The Problem with Modern Love - Sottotitoli bilingue
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To love at all is to be vulnerable.
Love anything, and your heart will be rung and possibly broken.
It seems like we have entered a sort of dark age for love.
It has almost become a great unifier across the political and social spectra.
No matter who we are and no matter what views we hold, everyone seems to agree on one thing.
The way we approach love today is fundamentally broken.
They may disagree on the causes or even what is broken about it,
but they tend to concur that something is rotten in the state of When this many people converge on a single point,
you can normally bet that there is some excellent philosophy involved.
And with something as universal, important, and life affirming as love at stake, it is imperative that we take a careful look at the issue.
So in this video, I'll be taking some of the most common complaints about love from across the internet.
and explore the philosophical background behind those ideas, and also consider some constructive criticism for the way we might approach friendship, passion, affection, and more.
Get ready to learn how optimism and cynicism are close cousins,
how we have killed commitment, and why our ideas about love are not just muddled but outright contradictory.
As always,
bear in mind that there is so much more to say on this topic than I will do here,
and that I absolutely do not have the final word on the issue.
I largely hope this can simply serve as an aid in your own thinking and reflections of our love.
I would also like to give a special mention to the works of Simon May and Alandie Botton, as they were incredibly helpful while researching.
this video, but before we get started I want to thank the very kind sponsor of this video, Squarespace.
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But anyway, back to love.
First, I recognize that people get a little bit embarrassed when they're talking about love.
So I want to clear the air by reassuring you that when it comes to love, we are all a little bit mad.
One, the terrifying power of love.
In Johann von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Verter,
we get one of the most extreme yet troublingly honest portrayals of love in all fiction, and specifically, it's darker and more terrifying aspects.
The plot follows a young romantic man named Verter as he falls deeply in love with a young lady called Charlotte.
to her lover, Albert.
In the frustration and pain of his thwarted love, Verta becomes increasingly erratic.
Whereas before, he seemed peaceful, calm, and generally like a reasonable chap, if a bit eccentric.
Now, he was almost violent in his madness.
He eventually drives both Charlotte and Albert away with his outbursts, and alone.
Rome, turns a gun on himself to end his torment.
Now, this is obviously a very dramatic story, and today it seems incredibly extreme.
But I bring it up because I think it hits upon an important point that often goes overlooked in discussions about love,
and specifically that kind of passionate erotic love that can hit us at the early stages of dating.
I think we all know the experience of getting to know someone and it becoming clear that
our feelings for them have become out of touch with what is reasonable or rational to feel at this stage.
You become painfully aware of the fact that you are too key.
You think about the object of your affection far more than you would admit to anyone outside of a therapist's office.
suddenly this person who you don't even know all that well is of supreme importance to you,
an attitude to you takes on a quasi-metaphysical significance.
The objectively quite trivial details of their actions become tiny opportunities for obsession,
the time they waited before texting you back,
whether they laughed at your ever so slightly cringy joke, whether they broke off eye contact just a second too early.
Each these probably means nothing,
but your eros adult brain hunts them through the night and investigates them for clues,
like a modern seer reading the future in the entrails of a cat.
And the patterns of amorous insanity do not end there.
Once you were together, you start to- become ever more attached to this person.
Slowly the sense that you could do without them fades into the background and they become a fixture of your life.
You know that you could very well survive on your own, but in some sense that idea remains unconvincing.
Your cognitive faculties are at odds with your emotional reality.
The other person starts to feel like a necessity.
all while you know that that is not strictly true.
You push the idea that you could even be separated far to the back of your mind.
The concept that your partner might one day turn around and no longer love you,
or die in some horrible accident, or that you might be split by circumstances outside either of your control.
All of these very real possibilities are denied.
They are viewed as absurd as asking whether the sun will rise tomorrow.
You are deep in emotional investment and are willing to ride this thing as long as it goes.
Alternatively, maybe something entirely different and equally strange happens.
Your partner does something that you find vaguely irritating and all of a sudden you notice other parts of them that are annoying as well.
Our rose-tinted glasses start to come off,
but rather than replacing them with a more compassionate kind of love,
one that learns to appreciate our lover for who they are, our minds immediately flip to the reverse.
We replace our ruddy spectacles with dark ones, and everything our beloved does strikes us as unconscionably infected with them.
We resent them for not living up to our expectations,
while at the same time crying out for them to love us in the way that we want to be loved.
Paradoxically, we both desperately want to stay and desperately want to leave.
Our mind is torn between two poles, and we start to go a bit mad.
To take a fourth example of love's madness, we might allow our love to blind us to someone who is really quite awful.
They might neglect us or hurt us, repeatedly beating us down with their scornful emotions.
They seem to hold us in contempt, hate us even, yet at the same time this only draws us in more.
We say that the problem must be us, and we chastise ourselves for not earning their approval.
The beloved's level of affection becomes the barometer for our self-worth, and we drive ourselves crazy attempting to attain it.
it.
If one of our friends was in this situation,
we would tell them to get out, say that they are out of their minds that almost anything will be better than their current position.
And yet, we stay inexplicably against our rational wills, only realising our own insanity after we have already left.
These four examples illustrate something that will become a general theme over the course of the video.
It's a thing we all know, and yet we hide from it, because it makes us really quite embarrassed.
At almost every level, love can make us a little bit irrational.
and erratic.
It can make us do things that we would never have dreams,
turn an ordinary person into some earthly angel,
and hide the fact that we are being treated incredibly poorly by someone who professes to love us.
I want to acknowledge this point, because if we're going to talk about love, then going to have to get over this embarrassment.
None of us are perfectly ragged.
especially in this sphere, and there is a reason why being hit with Cupid's arrow was seen as almost a sign of madness.
Why it drove Daido to the funeral pyre, even when she had an entire kingdom at her disposal.
Many the complaints we look at today are going to acknowledge the inner emotional chaos of love,
but I want to let you know that it is totally okay.
There is nothing to be embarrassed about,
and that it is perfectly natural for this topic to draw out of us all those aspects of our characters we desperately want to hide.
So, for this video, I want you to bear in mind Nietzsche's famous aphorism.
That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
Let's take a peek behind the curtain of our own affectionate insanity and see the first complaint that people have about modern dating Two,
lofty expectations.
A huge number of the issues people have with modern dating come back to the idea that men
or women or both have expectations that are far too high.
We are told that all women really want is an absurdly tall man with baby blue eyes who works in the city,
and that conversely every man desires a comically proportioned, impossibly beautiful young lady who is simultaneously sexually voracious and chased to the point of parody.
And to be fair, I am sure that there are some genuinely awful there, and that many of them are very shallow.
But I think that the superficial high standards mask a far deeper, more philosophical expectation for love that we really ought to reconsider.
The idea that love will redeem us, totally and unreservedly.
To a certain extent, I think this is baked into the structure of falling in love.
The early stages of courtship.
are accompanied by an unprecedented flush of chemicals in our brain that almost resemble a drug binge.
And this helps cement the idea that there is something truly special and unique on the horizon.
Additionally, we have inherited a whole host of philosophical beliefs about love that promise extraordinary things.
Notably, many early church fathers began to place love and specifically divine love, as the thing that grants humanity its dignity and meaning.
Simon May explores this point in fantastic detail in his history of love.
For these early Christian thinkers, love eventually rose to become the supreme virtue that we humans should strive for.
We see St Paul write that if we do not have nothing.
We could do whatever great deeds we wished,
have faith beyond imagining an evenly divine gift of prophecy, but if we don't have love, then we gain nothing.
In other words, love is painted as a missing ingredient and an essential component of a fulfilled and meaningful life.
To a certain extent,
religious thinkers have a lot more leeway here, because when they say love, they are often talking partly about the divine love of God.
Since God is omnipotent and all loving, there are all sorts of things His love might be able to do.
Save us from hell, for instance, or give His only son to redeem humanity.
The trouble is,
many of us are replying this framework not to God,
but to huge number of romantic narratives present love as having an almost godlike power, even when it is felt by us mere mortals.
Some have argued that this is a peculiarity of the romantic age that emerged in the 18th and early 19th centuries,
but I think we can see examples before them.
For instance, in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, we often focus on the tragedy of the protagonist.
And forget that it is their love, and the consequences of preventing it, that cause the two Veronese families to put aside their deadly feud.
It is because of the misadventured piteous overthrows of the two star-crossed lovers that their death buries their parents.
strength.
As a side note, a lot of people really rag on Romeo and Juliet these days, but there's a reason it's a classic.
It's not just two teenagers did stupid things, even if it is definitely sometimes that.
This idea that love is the panacea, the cure for all your psychological and philosophical ills, has only increased in recent years.
I cannot count the number of rom-coms whose plot is specifically about a protagonist's personal problems being plugged.
Romantic love is pitched as the solution to everything from financial stresses to existential crises.
Beyond this,
we've inherited historical ideas from the 12th and 13th centuries about the ennobling power of love,
which filtered from the Muslim world into Europe in the wake of the Crusades.
Under this conception,
it is not just that love can be a motivator to make you better,
but that love in and of itself had a noble ethical quality to it.
This was famously dubbed The Religion of Love by C.S.
Lewis in his book The Allegry of Love.
And it is true that romanticism has only intensified this idea.
In everything from Jane Austen to D.H.
Lawrence, you see love as the answer to general problems of life.
which, at least in theory, seem to have very little to do with romance.
In Lady Chatterley's Lover, the is stuck in a loveless marriage, and her affair certainly helps with that.
But it also manages to fix her general on we about life itself.
This is actually a really interesting staple of infidelity plots more generally.
The affair not only rekindles the protagonist to views on love, it reinvigorates their entire conception of life.
As I said,
I think this is partly because falling in love does kind of feel like all your problems are being solved,
provided that that love is reciprocated.
We are filled with such rushes of excitement that the very notion of an issue almost seems a bit absurd.
How could we be unhappy when they are there?
With millennia of cultural artifacts supporting this idea, it is easy to wholeheartedly believe it.
But, there is a small problem.
Because love is wonderful, it is not the cure to every problem we have.
And down, we know this.
Love did not save Tolstoy from his depression and it will not help us pay the bills.
The ideal conception of love rubs up against the non-ideal world and does not quite fit.
This might not be so bad if we became comfortable with this idea,
that love is great in a whole host of ways but it is not omnipotent.
However, we often draw the exact opposite conclusion.
We say that since this love did not solve all our issues, it must not be real love.
We might not even consciously think this in explicit terms,
but we begin to blame our lover for the things that go wrong in our own lives.
Or, as Debotton wonderfully put it, we confuse being unhappy around someone with being unhappy because of them.
In Voltaire's Candide,
he makes an incisive critique of the idea that we live in the best He shows how an overly optimistic outlook could not only cloud our view of reality,
but also prevent us from actually bothering to improve our situation.
He leans towards a sort of moderate pessimism,
where we approach life safe in the knowledge that things will definitely go wrong and that there is no total solution to the issues
of existence.
think this attitude may help us in the way that we approach love.
It may be very comforting to believe that once you are in love,
the trials and tribulations of life will gently fade into the background, and we are constantly bombarded with the idea that this is the case.
But I don't think it's a concept that will serve us very well in the long run.
It expects our beloved to have the power of a God, and that is far too much pressure to place on a single mortal person.
Of course, unlearning such a deeply rooted cultural belief is far easier said than done.
But this exaggeration of love's power can quickly become a destructive cycle, because it has the further, rather unfortunate, effect.
3.
The Cult of Eros As is mentioned in probably every article,
YouTube video and think piece on romance, the Ancient Greeks had a number of different conceptions of love.
Among others, there is Eros, Erotic Love, Philia, Friendly Love, and or Universal Spiritual Love.
that every single type of love had its place,
because all of it set us on the road to what he saw as the ultimate goal of love,
contemplating the forms of the good and the beautiful.
Today, we tend not to agree with Plato about the end goal of love, but these distinctions still remain supremely helpful.
Because the pricing of romantic love has also led to the prioritization of love.
of Eros above all else, and this adds potentially quite unfortunate consequences.
Let's start by considering the romantic concept of the one.
In its classic form, the one is something like a soulmate.
They waltz into your lives pre-made and perfect, metaphysically destined to be with you.
Perhaps this idea is best expressed by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium,
where he theorises that each of us is one half of a single multi-limbed organism that has been separated by the gods.
We must then spend our lives searching for our missing half so that we may then be complete.
This idea has the component of the one that has received the most criticism in modern years.
The metaphysical,
unique, This concept that there is one specific person we are destined to be with is falling out of fashion and probably for good reason.
A teleological conception of the universe doesn't mesh that well with dating apps.
However, predestination and metaphysical specialness are not the only properties of the one that exist in our cultural consciousness.
other set of qualities that we often skim over, but are equally open to philosophical critique.
To name just a few, there's the idea that the one is someone with whom you are effortlessly compatible.
That's the trigger and instinctive erotic response that has a unique phenomenological character,
that's all important special feeling,
that they fulfill all of your emotional needs just by themselves,
that you do not argue or dispute or disagree,
and if you do then it's a sign of deep narrative trouble,
and that they know you intuitively, almost to the point of mind-reading or clairvoyance.
You can see so many of these in our classic romantic narratives.
When Romeo has one conversation with Juliet, he is instantly smitten, as she is with him.
Verta describes in detail the special feeling that Charlotte arouses in him, believing that they would be the perfect pair.
In a Notting Hill, Hugh Grant is pitched as being just what Julia Roberts needs.
And while in all of these stories there is dispute or conflict between the lovers, and they may not even end up together.
This is pitched as a great tragedy because of the idea in the audience's mind that they are meant to be together,
that they display all the characteristics of being each other's ones.
Now, some components of the one might be very helpful for some people.
There are very few things worse than ending up with a lover who makes you miserable,
so it is useful I have some idea of what you want out of romance.
For some people, the cultural myth of the one may do just that and nothing more.
However, I want to hone in on this idea that a partner is meant to fulfill all your emotional needs, because this is quite an idiosyncratic concept, and I think
it risks idealizing love to the point of unattainability.
It are- asks an awful lot of just one person.
For Aristotle, it was not just romance, but friendship that was needed for a satisfying life.
He wrote more on simple filia than he did on the passions,
and he specifically praised having a small group of close friends with whom you would all strive to be virtuous.
The Buddha used to say that being surrounded loving,
caring community was a good step towards enlightenment,
while Michel de Montagne thought that friendship was how we became known by other people without fear,
where we can reveal our secret thoughts and be assured that we are not being used but appreciated.
In some ways I think we've taken these insights on boards in our modern conception of love.
People are much more likely to describe their partner as their best friend than they were in the previous century.
Nonetheless, if we look at the emphasis we currently place on erotic love and compare
it to the meager attention we give to friendship, culturally speaking, there is no contest.
Besides a few staples like the Buddy Cop movie and the heist film, each of which also tends to involve a romantic subplot.
give Eros far more attention than its humbler cousin.
And we don't just see this reflected in art,
friendship is on the decline,
with the number of US adults reporting having 10 close friends dropping from 33% in 1990 to 13% in 2021.
Though of course the causes for this are multifaceted.
I don't want to denigrate romantic love here.
it is a phenomenal part of life and something well worth pursuing.
But at the same time, are we not perhaps putting more of our eggs in one basket than is wise?
By valuing Eros so much more than Filia,
we may be simultaneously putting too much pressure on our romantic pairings and failing to appreciate the finer sides of a good, strong friendship.
Emotionally, friendship has a lot to recommend it.
We tend to feel a lot less possessive over our friends.
We are less interested in impressing them.
We do not care if they're attracted to us.
We are not so close that we drive one another insane.
At the same time, they tend to have lower expectations of us.
They don't expect us to sweep them off their feet or thrill them or show them special devotion.
While your average friendship does not tend to be as close as your average romantic partnership,
it still has great potential to grant comfort, love, understanding and companionship.
And these are many of the things that people look for in romance anyway.
Even as an atheist,
one of my favourite parts of the Bible is the intense friendship displayed between Jonathan and King David,
where the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David and Jonathan loved him as himself.
Friendship is not inherently less valuable than romance, but we treat it as if it is.
I have mentioned this before,
but one of the most poignant parts of the Sorrows of Young Verter is right at the end,
where a series of characters that we have heard very little about start to weep over Verter's death.
These are people who cared about him deeply,
loved him and treasured him, but he was too blinded by his obsession with Charlotte to see it.
He had become so consumed with eros that he had forgotten Philia entirely.
And I think it may be worth learning from his mistakes, so we don't fall into it.
This also links very closely with our previous point.
Because friends help fulfill so many of our desires for emotional connection,
understanding and more,
if we begin to let them go or devalue them,
then the expectations and pressures on our romantic relationships grow ever higher because they have to fill an ever deeper hole.
I can't see a reason why love and platonic friendship need to be opposed in this way.
Ideally, they are the perfect compliments in a balanced life, and yet we have tried
to make one the denigrated younger brother of the other, with disastrous results.
But next, I want to return to this idea of compatibility, in order to display an unfortunate but liberating truth.
about both ourselves and our lovers.
For the mysteries of compatibility.
There are few buzzwords that are thrown around more in dating than compatible.
One of the most common complaints I have heard from various people,
both in person and online, is, I cannot find anyone who is compatible with me.
And this is a totally understandable concern,
because you want to be with someone who you mesh with, someone who slots into you and you slot into them.
You know what I mean?
This wish is only intensified by the first component of the one that we just looked at, effortless compatibility.
We are constantly shown narratives not just compatible but are so without the slightest hint of struggle or strain.
Oftentimes the reason that lovers are kept apart in these stories is not to do with them, they would be perfect.
It is just some pesky external circumstance or misunderstanding.
In Disney's Aladdin,
Jasmine and Aladdin are already compatible at the beginning of the film and it is
the overcoming of social obstacles to their love that occupies the bulk of the runtime.
The overall message is that the old, original Aladdin was right all along and he did not need to change.
In Rossini's The Barber of Seville,
the Count and Rosina are already smitten with one another from the start and the entire plot works around how they rescue our ingenue from the
clutches of her guardian.
In the prince and our eponymous heroine face no issues of compatibility regarding their personality,
it is just the pesky matter of Cinderella's poverty and shame that keeps them apart.
All of this reinforces the message that total compatibility comes naturally,
and to return to a general theme so far in the video, at the start it often seems to.
When you first meet someone, you just don't know very much about them and they don't know very much about you.
Additionally, you are both trying your hardest to put your best foot forward, displaying all of your charming characteristics and hiding all of
the ones they might not like.
You are unlikely to reveal your unhealthy obsession with legos or your fear of spiders or the fact that you haven't changed your bed sheets in an embarrassingly
long time.
And the beautiful person sat across from you will also be concealing the way that their last relationship damaged their sense of trust,
or how they really hate that tweejacket you have inexplicably decided to wear.
The trouble is that eventually our lovers will do something that deeply irritates us, or even huts us.
We will discover that at some level are personalities or characters conflict.
Today this is often called by the monosyllabic moniker Ick.
That feeling we get when our beloved does something that turns us off and puts a dent in our idealized view of them.
The thing that strikes me and many other people about the modern Ick's in dating is just how small and seemingly arbitrary they can be.
They range from wearing a coat when it's cold to dancing with a friend in a lighthearted and silly fashion.
I think the reason that the ick hits the person feeling it so hard is because when we meet
someone new and we find them attractive, we do an incredible gap-filling exercise about every part of them we don't already know.
know about.
image of a sort of super romantic, whose every undiscovered attribute will be somehow irresistible to us.
As François de la Roche Foucault put it, sometimes it is ignorance, just as much as knowledge that keeps love alive.
This issue also goes both ways.
If relationships are meant to be totally or mostly compatible right from the get-go, then And was only one thing.
one thing to conclude if our partner criticises us or mentions that they are upset about something.
They are about to leave.
Despite all your love and devotion, they are going to abandon you because of your fundamental incompatibility.
It means every problem can potentially trigger an intense fear response because each minor issue is not just something to deal with as a person.
pair, but instead a symbol of your ultimate failure to live up to the romantic ideal.
The issue here is not so much the problems themselves, but again are strange expectations.
Our habit of imaginatively idealising our romantic partners in the early stages does have certain strengths.
It's can encourage us to take a leap of faith and commit to someone,
make them seem uniquely endearing and reinvigorate our hope if we have been burned one too many times.
But, by the same token, it sets us up for failure in the long term.
Because we all have incompatibilities with one another,
idiosyncrasies that will get on our lovers' nerves and neuroses that make us temporarily incomprehensible to the people around us.
This is not a sign that we are broken or unlovable, it is part of being human.
The trouble with the idea of easy compatibility is that our immediate conclusion upon encountering
a problem is to suspect that the whole relationship is doomed and that one or both parties must be deficient in some way.
They must not have been the one for us after all.
We leave.
the other, from they are perfect to we are done for.
Put a pin in this idea as it's going to come up later in the video.
This idealization, disillusionment, and abandonment, seems to be the cause of a lot of the dissatisfaction with the current dating market.
People understandably tire of living the same ciciphean cycle of rolling their boulder to the a first date,
only to have it come crashing back down the hill just a few months later.
The truth is, the moment we threw ourselves wholeheartedly into idealization, we also unwittingly signed ourselves up for the latter two stages.
The game was rigged from the start.
But there is another side to this that I want to explore,
and to do so I'll be drawing from the work of an old man.
favorite of the channel, the Danish heartthrob himself, Soren Kierkegaard.
5.
The stage of love One of the most common issues people seem to be facing in modern love is a general lack of commitment.
I've heard people refer to our age as the Situationship Era,
and while the majority of both men and women seem to want roughly the same thing,
a life partner to settle down with, this seems to paradoxically be eluding both parties.
Normally, when two people want the same thing, achieving that thing becomes a of a lot easier.
So, a mystery emerges.
What is happening here to prevent this?
Well, I would argue problem is that we are experiencing a despair of possibility.
This is a concept I talk about all the time, and it comes from Kierkegaard's book, The Sickness Under Death.
It essentially describes a situation where there are too many possibilities and paths to take,
and as a result,
commitment to a single path becomes more and more difficult to do,
until you find that you have wasted all that precious time and now have nothing to show for it.
At first, it feels very strange to think about having too many choices as a bad thing.
We come from a very freedom-loving culture,
and if theorists like John Stuart Miller to be believed, more freedom and a greater number of options tends to breed more happiness.
So surely the technologies which increase the number of romantic options someone has access to will make them happier in love.
But if Kierkegaard is to be believed, this is unlikely to be the case.
For him,
an essential component of fulfilment in any endeavour is commitment,
and commitment is much easier if our options are any golden mean between too many and too few.
Much of Kierkegaard's work is runs through with his three stages of human life, the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious.
More generally, the aesthetic is characterised by hedonism, a general lack of commitment and an unattached exploration of one's options.
So an aesthetic approach to ideas would be to read widely, but to remain uncommitted to any idea in particular.
Taking pleasure in He process of simply learning.
The ethical approach broadens our moral universe to include duties and responsibilities.
It enmeshes us in communities and asks what others require of us.
Then, the final religious stage of life involves an unconditional commitment to a higher power, which the Kierkegaard is God.
Obviously, his full views are much more complicated.
than this and I cannot go into detail on them now.
But I want to focus on the commitment portion of the stages.
The aesthetic has little to no commitment,
the ethicist has some commitment,
they take responsibility for other people, and the religious person is incredibly and almost unconditionally committed to something that they wholeheartedly believe in.
In other works like...
the present age, Kierkegaard bemoans how excessive options can leave us in the aesthetic stage of life in a given pursuit.
There, he talks about how too much information and too many ideas can dull our passion for
anyone in particular, and we will cease to care about the quality of ideas at all.
There is a definite link between his despair of possibility and the lack of commitment found in an aesthetic life.
And in today's romantic context, we have at least the illusion of lots of choice.
Dating apps will promise us that there are hundreds of people just waiting for us at the other end of the line.
Our cultural legends of love are filled with handsome strangers, chance encounters, romance around every corner, even when someone is in a committed relationship.
The image of interrupting the wedding ceremony and asking them to be with you instead has become so cliche it is now just a joke.
All around us we get the message that if someone is not perfect we can safely drop them.
Or to quote a popular online piece of advice, if they won't then find someone who There is not nothing in this idea.
Total to another person comes with numerous dangers and very few people would want to encourage others to stay in situations that are making them profoundly unhappy.
It is just that this general attitude has a philosophical trade-off.
It encourages us to see love through the lens of the aesthetic.
strong commitment is always a little bit irrational.
And a certain extent, I think that's true.
Faith a huge role in his philosophy
because he thinks it is a vital component in getting us to do something that seems irrational in the short term,
but is incredibly helpful in the long run.
It's a bit like how believing you will make a jump across a gap will increase your chances of doing so.
At any given moment,
committing to a particular thing can seem sort of insane because of the opportunity cost of missing out on all of the other possibilities.
But if we never commit,
then we will end up missing out on all of the deeper joys that lie on the other side of this commitment,
not least of which is being freed from the question of where the two commit.
I think this idea of despair
at possibility was best expressed by Sylvia Plath when she said her existence felt like sitting under a fig tree.
Each of the figs hanging from the branches represented a possible life she could live, a direction she could take.
She felt she was unable to choose any particular one, and watched as they eventually fell down to the ground, dead and rotten.
If there were only a few options, her decision would have felt that much easier, and she probably would have chosen a fig.
This is a bit like how Kierkegaard would describe living your entire life in the aesthetic stage.
And when it comes to love,
that is a disaster, because it bars us off from the treasures that lie on the other side of commitment.
In our constant worrying about wealth.
Whether we have chosen the ripest, best fig, we eventually starve to death, surrounded by the corpses of what might have been.
But of course, this is only one side of the equation.
The problems of excess are balanced by the problems of deprivation.
And there are a great many who feel like they are deeply underappreciated in modern love, principally because of their appearance.
So let's turn to hear this perspective.
6.
The Terror of Beauty.
There is a sort of elephant in the room when it comes to romance,
especially in the modern day, and that is that looks are, unfortunately, supremely important.
Trust me,
I was an incredibly weird-looking teenager and I am a slightly less weird-looking adult and it is a night and day experience.
I have many friends, both male and female, who say exactly the same thing.
I imagine it has always been harder to date if you are not blessed in the Department of Looks,
but as the way people meet one another becomes increasingly image-based turning to dating apps and social media.
There the general perception that things have got much more difficult.
Philosophically, this makes a certain degree of sense.
Even as far back as Plato, philosophers recognise that love often began with the admiration of someone's physical beauty.
These characteristics have always been acknowledged as the starting point of a lot of people's affections, though obviously not all.
However, while very few people historically argued that looks do not rich philosophical history of pointing out how an overthesis on beauty can lead to a mountain
of suffering when it comes to love.
In that very same book where Plato talks about the origins of love in beauty,
he also mentions that the higher stages of love should aim to outgrow this physical infatuation.
While he thinks we begin by appreciating physical beauty, we should aim to develop into treasuring the beauty of ideas.
Again, Plato's particular reasoning for this is idiosyncratic, but the general thrust of this concept has definitely persisted beyond it.
Cognitively, we tend to know that, as long as some attraction exists,
looks are not highly correlative with whether someone will be a fulfilling partner for us in
the have endless cautionary tales about the seductive yet dangerous allure of sensual beauty.
From Trojan War to the sirens to Tue Grant's character in Bridget Jones' diary, the message is screamed from all corners.
If you are led on by physical aesthetics alone, disaster awaits.
The trouble is that people like beautiful things and it's far as I can tell, this isn't going away.
If it were that easy to overcome,
we wouldn't have been telling ourselves the same warning for over 2,000 years and yet still be deceived by a winning smile.
However, you already know all of that, so I'm not going to dwell on it here.
I instead want to point out that there is a tension between how beauty functions in society and how we
treat the desire to be beautiful or the complaint that one is not sufficiently so.
On the one hand,
the evidence that aesthetics are important is all around us,
but on the other, we judge the wish to become beautiful as in some way shallow.
From mocking people who work out for aesthetic reasons to decrying makeup as the domain of the insecure,
there is this underlying online contempt often shown for people attempting to improve their looks or placing any importance on them at all.
It is often seen as vapid or indicative of some personal defect.
If they were truly a great mind or a substantial personality then surely they would not concern themselves with such things.
I think this is an incredibly cruel societal message to put out,
while beauty still clearly matters immensely for people achieving what they would like, both out of life and out of love.
This is the first example of a theme that will become more and more important later in the video.
The way that we approach love is mired in contradictions and internal tensions.
For better or worse, it seems that physical large component of romantic success, but we don't like to acknowledge that.
It forces us to confront quite an uncomfortable part of ourselves,
that we are all failing to live up to the ethical standards set by our culture.
We are all taught not just that looks do not matter, but that they should not matter.
From there, it is a short step to if you care about looks, your own order.
those of others, then you are ethically deficient in some way.
This then creates a significant philosophical incentive to engage in a sort of double-think.
On the surface we say that beauty does not matter, while secretly acknowledging that it absolutely does.
But if we tell people that looks do not matter, then there is only one thing to conclude from romantic troubles.
It is something to do with our character.
Again, it's not that this is never true.
I'm a massive fan of Aristotle, so you'll very rarely catch me saying we shouldn't work on our characters.
But it is a bit like telling someone struggling with poverty that they are just not working hard enough.
As an explanatory hypothesis, it seems to miss a huge component of the causal variables at play.
It also takes something multifaceted and complex and tell someone that it can all be boiled down to one fundamental fact,
you are not good at it.
enough.
Not just descriptively, but ethically as well.
Again, I think this is a problem of idealization.
We want to believe that love is selfless and kind, and caring about looks is sort of selfish and sort of not that kind.
So we reconcile the contradiction by saying that love must not care about looks.
But rather than this being a soothing balm to someone's romantic issues, it is instead a cruel kind of optimism.
Rather than recognizing that we are all partly at the mercy of causal chains that existed long before us, and that we will not.
over any aspect of our lives, including our love lives, we reserve every inch of fault for the person's suffering.
Essentially, we transform romantic failures from unfortunate circumstances to moral deficiencies.
With this comes a whole host of additional baggage, like guilt, shame, and a feeling of personal inadequacy.
But none One this needs to be there, it is an artefact of our idealised picture of love.
It comes from the same simplistic philosophy that brought you everything that happens in your life is your fault,
and you can do anything you set your mind to.
To borrow a thought from Byeongchul Khan, if we can do anything, then the only reason we haven't is because we are not good enough.
Far from being a compassionate person.
at message to send to someone struggling with loneliness, this strikes me as almost painfully unkind.
This is the sort of thought that sounds friendly on the surface but conceals a whole host of philosophical sins.
That, knowingly or not, only increases the sufferers hardship.
To continue this point further,
I want to explain explore the relationship between the love of others and self-love,
and how we may have introduced quite a destructive and deceptive principle into our received philosophy of romance.
7.
The of Self-Love As I was doing research for this video, there was one phrase I came across over and over again regarding dating.
If you can't love yourself, how can you expect others to love you?
This was often said as if it was ending the discussion.
A sort of mic drop moment before the enlightened purveyor of this aphoristic amorous advice strolled into the sunset.
And I don't want to be unfair here because as we shall see, there is not nothing in this.
But at the same time,
phrase is a picture of love that I think both demands far too much of us, and obscures its genuinely helpful aspects.
My primary issue with this piece of advice is that it treats our self-esteem and our identity formation as something that happens in isolation.
It paints a picture where we retreat to our cave for a little while,
learn to love ourselves, and then emerge back the public sphere with ironclad self-confidence ready to take tinder by storm.
But I don't think this is a realistic expectation to have of people.
Over the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries,
more and more thinkers came to believe that identity formation is only partly something we do individually,
and is ultimately inseparable from how we are perceived received by others.
Jacques and Jean-Paul Sartre both talked about how we form our self-conceptions by seeing how others react to us and adjusting accordingly.
I can say,
I'm a fantastic football player, but I can't fully believe it until there is solid evidence and other people to confirm this position.
When I stroll onto a field and immediately slip over trying to- kick the ball.
Not only will other people be unable to believe that I am good at football, but I will also struggle to believe it myself.
up.
This is part of why a lot of child psychologists place such an emphasis on the messages parents send to children through their behaviour.
It forms part of the child's later self-concept,
whether they see themselves as worthy, lovable and safe, partly depends on how they are treated by their parents.
But then this raises a question.
How on earth are we meant to fully love ourselves and be confident in ourselves before other people do?
I'm not suggesting that it's impossible, but I do think it is a lot more difficult than it's given credit for.
This view of love also stands in stark contrast to earlier conceptions, such as that given by Dante Algieri.
In the Divine Comedy,
his love, Beatrice, ascends through paradise with Dante, and eventually Dante even sees the glory of God reflected in the eyes of his beloved.
This picture implies that love is not simply a matter of two people coming together,
already complete and self-sufficient,
but rather a This is echoed in the works of someone like St Thomas Aquinas,
who described loving yourself, loving others, and loving God as all part of one shared project.
This is a far less individualistic picture of both love and self-esteem.
Instead self-love being something that you learn by yourself and then bring into the world,
it is something that you have to your beloved support one another in doing.
By willing the good of the other for the sake of the other,
we learn both that we are lovable and how to love others, thereby creating the conditions for self-love to emerge.
Or at least this is how I interpret this idea.
For Dostoevsky, it is often the love and care of another person that can spur someone onto them.
own sort of self-love.
When Alyosha displays his spiritual love to Grushenko, this is the first step towards her learning to find her personal dignity.
And when Sonia loves Raskolnikov,
it is the very thing he needs to embark on the long road to abandoning his self-hatred and making amends for his deeds.
In these works,
love is presented as much more of a communal effort,
and there is no pretense that anyone can wake up one morning and decide to love themselves.
It is rather that we, and by we I mean all of us, must help one another to see our lovable aspects.
Or to again draw from Christian theology, to see someone through the eyes of an all-loving God.
You don't need to be religious to appreciate that there might be some value in this message.
It's also worth noting that the love in question need not be romantic in nature.
And this communal task is pretty vital,
because the valuable part of the idea that self-love is a prerequisite for the love of another is that a poor self
-image can lead to all sorts of self-destructive behaviours that make perfect sense to the self-hating lover.
But baffle everyone around them, including their beloved.
This is explored in great detail by Diboton, in various talks, books, and lectures.
He concurs with other thinkers like Jijek and Lacan that they need to be loved often, but not always, begins from some feeling of inadequacy.
We see in someone else, both the qualities we wish.
we have ourselves and someone whose admiration would help complete our self-image as a lovable person.
It is a bit like how a chef might desire a good review from a particularly harsh critic to serve as the ultimate test of their skill.
However, Dibotan says that this is often a catch-22 because when our self-concept is truly in the gutter, someone liking us
does not become evidence that we were not that bad after all, but rather one of two unfortunate things happen.
We either start to like that person less on the basis that we do not want to be a part of any club which would have us as a member,
or we begin to feel incredibly dishonest.
We suspect that the only reason that they have not abandoned us is because they are yet to discover our fatal flaw.
We conceive of ourselves as in some way metaphysically tainted.
They only like me, we say to ourselves, because they haven't discovered that I am secretly an ugly, repulsive goblin.
This can turn the experience of being loved into a source of guilt.
We feel like we are conning our beloved, because if they still love us, then we must be playing some sort of trick on them.
We exist with the permanent anxiety of being discovered.
Either way, we are apt to run from the very person we most desire.
But therein lies the fatal tension.
It is hard to convince yourself you are lovable without love,
but at the same time, it is hard to believe that you are loved if you hold the deep-seated belief that you are unlovable.
I certainly don't have a complete solution here,
but I will refer you back to the previous section of the video where I talked about the importance of friendship.
Friends can help us see our loveability at a much lower stakes level,
and as a result can be vital pillars in building our self-esteem, yet another reason to reinstate the value of friendship in our society.
But now, I want to move on to what I think is the root philosophical cause of a great many troubles about love.
And it's going to be a tricky one to untangle,
because I think that fundamentally,
the way we conceive of love suffers from truly deep-rooted internal tensions,
that make finding and maintaining love less like discovering a treasure and more like keeping 18 plates spinning at once,
and that our failure to acknowledge this sets us up for future cynicism.
Eight, dissonance and harmony.
A brilliant song about love is Bo Burnham's Lower Your Expectations.
I will spare you my rendition of it,
but essentially it goes through a series of qualities people desire any partner and suggest that they are unlikely to find them all at once.
My favourite line, however, is, you want a good boy, a bad boy, a good bad boy, a half good, half bad, half boy.
I love this, because I think Burnham here gets to the crux of the issue.
In love, we don't just want something special, we often want a connection with properties are kept in perfect tension.
A great psychoanalyst who touches upon this point is Esther Perel.
She has written extensively on how to keep romance alive within long-term relationships,
and she talks constantly about the two properties of closeness and distance.
According to her, too much closeness has a tendency to kill desire.
We forget that our partner is another person, that they are independent and that they are not simply an extension of ourselves.
It is hard to feel intense attraction for someone who you view as an allergist to your arm.
But, on the other hand, too much distance and this can create distress, anxiety and damage the very foundations of the relationship.
In her therapeutic experience,
it is only when we simultaneously feel safe and secure with someone,
but also recognise that they are separate from us, that attraction blossoms and blooms over the years.
This meshes quite well with what a lot of different philosophers and thinkers have said about love.
In the Bible,
the togetherness aspect is represented by the two lovers becoming one flesh,
and the separateness aspect is found in the analogy of the married couple being like Christ and his church, two separate entities.
For Arasophanes, it the existence of a destined other half versus the fact that they have been cleaved in twain.
For Tolstoy, it was the illicit availability of Count Franzke and the tragedy of Anna's pre-existing marriage.
For D.H.
Lawrence, it is the intense passion that exists between Lady Chatterley and her lover, coupled with her unhappy marriage and their class divide.
But from, it is the wish to meld with another person, coupled with the recognition that they are not you.
This tension between self and other, togetherness and distance, makes love inherently unstable.
By this, I don't mean that it is always chaotic, but rather that it does not rest in a single state.
It a bit like shop and house will, endlessly raging onward, never stopping, never waiting, requiring endless work and struggle.
Luckily, there is little that is more meaningful to struggle over.
And this is only the start of the inner tensions in our concept of love.
On the one hand, we are taught that love is in some way frivolous, a thing for children.
We proclaim the virtues of total self-sufficiency.
That is what is required to succeed in this world, a hard exterior and the unwillingness to rely on anyone else.
From the men going their own way to the boss babes, the cult of individualism buries its claws deep.
But on the other hand,
we tell people that love is a supreme virtue that it is ennobling,
kind, generous, patient, that all you need is love and that a life without love is simply meaningless.
We tell people that love is one of the most important human pursuits and then denigrate them for wanting it.
Is it any wonder we end up miserable and confused?
To take another example,
we are often told that love is selfless,
but on the other hand, we are often attracted to someone who wants us in a slightly selfish fashion.
We are presented with a sanitized idea of love that is purely good, incredibly chaste and stable.
And then we reach adulthood, and a whole chunk of us find that this is not all we want.
We also want excitement, and for our lover to sign Sometimes desire us as an object.
At the same time, we want to be respected and cherished, yet also be on the receiving end of someone's occasional selfishness.
We want them to want the best for us, but avariciously.
We want excitement and comfort, risk and security, stability and a rocking boat.
We want sweetness, vitality, joy.
gentleness, ferocity, tenderness, instinct, independence and possession.
We our lover to be both our best friend and a beautiful stranger,
to know them better than we know ourselves and yet for them to remain full of mystery.
The contradictions abound, the tensions are endless, and even if not everyone is instantiated in every individual person, some of them.
normally are.
Love, as experienced by real, existent people, is the desire for a harmony of a whole series of qualities that are at war with one another.
And when we are at our most unguarded, say when writing or reading romantic fiction, we often admit this.
I say all of this to bring one idea to the forefront on almost any plausible philosophical analysis,
love is difficult and only gets more difficult over time.
There is something in the image of being hit by an arrow.
Or of Romeo's sweet sorrow at parting from Juliet.
Or of Haddaway following the phrase what is love with baby don't hurt me.
Perhaps this is the biggest myth we tell about love.
of all, that it is meant to be easy, straightforward, instinctive and low effort.
This perhaps sets us up for failure more than anything else, and it is an insidious thing to tell people struggling with love.
Surely it is more realistic to see love as the well-won reward of years of toil,
growth and development as we learn to integrate our whole another person into our lives and us into theirs.
As we slowly develop the skill of loving someone how they wish to be loved and teaching them to do the same for us,
Aristotle used to say that for many skills and virtues there was no other way to learn them, but by personal practice, contemplation and habituation.
He recognised that almost any personal quality worth having was not going to be a simple matter of knowledge that we
can reason out in an academy.
Rather, we will have to investigate the world for ourselves with the approach that we are learning a skill, developing practical wisdom and improving little
by little at our chosen pursuit.
I would gently suggest that we start to think of love more like this.
It has numerous strengths.
Whether alone or with our lovers,
we can start to look at our romantic failings,
hiccups or difficulties not as evidence of our fundamental unloveability, but of our status as students at Cupid's feet.
We can follow in the experimental attitude of John Dewey and see this aspect of our lives as not simply a goal to be achieved,
but rather a series of trials to be slowly refined over time.
When we inevitably mess up in love, we can view it like we've just knocked over our paintbrushes or written a cliche in our notebook.
It no longer supports the hypothesis that we are broken, but rather that we are learning a lifeline.
and one we won't be finished with when we close our eyes for the final time, hopefully with a heart bursting with love.
I can hear people already saying that this idea of love requiring constant effort and learning and skill and development has robbed it of much of its luster.
So allow me to say why I don't think that is true.
And in any case, that it is far better.
9.
Romantic In all my research for this video,
I still did not come across a singular term to describe the general malaise that many people feel
about the concept of love at the moment.
And I would like to propose one.
Romantic In favourite analysis of philosophical nihilism, John Stewart identifies that nihilism begins as a reaction to broken promises.
For hundreds of years we were told that there was a God and afterlife,
and our lives had inherent meaning, and gradually people started to view these as false.
And more than that, as lie.
Nothing to fill the void, they became cynical and pessimistic.
In moment of empathy,
Nietzsche describes how these nihilists had put their entire trust and faith into a set of ideas,
only to discover that they were wrong all along.
Now they feel foolish for ever believing them.
They display the same sort of general, undifferentiated skepticism towards them.
the world that many who leave a cult describe.
In effect, they leap from one extreme to the other, from optimists and idealists to pessimists and cynics.
And think Nietzsche is really onto something here about the dangers of idealization in any sphere.
We like to think that if we present a rosy and optimistic view of the world or of key concepts,
then that will protect us, and if they turn out to be false, well then we'll just adjust our views accordingly.
But this is not necessarily the case.
If Nietzsche is right, then once the ideal falls away, we just as often collapse into total despair.
We reject wholeheartedly the thing that we're used to desire, recognizing that it is unachievable in the way we want to.
we fall into resentment and scorn.
We view the object of our wishes as childish and we declare that it is dead.
This analysis fits almost uncannily well with how many of our attitudes to romance have shifted.
Strangely, it is easier to go from love is everything to love doesn't exist without our philosophy.
ever resting in the middle ground.
The of love we were fed as children are being broken,
and we are reacting in a classically 19th century fashion, straight from the frying pan of the ideal to the fire of the cynic.
If love is not to be effortless, endlessly glorious, and solve everyone of our existential problems, then we don't want it to happen.
anymore and I think this is a real shame because at heart I am a total romantic.
I firmly believe in the powerful things love can do, be romantic, platonic or familial.
I think that it can stand alone free from its mythical adornments.
It can bring us someone to commit to, someone to know us and for us to know them.
It does have the potential.
to make us kinder and more caring.
It is a natural way to infuse life with felt value.
It bring out our selfless and generous natures.
It can truly be patient, kind, non-judgmental and non-transactional.
We can learn to love someone in a way that makes them feel truly fulfilled and teach them how to do that to us.
It is not that love will be de-cure to every one of our ills,
but we have every reason to think that it can be a real pillar of our meaning,
but we also have to recognize that it will come with struggle and strife, endless effort, tension and contradiction.
However, if we continue to think that love must be easy, that it is endlessly pleasant
conflict, that our partners must be gods rather than men, and that the ability to love is
innate rather than taught, then I fear the greater sides of love may be forever out of our reach.
So if there is one idea you consider from this video, I hope it is this.
Much like a lover, love itself is neither angel nor demon.
It starts out...
seeming faultless, then shows its flaws, and then finally we learn to love those flaws too.
But this is not our God-given gift, but rather the end result of long protracted efforts to learn how to love.
To see our lovers as humans, damaged and battered by the world, fractured and faulty in ways that will drive us inside.
But, when all is said and done, we see them as they are, and we care for them all the same.
Safe in the knowledge that they are looking at are broken, bruised, and slightly mad psyches, and thinking the exact same thing.
game.
The more false promises we sell people now,
the more future nihilists we will create, when the scales finally fall from their eyes, and they wonder what else we have lied about.
But as always, I encourage you to think about each one of these ideas critically.
There was a lot in this video to take in, and every single part is open to further discussion, criticism and development.
I hope this happens.
for your own ideas than as a lecture.
And if you want a totally different perspective on love,
then click here to watch my take on Dostoevsky's radical and revolutionary philosophy about love and care in all its forms.
Thank you for watching and have a wonderful day.
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