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    How to Find Love
    How to Find Love
    How to Find Love
    Ebook70 pages45 minutes

    How to Find Love

    By The School of Life

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    • A GUIDE TO MAKING BETTER DECISIONS IN LOVE: and how to choose the "right" partner.
    • PRESENTS THE TOOLS WE NEED: to break unhealthy relationship habits.
    • PART OF THE SCHOOL OF LIFE'S GIFTABLE ESSAYS SERIES: other titles include Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person, Why We Hate Cheap Things, and Self-Knowledge.
    • DRAWS FROM THE SCHOOL OF LIFE'S CORE CURRICULUM
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe School of Life
    Release dateJul 29, 2020
    ISBN9781999747138
    How to Find Love
    Author

    The School of Life

    The School of Life is a groundbreaking enterprise which offers good ideas for everyday living. Founded in 2008, The School of Life runs a diverse range of programmes and services which address questions of personal fulfilment and how to lead a better life. Drawing insights from philosophy, psychology, literature, the visual arts and sciences, The School of Life offers evening classes, weekends, conversation meals and other events that explore issues relating to big themes such as Love,Work, Play, Self, Family and Community.

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      Book preview

      How to Find Love - The School of Life

      I

      Introduction: From Reason to Instinct

      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 didn’t marry for love. They did so for reasons of status, money, household skills and beauty. We didn’t expect to love our partners; we hoped – at best – to tolerate them. We made Marriages of Reason. Secondly, we didn’t 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 couldn’t 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.

      Romanticism’s 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 can’t 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.

      II

      Why We

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