinct for completion. The places we call beautiful (like the people we call attractive) are often those that have qualities we want but dont yet have enough of. Consider these two very different buildings (right). We are most likely to be drawn to one or the other on the basis of a quality we dont feel we possess enough of in ourselves. People who feel a painful lack of exuberance, drama and extravagance, and are overwhelmed by drabness and sobriety might be drawn to Viennas Peterskirche. Those who feel an anxious lack of calm, coherence and serenity, and have too much chaos, activity and intensity, might feel moved by the simplicity of the St. Moritz Church in Augsburg.