Alain De Botton: How To Make Real Connections | GREAT MOMENTS

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2:15Hello everyone, I'm Jamie Lang and this is Great Moments. Hey guys, how you doing? Welcome back to another Great Moments. Today I'm really excited for you to listen to this because we have got Alain de Botton on Great Moments. Now, this episode is still one of those episodes that people come up to you on the street and say, I love that episode, Jamie. It's so good. It's full of just eye-opening conversations that I never thought I'd have. Now, I love the way Alain looks at life. He's so measured and kind of thoughtful and has so much knowledge to share. So in this great moment, he talks about what love really means in adult relationships, where the ick actually comes from.

2:54And he had some really interesting stuff to say about comedians and why they often come from unhappy childhoods. All of that is in the episode. I also asked Alan about my own relationship with my wife, Sophie, which is very risky. I have to admit because he's a relationship expert. And he also shared some fascinating stuff about attachment styles. Okay, I really hope you enjoy this. Great moments. And don't forget to go and check out other amazing guests on Great Company. Just search Great Company wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like this little clip, click on the show notes, click on the link, and it'll take you to the full episode.

3:24And don't forget to subscribe. Okay, enjoy this Great Moments with Alain de Bottin.

3:34Many entertainers, entertainment was not a choice, it was a necessity.

3:40Alain de Botton: They needed to entertain because someone around them, maybe many people around them, couldn't quite bear certain things. So I've noticed just sort of empirically that people who are very funny often grew up in circumstances that were not funny at all. And where the humor that they're excellent at deploying is essentially a way of diffusing the rage and the difficult moods of people around. so it's not so much a you know just a skill like any other it's a survival skill um that people have honed in order to manage the very difficult people around them so you know i mean that we kind of know that in popular way the melancholy clown etc but but it really does tend to have origins in humor being something that you learn um because because otherwise people are are a little too serious and often too angry.

4:38That's interesting you say that because I remember Jimmy Carr saying, people always ask me if I'm depressed. That's why I'm a comedian. But actually, you should ask if my parents were depressed. Perfect. Yeah, exactly.

4:50Alain de Botton: Exactly. I mean, very often the wit of the child is there to ward off the parents' depression. Really? Listen, people come into the, children come into the world and all of us are honed by nature to figure out what do I need to do here to survive? I mean, literally, that's how one should imagine every child. What do I need to do here to survive? Not necessarily survive physically, though, of course, yes, physically as well, but psychologically, mentally, what do I need to do? In some families, you need to excel academically. In some families, you need to fail academically. In some families, you need to be very witty.

5:25Alain de Botton: In some families, you need to be invisible. Why would you need to fail in some families? Oh, well, the classic one is parental envy. I mean, it's an awkward fact, but some parents are hugely envious of their own children, and they cannot bear that their child, who they've put on the earth, should be happier than they've managed to be. And so, therefore, the child has to take early retirement from various things, and the child ends up thinking, oh, I'm bad at maths or whatever. Maybe. Or is there someone who would be rather frightened if you were better at maths? So families are difficult places and dynamics occur that really go way beyond what we're ordinarily prepared to tolerate.

6:06Alain de Botton: What does love mean? If you mean kind of adult romantic relationships, adult romantic relationships are a kind of litmus test of our emotional development. And that's why very many of us find them very, very hard. They're also a moment where your past catches up with your present because the way in which we love as adults owes a huge amount to the way in which we experience love as children. You could say that what we're looking for in adult romantic relationships is often a sense of familiarity, not so much happiness. People go, oh, I'm looking to be happy. Steady. Maybe not. Maybe what you're really looking for is a sense of familiarity, which might be, it might be that what you're really looking for is suffering, neglect, feeling that you're not that important to somebody, feeling that somebody's got something more important to do other than be with you.

7:02Alain de Botton: I mean, this is why people make such, as it were, strange choices in relationships. I mean, I'm sure we've all had situations where you recommend that a good friend of yours goes out with another good friend of yours to go on a date. Yes. And you think these people really should match. And they're both got so much to offer the world. And you call up your friend afterwards. And you go, how did it go? And they go, really nice, really nice person. And you go, is that a problem? And they go, maybe you didn't have that much to say to one another, et cetera. Now, maybe what they're perhaps struggling to say is, this person I encountered is too nice to give me the feeling of suffering that I need in order to feel I'm in love because that's slightly the way in which I may have developed that being loved and giving love is not an uncomplicated process.

7:55As I say, in many families, for example,

7:59Alain de Botton: you're only loved if you do something, if you achieve something, if you prove yourself, in a certain way. It means that in adult relationships, we're often looking to recreate that conditionality. And therefore, well, you know, the ick, why does the ick sometimes descend? It's very Gen Z of you. I know. I've been taught by younger folk. The ick can descend in contact with a level of kindness and sympathy, which doesn't feel warranted and earned. It's simply unfamiliar. And so this is why relationships are often so complicated, because we're on a track to recreate patterns of suffering that we don't understand we're interested in recreating, and which we're unconsciously repeating.

8:47So this is why relationships are so strange.

8:53Alain de Botton: You know, we used to get into relationships because our parents would fit them in, or society would arrange marriage. Now we have marriages and relationships by instinct. We get drawn to people. But those instincts are so much more complicated than we like to think because we're not merely pulled by a desire to be happy. We're pulled by a desire to rework many of the challenges of our past. I mean, Freud put it at its best. His view was that we're looking to recreate painful situations that we experienced at the hands of our parents, but give them a better ending. So, for example, someone might be, let's imagine a woman who finds herself very often getting together with angry, intemperate, slightly out of control men.

9:42Alain de Botton: You say, okay, why is this happening? We might discover that the past of this person includes a father who was very much like this. And we might say, goodness, this sounds like awful. This is ever going to end? The hopeful psychotherapeutic answer is yes, because what the person's doing is not looking to suffer forever. What they're looking is to understand the pattern and solve it, ideally with somebody that they can go on a journey with, which is why, you know, if you had an angry father and you come across a completely calm person, that might not be that interesting. You come across somebody who feels the temptation of anger, but wants to work it through with you in your company and that together you might heal from this problem, that can be deeply satisfying for people.

10:26Alain de Botton: So, you know, if we want to be optimistic about the patterns people are involved with, I don't think people are invested in suffering forever. They're interested in finding a way out of the pattern, but they need to be close to that pattern in order to feel that thing we call desire. That desire is often ignited by proximity to a pattern of pain that was experienced in the past. I love that idea. I don't love that idea, but the way we actually, we're not trying to be happy. We're looking for familiarity, which is wild because...

11:05Well, it's so paradoxical, right? Well, no, it's paradoxical because, because I can't take it for a look at my my wife for example so um she her parents loved her she her daddy used to come home and she would get onto his feet and dance on his shoes and she was she had all this and so she has this immense inner confidence I ever asked if she'd ever been heartbroken I've never been heartbroken ever yeah and I was like really you've never been heartbroken? No, I've never experienced that. Me, on the other hand, I quite like, I think, to maybe, I'm drawn to that rejection. Because I went to boarding school eight years old, divorced parents, that classic abandonment, probably.

11:52So I understand from my side, why, and Sophie, who is just the greatest thing to me, I think she's the greatest thing that walks on this earth um she's quite you know if i could try and kiss her and hug her get off you know all you know she doesn't need it what i wanted all the time and so that that's kind of why we work i would say and i feel very happy but from her side if she's experienced love then what is she looking for what do i offer her really if she's have i just made this about

12:21Alain de Botton: myself do i do well look i'm interested in what you're saying it's interesting you say she received warm love from her dad and the dance on his shoes, etc. But when you come close to her, she goes, no, and pushes you slightly away. So that suggests a pattern of avoidance on her part. And even though she may have at some points had love, maybe there are complexities there, and maybe you picked her. You said you were quite interested in rejection and whatever. And maybe she rejects you just as much as you need to be rejected in order to feel you're in love. If she rejected you too much, you might flee.

12:59Alain de Botton: If she didn't reject you at all, you might think, oh, I'm not sure I can get that feeling. So it's possible that you've worked out between you a happy medium where, you know, in the classic attachment theory, you are just anxious enough for her love. And she is just avoidant enough that it works. And that it's, you know, the great trick in love is where are people standing too close or not close enough if people can find the right distance from one another it it can work but but i would be interested to you know if she were here to ask you know what was it about her relationship with her parents and her early experience of love that means that when you hunger for her love it's a bit much and she feels the need to go away and keep you at bay well she said that her dad used to smother her kisses and that used to annoy her and I do the same.

13:46Okay. So maybe there was a way in which

13:48Alain de Botton: she experienced love as a little bit invasive. Yes. Because we think of love as, you know, true love is correct attunement to somebody. If somebody wants to be alone, you let them be alone. Somebody's a bit sad, you allow them to be sad. There's a more cartoonish vision of love where it's just hugs and kisses and joy. That's, you know, it's, you know, the sort of parents who goes up to a child and goes, who's a pretty boy now? And always trying to make fun when actually the child might be in a melancholy mood. Let that child have that sad mood. Let the child have their distance. It's possible.

14:20Alain de Botton: Who knows that your wife experienced her father as forcing her out of affection, but nevertheless forcing her to inhabit a certain emotional band, which didn't necessarily always respect what she was actually feeling. And therefore she maybe has grown up with a sense of needing to push away at moments when she might not be on the same page. And that's okay. So she means, yeah. I'm honestly never even more fascinated. My brain is going wild with the questions. How does an individual then, how do we make sure we're picking the right partner? And is life about finding a partner or isn't? Isn't it?

15:06Alain de Botton: extreme modesty is probably a good starting point. In other words, we probably have to acknowledge that we'll almost certainly make some mistakes and we need to go steady. And therefore, when we get married, celebrate if you like, but also cry a little bit preemptively because you're going to be in for some pain because few of us are without error in our love choices. This is a very imperfect and very demanding business. And it's good just to lower the temperature. The perfect relationship does not exist. The more you insist that it does, the more you're going to have an imperfect one. So to go easy on one another, a relationship is always an encounter between two very broken people who are just trying to get by.

15:52Alain de Botton: And the other person's not trying to do you down. The other person is just struggling with their own issues, et cetera. So if that's the starting point of a relationship. It's much more helpful than, you know, we are two paragons of, you know, beauty and perfection and we're all, you know, whatever. I mean, at the School of Life, we always recommend that when people go on a date, one of the first questions they should ask is a relatively early question is, how are you mad to the partner, to the prospective partner? In other words, the utility of that question is, we're all mad. The question is just, do you have any insight into what your madness is?

16:23Alain de Botton: And it's fine to be mad. I'll tell you how I'm mad. You'll tell me how you're mad and we won't make such a taboo of it. So that helps, I think, when embarking on a relationship. Also, it does help to go and have some therapy, go and look into yourself, have a basic grasp of attachment theory. Attachment theory worked out 40 years ago now. Very useful. Who's avoidant? Who's anxious? Who's secure? What makes you avoidant? What are your triggers? We don't need people to be perfect in relationships, but if they have some grasp of the areas in which they go a bit mad. That's tremendously helpful. To be able to give your partner a rudimentary, but nevertheless, fairly accurate map of the bits of you that are a little wonky.

17:08Alain de Botton: This is very generous. This is a hugely generous act to say, in this area, I'm fragile. When it comes to how I might behave about the fact that you have lots of friends, or that you're often down about something or that you're not punctual or whatever. These things are difficult. And the reason why relationships get so bitter is that people fail to remember the complicated, in a way, very understandable reasons for why their partner is as difficult as they are. If you can remember, okay, what I'm dealing with is not an enemy who's trying to ruin my life, but someone who really struggled with their father when they were five, that's why it's so hard for them.

17:49Alain de Botton: to do that thing in the kitchen that I'd like them to do. They're not trying to ruin my life. They're just trying to cope in their own way. And we forget this. It's so hard, but there should be a patron saint of this and there should be reminders before and after the news that this is what we all need to do. I love that, that you should look at relationships as we're both broken individuals and we're just trying to figure this out together. So if you are in an argument with your partner or your loved one or whoever it is, then how is the best way to communicate with each other.

18:20Alain de Botton: The number one way to unwind a particularly tense standoff is always to give your partner or friend, colleague, whatever, a sense that you are listening to what it is that they're saying. You don't have to agree, but you have to listen. And a very simple way is to go, I hear you. But an even better way, this is what they teach you in class 101 when you could try and train in psychotherapy, is you reflect back to them what they're saying. So they're saying, it's all terrible because of this, that, and the other. And rather than going, okay, yes, I hear you, you say, okay, so I'm hearing that when you went to work, your boss did this, and then they did that, and you felt this, and that way it's left you feeling, and they go, yes, yes, you understand me because you've paraphrased their feeling.

19:06Alain de Botton: And I can't tell you how satisfying that is. So paraphrasing what someone has just said to you, asking them what it is, and then massively lowers the temperature because immediately someone feels heard. And the moment they feel heard, they're then ready to hear you. So if you do this for somebody, they will then do it back to you. And then you're in a virtuous circle and off you go.

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