Live Well Be Well with Sarah Ann Macklin · Transcript · · Updated
Why Compatibility is Overrated: Alain de Botton’s Guide to Relationships That Last | Alain De Botton – Transcript
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- Alain de Botton explains that a good functioning relationship is very difficult to achieve and that most people spend insufficient time working on it.
- Alain de Botton notes that heartbreak can feel like a major life event and an annihilation of oneself in another person's life.
- Alain de Botton states that compatibility is an achievement of love rather than a precondition for it.
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people that I've connected to the most are the ones that have been the most vulnerable with me. >> Connection is about taking a risk with someone that if you want to break through loneliness, you have to take a risk. And it's a risk around potentially being humiliated. I've got a trick for you. If you want to get over humiliation, rather than going, I won't be humiliated, humiliate yourself. Tell yourself every morning, I'm a bit of an idiot. Throw dignity out the window and start to live.
>> Today on the show, >> best-selling author Alander Bon. >> Alander Bon. >> Alando Bon. Everybody's got a fantastic advertisement for themselves going and we believe the advertisement and we forget it's just a billboard. People are always blocking each other from revealing their true self.
>> One of the biggest videos of all time on YouTube that I found is am I going to marry the wrong person? >> The bad news is you'll marry the wrong person. The good news is there's no right person. We live in a culture that is obsessed by the idea of a soulmate. This is a one-way ticket to disaster. A good functioning relationship is the hardest thing in the world for a human being to achieve. 70% of a person's life satisfaction is dependent on the quality of their relationship. We've built a very odd world in that if you look at what people are doing, they're not spending 70% of their time working on their
relationship. >> Do you think that heartbreak is one of the most important life lessons that we can learn? >> It is a major life event. It is an annihilation of yourself that existed in the life of another person. The worst heartbreaks are those that are not properly explained. I think there should be almost a government law that you cannot leave a relationship without giving the other person maximal closure.
And I speak with experience, authority, and a lot of pain on this. >> Hey guys, I am very bad at asking for this, but I wanted to stop for just one minute and ask a huge favor. If you want to hear more diverse conversations from female voices such as myself, I would love if you could hit subscribe. We work so hard on this show to bring you some of the best guests in the world. And having a female voice sometimes gives a
different perspective and I really want to elevate more of that on this channel. So please hit subscribe if that's important to you as it is to me. So where do you think that we've learned the idea that vulnerability is a weakness when every meaningful experience requires it?
>> Let's make an argument for the fact that vulnerability is sometimes a bad idea, particularly in professional life, particularly with people who are not friendly. You know, we do live in a hard world in many ways. And I think that the confusing bit of the conversation around vulnerability is that sometimes vulnerability is very important and sometimes invulnerability is very important. It wouldn't it wouldn't be an issue unless there were two poles of this debate. And and the tricky thing in modern life is how to navigate things so that you can be vulnerable when you need
to be vulnerable when vulnerability pays and also you know draw boundaries and know how to say no and know how to put your wall up when that's necessary too and you know both belong to a healthy life and I'd say that you can suffer at both ends of the spectrum.
>> Why does telling the truth about our fragility make us stronger though not weaker? Well, I think there's a way in which if you're able if you're fully at peace with things that are so-called weak, you oddly do become quite strong. So, to be able to declare, you know, to be able to say, even if I said to you now, Sarah, I've been crying all night. Um, you might go, well, this is quite strange because this guy's sitting here, his podcast, you know, he's looking serious and he's admitting to something which
normally people would admit with enormous shame, reservation, um, doubt, etc. and yet he's coming out with it in a manner that seems fairly self-confident and blind, etc. And then you think, okay, so in order to be this strong about something weak, um, there must be an interesting balance in this person around, you know, weakness and strength. And I think that's often what we look for. We look for weakness well-andled. I think that's a very
desirable trait. If someone is able to take you into the broken bits of their personality, but but do so with relative self-confidence, if that isn't a paradox, it's meant to be a little bit of a paradox. >> Yeah. Well, it is a paradox. What I find interesting is the people that I've connected to the most are the ones that have been the most vulnerable with me.
Yet, we struggle to do that ourselves. Like, stories are an amazing example of that. People that can storytell really well, you can connect to. I mean, connection is about taking a risk with someone. You know, if you say to me, "What have you been doing for the weekend?" And I say, "I've, you know, just been um looking at the clouds."
That's not going to get anywhere. But if the moment that I say to you something like, "Well, actually, I was speaking to my ex-girlfriend and it was quite painful and uh, you know, we both um felt a lot of emotion." Immediately, we're into richer territory. Um, and something is beginning to happen. So, conversation is filled with little gateways that you almost don't notice.
It's like somebody says, "Oh, do you go on holiday? what happened. You've got a choice. You can either stay on the surface or you can go a little bit deep. And what deep means is to show something that an enemy could use against you. And if an enemy can use it against you, a friend can use it for you. So that's why it's a gateway to friendship. And that's why all friendship is always a gamble that you could be exploited. You could suffer from the gift that you've given.
But it's a risk worth taking ultimately. you know, we we look, we can always sit alone under the bed, um, you know, surrounded by our armor. Fantastic. It's just a bit lonely. So, if you want to break through loneliness, you have to take a risk. And it's a risk around potentially being humiliated. And I think we're so scared of humiliation that we miss out on so many lovely things. And I've got a trick for you. If you want to get over humiliation, rather
than going, I won't be humiliated, humiliate yourself. Tell yourself every morning, I'm a bit of an idiot. Life's not right for me. I've made a 100 million mistakes. Um, you know, doctors have seen me naked in strange positions. You know what I mean? Medical examination. It's like, throw dignity out the window and start to live. I mean, we're so hampered by an exaggerated notion of how dignified we need to be in order to have a good life.
Well, throw that out the window. Take a little bit of a risk. Make yourself fully at home with being a bit of an idiot. We We spend so long fearing that someone might think us an idiot. You know the best way to cope with that? Just declare yourself an idiot way before anyone else gets a chance to. You know, get ahead of the opposition.
They're saying, "Oh, I think that person might not be so clever." Don't worry, we factored that in a long time ago. Idiocy is has been baked in. You're not telling me anything I didn't know. And with that kind of sort of assurance of your own vulnerability, you actually become invulnerable to all sorts of attacks.
>> But why do you think we struggle with worrying about our dignity and vulnerability? like what is it that is stopping us being humiliated? >> Um role models. Um you know we get very unhelpful role models. Think of how a child looks at an adult um most of the way that adults present themselves to children is full of deceit. Some of the deceit is necessary and some of it is pretentious. Um you know when a child sees its teacher in the supermarket uh
in the weekend the child will always go oh goodness the teacher actually you know likes Jaffa cakes. The teacher is filling their basket. The teacher is a human being but that humanity is not revealed to the child um during lessons and I think that it takes us a hugely long time to realize that people especially people in authority are essentially human. um you know wonderful one of my favorite philosophers is the French 16th century philosopher Michelle
de Morten and in his book the essays he has a wonderful moment where he's trying to remind his audience that everyone however high and mighty is actually at the same level and he comes out with a phrase very reddlin phrase he says kings and philosophers and so do ladies and so he's picking the three iconic things kings philosophers and ladies and he says they and and he uses that that word a very pungent word in French
deliberately to to shock his audience. Uh and then he says he follows up by going on the highest throne in the world with seated still upon our asses. And again this kind of language from a philosopher very unusual at the time but what he's trying to do is to say come off it guys we're all in this alike.
What is this constant fantasizing that there are people who don't go through the things that we go through? It takes a hugely long time to realize that if it's in you, it's likely to be in the other person. And it seems implausible because you think, hang on a minute, I'm really weird. I should we run through a list? Um, uh, sexually, very odd. All sorts of odd thoughts. Vulnerability,
crying, weeping, getting anxious, getting furious, or that surely no one else does that. um frustration, uh regrets, hung up still on things that happened 20 years ago, worrying about something one said 15 years ago, um uh you know, regretting some choice that you've made. You know, this is just a starter list of like the ways in which one might be nutty. Now, the thing is everybody's nutty. It's just everybody's
got a fantastic advertisement for themselves going and we believe the advertisement and we forget it's just a billboard. And sometimes that's fine, but it the collective cost to our psyches is enormous. So that we keep thinking that being normal is different from the way we are. But in fact, everybody's so-called normal, we just don't know them well enough to see that all the stuff in us is in them as well.
So what you have to do is take a leap of faith. So every time you see somebody and they're giving off absolutely no signs that they're the crazy banana that we know we are, the leap of faith is to go, "Hang on a minute. I don't know what your crazy is, but there's something in it. So, I'm going to choose not to fully believe in it. And once you, the interesting thing happens once you give space to their crazy, you don't know what their crazy is, but you know it's there. Once you give space to imaginatively, you just go, I know you're a weirdo cuz I'm a weirdo cuz
everybody's a weirdo. Then they will come towards you. There's a interesting almost natural osmotic process whereby if you give space to their oddity then they and by oddity I mean that warmly their humanity then they will come forward. People are always blocking each other from revealing their true selves.
For example, if I said to you did you have a good evening last night? Right? That is a leading question. That's not an open question. I'm a psychotherapist. One of the things they teach you in psychotherapy training is all your questions have to be open. You never say to someone, "Did you have a good weekend?" Because that's essentially silently coercing you that the answer has to be yes. You have to say, "How is your weekend? How was your weekend?"
That allows for everything from weeping and screaming to joy and ecstasy. But but you're giving space. And too often we shut people down. um uh you know, we'll say somebody's gone through a breakup and we'll say, "Are you getting better then? Are you getting better then? Wow, you don't mean ill." But that's such a reduction of the other person's chance to actually reveal how they're feeling. So, we don't
necessarily give each other the room we need to expand as we would need to. >> So, do you think our communication is actually then blocking our authenticity to be our crazy selves? Look, I think one of the really fascinating things about interpersonal communication is we don't feel the same way with everyone.