Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

I've been asked to talk to you today about an essay that I wrote uh for the New York Times um last year which went under a rather dramatic uh heading uh it was called why you will marry the wrong person and perhaps we can just begin um we're among friends um by just asking how many of you in the room do feel on balance that you have married the wrong person I mean we're among friends honest any yeah lady that c couple of people that 5 10 I'd say 30 people in the room and and

so we always have to trle that uh so there's there's a pretty hefty majority but I'm here to give counsel and to give uh 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 if we manage to turn rage into grief we will have made psychological progress and this is uh 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 find 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 are mysteriously traffic free it is hope that is turbocharging

their rage so if we're to get a little bit less sad uh uh and as 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 um there was wonderful quote from the German philosopher Theodore adoro who in the 1960s said that 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 um it was the task of philosophy to let us down uh gently which is what I'm going to be uh uh doing uh 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 um I should say that it's not that bad and the reason is that all of us uh will not manage to find

the right person but we will probably all of us manage to find a good enough person so and that's success um as as as you will we'll come see one of the one of the reasons why we're not going to be able to pull this one off as successfully as we might have hoped at the early at the outset of our our probably our teenage Hood 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 and you know we're not going to do anything

very dangerous but we are basically psychologically quite strange um we don't normally know very much about this strangeness it takes us a long long time before we're 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 and see me afterwards I know I know that you're not easy to live with um and the reason is that you are Homo sapiens and therefore you are

not easy to live with no one is um and but there's a there's a wall of Silence that surrounds us from a deeper acquaintance with what is actually so difficult about us uh our friends don't want to tell us why would they bother they just want a pleasant evening out they're not our friends know more about us us and more about our flaws probably after a 10-minute acquaintance a stranger will know more about your flaws than you might learn over 40 years of life on the planet our our capacity to Intuit it 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 can see of course I mean they've followed us from the crib they know what's wrong with us they're not going to tell us uh because they they just want to you know be sweet uh and our ex-lovers a vital source of knowledge they know absolutely they know uh but do you remember that speech that they gave it was it was moving at the time when they said that they wanted a little more space

and we're attracted to travel and we're interested in the culture of Southeast Asia nonsense they thought lots of things were wrong with you but they weren't going to be bothered to tell you they were just off 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 uh low sense of what is actually wrong with us um not least all of us are addicts almost all of us are addicts not

injecting heroin as such but addicts in the we need to redefine what addiction is I like to Define addiction not in terms of the substance you're taking in other words you know I'm heroin addict I'm a cocaine addict no addiction is basically any pattern of behavior whereby you cannot stand to be with yourself and certain 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 so long as it keeps you away

from tricky self- knowledge and most of us are addicts and thanks to all sorts of Technologies and uh distractions Etc we can have a good life where we will almost certainly be guaranteed not to spend any time with ourselves um except maybe for certain kind of airlines that 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 uh to another person um

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 am vulnerable before you and there's a very strong impulse in all of us to be strong and to be well- defended and not to reveal our vulnerability to another person psycho psychologists talk of two patterns of response that tend to crop up in people whenever there's a danger of needing to be extremely vulnerable

dangerously vulnerable and exposed to another person the first response is to get what what um uh psychologists call anxiously attached this 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're 10 minutes late or I think 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 uh we get procedural the other other thing the other pattern of behavior which psychologists have identified and it tends to apply to people uh who are in this room in other words a types very outgoing types uh Strivers uh you become in relationships tell me if I'm wrong uh you become what is known as avoidant which means that when you when you need someone it's precisely at that moment that you pretend you don't when you feel most vulnerable you say I'm quite busy at

the moment I'm fine thanks I'm well busy today uh in other words you don't reveal the need for another person which sets them off in into a chain of wondering whether uh you are to be trusted and there'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've got a beard maybe I've been alive for a long time uh I'm 6'2 Etc I'm actually a small child inside and I

need you I 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 uh of Love um in short we don't know very very much how to love we and it sounds very odd cuz imagine if somebody said to you 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 uh in in your life what is love ultimately love I believe is something first of all there's a distinction between love loving and being loved we all start off in life by knowing a lot about being loved being loved is the fun bit uh that's when somebody brings you something on a tray and ask you how your day

at school went Etc and we grow up thinking that that is what's going to happen in an adult relationship we can be forgiven for that it's an understandable 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 and what does it really mean to love to love ultimately is to have the willingness to interpret someone's on the surface not 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 uh we wouldn't get through uh any kind of relationship but we're not used to thinking that that is the at the core of what love is core of what love is is the willingness to interpret another's behavior um 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 uh psychoanalyst called Melanie Klein who was active in the 50s and 60s originally from Vienna uh 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 a

baby is you know really at 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 melan Klein thought it might be until you're four um 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're able not to run away from that situation you're able to say I love someone and hate

them and that's okay uh and Melanie Klein thought this is an immense psychological achievement when we can no longer merely divide people into absolutely brilliant perfect what 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 heroes or or Sinners really among human beings that all of us have this wonderfully perplexing mixture of the good and the

bad and adulthood true psychological maturity and you may need to be 65 before it hits you I'm not there yet uh is the capacity to realize that anyone that you love is going to be this mixture of uh uh the good and the bad so love is not just admiration for strength it is also tolerance for weakness and recognition of ambivalence um the reason why we're 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've 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're all the time reminded that if we stop uh reasoning analyzing by the way are there people in this room who think that you can think too much about your emotions there sort of few people go you you can think too much a few people okay I you can't think too much you can only ever think badly uh but there's no such thing as thinking too much about emotions but the

problem is 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 out believer in Psychotherapy or psychoanalysis to realize that the way we love as adults sits on top of our early childhood experien 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 abound 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 um people will say to us look there's a wonderful person you should go and date them they're they're they're goodlooking they're Charming they're all sorts of things and we go out with them we them and we do recognize that they're really wonderful and amazing but we have to confess to our partners that to 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 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're 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 believe of its parent that a true lover will guess what is 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 our suks for people who we love and who we think love us and they tell us something you know they unwittingly will trigger a negative reaction in us and we'll Suk and they'll say what's wrong with you darling and we'll say nothing and

they'll say but come on you're upset and we'll go no I'm not I'm absolutely fine and 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'll knock at the door and they 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 fussy with a with a chalkboard Etc 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 is 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're frightened we've married an idiot and because we're so frightened we start screaming at them you've got to understand and the thing is that unfortunately by the time you've started to humiliate the person you want to understand something less and 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 um 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're 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're 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're appalling really want the whole of you accepted no that's not love the 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 um so what we need to do uh is 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 uh very strongly um is there any hope of course there's hope look I mentioned the word good enough it's a phrase phase taken from a wonderful English psychoanalyst called Donald winot 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 um my child has this problem or that problem Etc and he came up with a wonderful

phrase he said you are most likely to be a good enough parent and he it's a relief from our otherwise punishing uh uh 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 um 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

uh and 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 grow gradually accept the need uh uh to to be uh compatible um we probably can't change our types right so all of us are pro many of us are 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 casually say to

us Chuck them get out the relationship Etc right no I don't you know 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've 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're adults we rattle and bang in our own way and we think that's going to help it doesn't it creates a a cycle that's going to be a vicious uh uh cycle that's 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 uh uh achievement um the other thing we should do is recognize

the nobility 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 oh why have you compromised well I'm not that attractive myself uh I've got lots of problems I'm a bit nutty frankly I couldn't pull anyone better but they're very nice they're okay now 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 lives maybe we're sticking around for the children good people

say oh they're only sticking around for the children that's a wonderful reason to stick around why else are you going to stick around okay so let's look a bit more benevolently at the art of uh compromise it's a massive achievement uh in love I'm going to end um with with a a quote from one of my favorite philosophers Danish 19th century very gloomy philosopher called kard and kard 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'll 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 [Applause] [Music] much we publish new thought-provoking films every week be sure to subscribe to our Channel and take a look at more of what we have to offer at the link on your screen now