Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person | Alain de Botton | Google Zeitgeist

Summary

In this insightful talk, the speaker explores the concept of marrying the 'wrong' person, suggesting it's not about finding a perfect match but a 'good enough' one. They delve into the complexities of human nature, the unrealistic expectations set by society, and the importance of understanding and accepting our own flaws and those of our partners. The speaker encourages embracing vulnerability and the art of compromise, emphasizing that love is a skill to be learned and that true maturity in relationships involves recognizing the ambivalence of both good and bad in the people we love.

Takeaways

• 💔 The title 'Why you will marry the wrong person' suggests that the idea of a 'perfect' partner is unrealistic and that we often marry people who are simply 'good enough' for us.
• 😔 Anger in relationships often stems from unmet expectations and a sense of hope, which can be transformed into sadness as a form of psychological progress.
• 🤔 The speaker posits that we are largely unaware of our own flaws due to societal and personal barriers that prevent us from confronting our own shortcomings.
• 🔮 High expectations of love, fueled by media and societal influences, can lead to disappointment and the belief that we've married the wrong person.
• 🌱 The concept of addiction is redefined to include behaviors that serve as distractions from self-reflection and self-awareness, which are crucial for forming healthy relationships.
• 💬 Communication is key in relationships, and the expectation that a partner should instinctively understand us without verbal expression can lead to misunderstandings and conflict.
• 👶 The need to express vulnerability and the difficulty in admitting our needs to others is a significant challenge in forming deep connections.
• 🤝 Love is presented as a skill to be learned rather than an instinct, requiring effort and the ability to interpret and tolerate the complexities of another person.
• 🤔 The tendency to seek out partners who are familiar rather than those who make us happy can lead us to repeat unhealthy relationship patterns.
• 👨‍🏫 The importance of being a 'good teacher' in a relationship is emphasized, meaning the ability to communicate effectively and help your partner understand your needs and feelings.
• 🔄 The acceptance of compromise in love is framed as a noble act, suggesting that no relationship is perfect and that maturity involves adjusting our responses to our partner's behavior.

Q & A

What is the main theme of the essay discussed in the transcript?

The main theme of the essay is 'Why you will marry the wrong person,' exploring the reasons behind this phenomenon and offering a philosophical perspective on love and relationships.

Why does the speaker suggest that turning anger into sadness could be a sign of psychological progress?

The speaker suggests that turning anger into sadness is a sign of psychological progress because it allows individuals to move from a state of rage, which is often driven by unmet expectations and hope, to a more emotionally intelligent state of grief, which can lead to acceptance and understanding.

What role does hope play in driving rage according to the speaker?

According to the speaker, hope plays a significant role in driving rage because it sets high expectations for how things should be, and when these expectations are not met, it leads to disappointment and anger.

How does the speaker describe the concept of addiction in the context of love and relationships?

The speaker describes addiction as any pattern of behavior that allows individuals to avoid being with themselves and their uncomfortable thoughts and emotions. This avoidance can be detrimental to forming deep and meaningful relationships.

What is the psychological challenge that most people face when it comes to expressing vulnerability in a relationship?

The psychological challenge most people face is the difficulty in admitting their need for another person and expressing vulnerability, which often leads to patterns of anxious attachment or avoidance in relationships.

What does the speaker mean by 'a good-enough person' in the context of love?

The speaker refers to 'a good-enough person' as someone who may not be perfect or the ideal partner but is still capable of providing a fulfilling and successful relationship through mutual understanding, compromise, and growth.

Why does the speaker argue that love is a skill that needs to be learned rather than an instinct?

The speaker argues that love is a skill because it involves the ability to interpret and understand another person's behavior with charity and generosity, which requires effort, learning, and practice rather than being an innate instinct.

What is the role of teaching in forming and maintaining a good relationship according to the speaker?

According to the speaker, teaching is crucial in a relationship because it involves effectively communicating one's thoughts, feelings, and needs to the partner, which fosters understanding and strengthens the bond between them.

Why does the speaker suggest that expecting to be understood without communication is a mistake?

The speaker suggests that expecting to be understood without communication is a mistake because it leads to misunderstandings, sulking, and a breakdown in communication, which are detrimental to the relationship.

What does the speaker mean by 'compatibility is an achievement of love'?

The speaker means that compatibility in a relationship is not something that exists from the beginning but is developed over time through mutual effort, understanding, and compromise, making it an achievement of the love between two people.

How does the speaker use Kierkegaard's philosophy to convey the inevitability of regret in life decisions?

The speaker uses Kierkegaard's philosophy to illustrate that regardless of the choices one makes, such as marrying or not marrying, there will always be a sense of regret, which is a part of the human condition.

Outlines

00:00

😀 Acceptance of Marrying the 'Wrong' Person

The speaker begins by addressing the audience humorously about marrying the wrong person, as suggested by an essay they wrote for 'The New York Times'. They aim to console those who feel they've made this mistake by suggesting that turning anger into sadness can be a form of psychological progress. The speaker posits that rage often stems from hope and that reducing expectations can alleviate some of this anger. They also touch on the idea that we are all 'strange' and difficult to live with, often without realizing it, and that this self-awareness is crucial in forming successful relationships.

05:00

🤔 The Challenge of Self-Knowledge in Love

This paragraph delves into the concept of addiction, redefining it as a pattern of behavior to avoid confronting one's own discomfort. The speaker argues that our inability to be alone with ourselves and understand our vulnerabilities hinders our capacity to form meaningful relationships. They discuss the psychological barriers that prevent us from expressing vulnerability and the tendency to either become anxiously attached or avoidant in relationships. The paragraph concludes with the assertion that love is a skill that needs to be learned, rather than an instinct, and that understanding the difference between loving and being loved is essential for mature relationships.

10:05

👶 Early Childhood and the Formation of Love

The speaker explores the influence of early childhood experiences on adult love relationships, referencing Melanie Klein's theories on how children initially perceive their parents as separate entities of 'good' and 'bad'. They explain that as children grow, they eventually recognize the duality within a single person, leading to ambivalence and the ability to love and hate simultaneously. This understanding is crucial for mature love, which involves accepting the mixture of good and bad in a partner. The speaker also addresses the tendency to seek out partners who are familiar, even if that familiarity is tied to past suffering, which can lead to repeating unhealthy patterns in love.

15:08

🗣️ The Importance of Communication in Love

This paragraph emphasizes the importance of communication in relationships, challenging the romantic notion that true love means being understood without words. The speaker discusses the negative impact of sulking and the unrealistic expectation that lovers should intuitively know our thoughts and feelings. They argue that effective teaching, or the ability to convey one's needs and thoughts clearly, is essential for a successful relationship. The speaker also encourages viewing criticism as a form of education towards self-improvement, rather than as a personal attack.

20:12

🤝 The Art of Compromise and Accommodation in Love

The speaker discusses the inevitability of compromise in love and life, rejecting the notion that it is a negative aspect of a relationship. They argue that compromise is a noble act and a sign of maturity, allowing individuals to accept and accommodate each other's imperfections. The speaker also touches on the idea that we may not be able to change our 'type' of partner, but we can change how we respond to them, breaking cycles of negative behavior. They conclude by advocating for the recognition and acceptance of compromise as a positive and necessary part of love.

🎩 Embracing Regret and Imperfection in Life and Love

In the final paragraph, the speaker uses a quote from Kierkegaard to illustrate the universal human experience of regret, suggesting that no matter what choices we make, we will always find reasons to question them. They argue that this is an inherent part of being human and should not be a source of self-reproach. The speaker encourages the audience to accept the imperfections and inevitable regrets as part of the human condition, advocating for a more benevolent view of our life decisions, including those related to love and relationships.

Keywords

💡Optimism

Optimism in this context refers to an unrealistic expectation or hope that things will always go well. The speaker uses this term to explain that what often drives rage is not pessimism but rather an unfulfilled optimism, as seen in the example of someone getting angry over lost keys or traffic jams, which signifies a belief in a world without such inconveniences.

💡Philosophy

Philosophy is presented as a discipline that aims to gently bring people down to reality from their inflated expectations. The speaker mentions Theodor Adorno's view on Walt Disney as an agent of hope, which in turn leads to rage and bitterness, suggesting that philosophy should help mitigate such emotional extremes.

💡Addiction

The concept of addiction is redefined in the script to describe any behavior pattern that serves as a distraction from one's own thoughts and emotions. The speaker argues that most people are addicts in this sense, using various distractions to avoid confronting their inner selves, which is crucial for forming healthy relationships.

💡Vulnerability

Vulnerability is discussed as a natural but often avoided aspect of human relationships. The speaker points out that expressing one's need for another person is challenging because it requires admitting one's own weakness and dependency, which goes against the common desire to appear strong and independent.

💡Attachment Theory

Attachment Theory is briefly mentioned in the context of how people respond to the fear of vulnerability. The speaker describes two patterns: anxious attachment, where individuals become overly procedural to avoid expressing need, and avoidant attachment, where individuals deny their need for others, leading to relationship issues.

💡Psychological Maturity

Psychological maturity is defined as the ability to recognize and accept the complex mix of good and bad in oneself and others. The speaker uses Melanie Klein's work to illustrate how children initially perceive their caregivers as entirely good or bad before gradually understanding the ambivalence of human relationships.

💡Compatibility

Compatibility in relationships is presented not as a pre-existing condition but as an achievement of love. The speaker argues that true compatibility is the result of effort and compromise, rather than an inherent trait that two people either have or lack from the start.

💡Compromise

Compromise is portrayed as a noble and necessary aspect of love and relationships. The speaker challenges the negative connotation often associated with compromise in love, suggesting that it is a sign of maturity and a key to a successful relationship.

💡Perfectionism

Perfectionism is critiqued as a source of unrealistic expectations that can lead to loneliness. The speaker introduces the term 'good enough' to convey the idea that striving for perfection in relationships is not only unattainable but also detrimental to forming connections with others.

💡Regret

Regret is discussed in the context of the inevitable mistakes and choices one makes in life, including in love. The speaker uses a quote from Kierkegaard to highlight the human condition of regretting actions taken or not taken, suggesting that it is part of being human and should not be a source of self-betrayal.

💡Self-Knowledge

Self-knowledge is emphasized as essential for understanding oneself and for building a relationship with another person. The speaker argues that without introspection and self-awareness, individuals are ill-equipped to navigate the complexities of love and connection.

Highlights

The speaker discusses the common feeling of marrying the wrong person and aims to console and counsel on this matter.

The speaker suggests turning anger about love lives into sadness as a form of psychological progress.

Rage is often driven by hope, not pessimism, as people expect an ideal world that rarely exists.

The speaker critiques the influence of Walt Disney for inflating expectations of love and causing rage and bitterness.

The idea that we will find a 'good enough' person is presented as a more realistic and successful outcome than finding 'the one'.

People are psychologically strange and often do not understand their own flaws, which complicates relationships.

Addiction is redefined as any behavior that keeps individuals away from confronting themselves and their emotions.

Love requires vulnerability, which many people resist, leading to relationship difficulties.

Anxiously attached and avoidant behaviors are identified as common responses to vulnerability in relationships.

The speaker emphasizes that love is a skill to be learned, not just an instinct, and society often neglects this.

To love someone is to interpret their behavior with charity and generosity, a concept often misunderstood.

Melanie Klein's theory of splitting good and bad parents and the realization of their unity is related to understanding love.

The speaker argues against the belief that a true lover will instinctively understand you without communication.

Good relationships require becoming good teachers and effectively communicating needs and feelings.

Criticism in relationships is reframed as an attempt to help each other grow, not as a negative attack.

The acceptance of compromise in love is presented as a mature and noble aspect of relationships.

The speaker concludes with Kierkegaard's philosophy on the inevitability of regret in all life choices, encouraging a more forgiving view of oneself.

Transcripts

I have been asked to talk to you today about an essay that I wrote for "The New York Times"

last year which went under a rather dramatic heading.

It was called, "Why you will marry the wrong person."

And perhaps we can just begin -- we're among friends -- by just asking how many of you

in the room do feel on balance that you have married the wrong person?

[ Laughter ] I mean, where are my friends?

Yeah, a lady there, a couple people there.

Five, ten.

I see 30 people in the room, and so we always have to triple that.

[ Laughter ] So there's a pretty hefty majority.

But I'm here to give counsel and to give consolation for this situation.

You know, 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.

Not least all of us are addicts.

Almost all of us are addicts, not injecting heroin as such but addicts in the sense we

need to redefine what addiction is.

I like to define addiction not in terms of the substance you're taking.

In other words, I'm a heroin addict.

I'm a cocaine addict.

No.

Addiction is basically any pattern of behavior whereby you cannot stand to be with yourself

and sort of the more uncomfortable thoughts and, more importantly, emotions that come

from being on your own.

And so, therefore, you can be addicted to almost anything so long as it keeps you away

from yourself, as long as it keeps you away from tricky self-knowledge.

And most of us are addicts.

Thanks to all sorts of technologies and distractions, et cetera, we can have a good life where we

will almost certainly be guaranteed not to spend any time with ourselves except maybe

for certain kind of airlines still don't have the gadgets to distract us.

But otherwise, you can be guaranteed you don't have to talk to yourself.

And this is a disaster for your capacity to have a relationship with another person because

until you know yourself, you can't properly relate to another person.

One of the reasons why love is so tricky for us is that it requires us to do something

we really don't want to do, which is to approach another human being and say "I need you.

I wouldn't really survive without you.

I'm vulnerable before you."

And there's a very strong impasse in all of us to be strong and to be well-defended and

not to reveal our vulnerability to another person.

Psychologists talk of two patterns of response that tend to crop up in people whenever there

is a danger of needing to be extremely vulnerable, dangerously vulnerable, and exposed to another

person.

The first response is to get what psychologists call anxiously attached.

Attachment theory, some of you may know.

So when you are anxiously attached to somebody, rather than saying, "I need you,I depend on

you," you start to get very procedural.

You say, "You are ten minutes late," or, "The bin bags need to be taken out."

Or you start to get strict when actually what you want to do is to ask a very poignant question:

Do you still care about me?

But we don't dare to ask that question, so instead we get nasty.

We get stiff.

We get procedural.

The other thing -- the other pattern of behavior, which psychologists have identified -- and

it tends to apply to people who are in this room, in other words, A types, very outgoing

types, strivers -- you become in relationships -- tell me if I'm wrong, you become what is

known as avoidant, which means that when you need someone, it's precisely at that moment

that you pretend you don't.

When you feel more vulnerable, you say, "I'm quite busy at the moment.

I'm fine.

Thanks.

I'm busy today."

In other words, you don't reveal the need for another person, which sets them off into

a chain of wondering whether you are to be trusted.

And it's then a cycle of low trust.

So we get into these patterns of not daring to do the thing that we really need to do,

which is to say even though I'm a grown person, maybe I have got a beard, maybe I have been

alive for a long time, I'm 6'2", et cetera, I'm actually a small child inside and I need

you like a small child would need its parent.

This is so humbling that most of us refuse to make that step and, therefore, refuse the

challenge of love.

In short, we don't know very much how to love.

And it sounds very odd because imagine somebody said, look, all of us probably in this room

would probably need to go to a school of love.

We think, What?

A school of love?

Love is just an instinct.

No, it's not.

It's a skill, and it's a skill that needs to be learned.

And it's a skill that our society refuses to consider as a skill.

We are meant to always just follow our feelings.

If you keep following your feelings, you will almost certainly make a big mistake in your

life.

What is love?

Ultimately love, I believe, is something -- first of all, there is a distinction between loving

and being loved.

We all start off in life by knowing a lot about being loved.

Being loved is the fun bit.

That's when somebody brings you something on a tray and asks you how your day at school

went, et cetera.

And we grow up thinking that that's what is going to happen in an adult relationship.

We can be forgiven for that.

It's an ununderstandable mistake, but it's a very tragic mistake.

And it leads us not to pay attention to the other side of the equation, which is to love.

What does it really mean "to love"?

To love ultimately is to have the willingness to interpret someone's on the surface not

very appealing behavior in order to find more benevolent reasons why it may be unfolding.

In other words, to love someone is to apply charity and generosity of interpretation.

Most of us are in dire need of love because actually we need to be -- we need to have

some slack cut for us because our behavior is often so tricky that if we don't do this,

we wouldn't get through any kind of relationship.

But we're not used to thinking that that is the core of what love is.

Core of what love is, is the willingness to interpret another's behavior.

What we tend to be very bad at is recognizing that anyone that we can love is going to be

a perplexing mixture of the good and the bad.

There's a wonderful psychoanalyst called Melanie Klein, who was active in the '50s and '60s,

originally from Vienna, active in North London studying how children learned about relationships

from the parental situation.

And she came up with a very fascinating analysis.

She argued that when children are small, very small, they don't really realize that a parent

is one character.

They actually do what she called split a parent into a good parent and a bad parent.

And so this is when a baby is really at an infant stage.

So what you do is you split into the good mother or -- and the bad mother.

And it takes a long, long time.

Melanie Klein thought it might be until you are 4 until you actually realize that the

good and the bad mother are one person and you become ambivalent.

In other words, you become able to hate someone and really go off them and at the same time

also love them and you are able not to run away from that situation.

You are able to say, "I love someone and hate them and that's okay."

And Melanie Klein thought this was an immense psychological achievement when we can no longer

merely divide people into absolutely brilliant, perfect, marvelous and hateful, let me down,

disappointed me.

Everyone who we love is going to disappoint us.

We start off with idealization, and we end up often with denigration.

The person goes from being absolutely marvelous to being absolutely terrible.

Maturity is the ability to see that there are no heros or sinners really among human

beings.

All of us are this wonderfully perplexing mixture of the good and the bad.

And adulthood, true psychological maturity -- you may need to be 65 before it hits you.

I'm not there yet -- is the capacity to realize that anyone that you love is going to be this

mixture of the good and the bad.

So love is not just admiration for strength.

It is also tolerance for weakness and recognition of ambivalence.

The reason why we are going to probably make some real mistakes when we choose our love

partners, some of you in this room have made some stunning mistakes.

Now, why is this?

The reason is that we have been told that the way to find a good partner is to follow

your instinct; right?

Follow your heart.

That's the mantra.

And so we are all the time reminded that if we stop reasoning, analyzing -- By the way,

are there people in this room who think that you can think too much about your emotions?

That sort of view people get you can think too much.

A few people.

Okay.

You can't think too much.

You can only overthink badly.

But there is no such thing as thinking too much about emotions.

But the problem is that we live in a romantic culture that privileges impulse.

Now, when it comes to love, something tricky occurs because you don't have to be a paid-up

believer in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis to realize that the way we love as adults

sits on top of our early childhood experiences.

And in early childhood, the way that we learned about love was not just via experiences of

tenderness and kindness and generosity.

The love that we will have tasted as children will also be bound up with experiences of

being let down, being humiliated, maybe being with a parent who treated us very harshly,

who scolded us, who made us feel small in some way.

In other words, quite a lot about our early experiences of love are bound up with various

kinds of suffering.

Now, something quite bad happens when we start to go out into the adult world and start to

choose love partners.

We think we're out to find partners who will make us happy, but we're not.

We're out to find partners who will feel familiar.

And that may be a very different thing.

Because familiarity may be bound up with particular kinds of torture.

And this explains why sometimes people will say to us, Look, there's a wonderful person.

You should go and date them.

They are good looking.

They're charming.

They're all sorts of thing.

And we go out with them and we date them.

And we do recognize that they are really wonderful and amazing.

But we have to confess to our partners that -- to our friends that actually we found this

person -- often we struggle with the vocabulary.

We say maybe not that exciting or maybe not sexy or a bit boring.

But really what we mean is that we've detected in this really quite accomplished person someone

who will not be able to make us suffer in the way that we need to suffer in order to

feel that love is real.

And that's why we reject them.

So we are not merely on a quest to be happy.

We are on a quest to suffer in ways that feel familiar, and this radically undermines our

capacity to find a good partner.

Here's another reason why we are going to come unstuck in the field of love.

We tend to believe that the more a lover is right for us, the less we're going to have

to explain about who we are, how we feel, what upsets us, what we want.

We believe, rather as a young child believes of its parent, that a true lover will guess

what's in our minds.

One of the great errors that human beings make is permanently to feel that other people

know what's in their minds without us having said what's in our minds.

It's very cumbersome to use words.

It's such a bore.

And when it comes to love, we have this deep desire that will simply be understood wordlessly.

It's touching.

It's a beautiful romantic idea, but it also leads to a catastrophic outbreak of sulking.

Now, what is sulking?

Sulking is an interesting phenomenon.

We don't just sulk with anyone.

We sulk with people who we feel should understand us and, yet, for some reason have decided

not to.

And that's why we tend to reserve ours sulks for people who we love and who we think love

us.

And they tell us something -- they unwittingly will trigger a negative reaction in us and

we'll sulk.

And they will say, "What's wrong with you, darling?"

And we'll say, "Nothing."

And they'll say, "Come on, you're upset."

We'll go, "No, I'm not.

I'm absolutely fine."

[ Laughter ] It's not true.

And we'll go upstairs and we'll shut the door and we won't tell them what's wrong with us.

And then they will knock at the door and they will say, "Please, just tell me."

And we'll say no because we want them to read our souls, because we expect that a true lover

can understand what we feel and who we are without us speaking.

This is a catastrophe for our capacity to form lasting relationships.

If you do not explain, you can never be understood.

The root to a good marriage and to good love is the ability to become a good teacher.

Now, teaching sounds like a narrow profession, those guys in tweed jackets and fusty with

a chalkboard, et cetera.

I'm not talking about that kind of teaching.

All of us, whatever our job aspirations, whatever it is we do, have to become teachers.

Now, teaching is merely the word that we give to the skill of getting an idea from one head

into another in a way that it's likely to be accepted.

And most of us are appalling teachers.

Most of us teach when we're tired, when we're frightened.

What are we frightened of?

We are frightened we've married an idiot.

[ Laughter ] And because we are so frightened, we start

screaming at them.

"You've got to understand!"

And the thing is that, unfortunately, by the time you have started to humiliate the person

you want to understand something, lesson over.

You will never get anyone to understand what you want them to understand so long as you

make them feel small.

In order to teach well, you need to be relaxed.

You need to accept that maybe your partner won't understand.

And, also, you need a culture within a couple that two people are going to need to teach

each other and, therefore, also learn from one another.

And this brings me to the next reason why you are going to have a very unhappy relationship,

probably.

And that is because you probably believe that when somebody tries to tell you something

about yourself that's a little ticklish and a little uncomfortable, they are attacking

you.

They're not.

They are trying to make you into a better person.

And we don't tend to believe that this has a role in love.

We tend to believe that true love means accepting the whole of us.

It doesn't.

No one should accept the whole of us.

We are appalling.

Do you really want the whole of you accepted?

No.

That's not love.

The full display of our characters, the full articulation of who we are should not be something

that we do in front of anyone that we care about.

[ Laughter ] So what we need to do is to accept that the

other person is going to want to educate us and that it isn't a criticism.

Criticism is merely the wrong word that we apply to a much nobler idea, which is to try

and make us into better versions of ourselves.

But we tend to reject this idea very strongly.

Is there any hope?

Of course, there's hope.

Look, I mentioned the word "good enough."

It's a phrase taken from a wonderful English psychoanalyst called Donald Winnicott.

He had a lot of parents who would come to him and say things like, "I'm so worried.

I'm not a good parent."

My child has this problem or that problem, et cetera.

And he came up with a wonderful phrase.

He said, "You are most likely to be a good-enough parent."

And it's a relief from our otherwise punishing perfectionism.

The good thing is that none of us are perfect and, therefore, we don't need perfection.

And the demand for perfection will lead you to only one thing, loneliness.

You cannot have perfection and company.

To be in company with another person is to be negotiating imperfection every day.

Incompatibility, we are all incompatible.

But it is the work of love to make us graciously accommodate each other and ourselves to each

other's incompatibilities.

And, therefore, compatibility is an achievement of love.

It isn't what you need from the outset.

Of course, you're not going to be totally compatible.

That's not the point.

It is through love that you gradually accept the need to be compatible.

We probably can't change our types; right?

So all of us -- many of us have got types who are going to cause us real problems.

They may be too distant.

They may be arrogant.

They're going to torture us in some way.

Now, friends say casually say to us, "Chuck them.

Get out of the relationship," et cetera; right?

No.

I don't -- we're realists here at Google, and I'm giving you realistic advice.

You're not going to manage to change your type.

Let's get that for granted.

What you can do -- and this is a big achievement -- is to change how you characteristically

respond to your tricky type.

Most of us have formed the way that we respond to tricky types in early childhood.

So we had a distant parent.

We have now chosen a distant lover.

When we were very young, we responded to that distant parent by attention seeking.

We rattled and banged.

And now we are adults, we rattle and bang in our own way.

We think that's going to help.

It doesn't.

It creates a cycle that's going to be a vicious cycle.

It is not going to get us anywhere.

It is open to us at any time to have a more mature response to the challenges that the

types of people we're attracted to are going to pose for us.

And that is an immense step forward, an immense achievement.

The other thing we should do is recognize an ability of compromise.

One of the most shameful things to ever have to admit is to say, "This is my partner.

I've compromised.

In choosing them, I've compromised."

"Why have you compromised?"

"Well, I'm not that attractive myself.

I have got lots of problems.

I'm a bit nutty.

Frankly I couldn't pull anyone better but they're very nice.

They're okay."

[ Laughter ] You would think, loser, it's not true.

Compromise is noble.

We compromise in every area of life.

There's no reason why we shouldn't compromise in our love life.

Maybe we're sticking around for the children.

Good!

People say, "Oh, they are only sticking around for the children."

That's a wonderful reason to stick around.

Why else are you going to stick around?

[ Laughter ] Okay.

So let's look a bit more benevolently at the art of compromise.

It's a massive achievement in love.

I'm going to end with a quote from one of my favorite philosophers.

Danish, 19th century, very gloomy philosopher called Kierkegaard.

And Kierkegaard in his book "Either/Or" had a wonderful outburst where he basically said,

"Of course, you're going to marry the wrong person and make the wrong decisions in a whole

row of areas.

And the reason you're going to do this is that you're human.

Therefore, do not berate yourself for doing what humans do."

This is what he says, "Marry, and you will regret it; don't marry, you will also regret

it; marry or don't marry, you will regret it either way.

"Laugh at the world's foolishness, you'll regret it; weep over it, you'll regret that,

too; laugh at the world's foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both.

"Hang yourself, you will regret it; don't hang yourself, you will regret that, too;

hang yourself or don't hang yourself, you will regret it either way.

Whether you hang yourself or don't hang yourself, you will regret both."

This gentleman is the essence of all philosophy.

Thank you very much.

[ Applause ]