Relationships
Working on the Speed of an Exit
Much of the discussion on relationships focuses on the importance of identifying as early as possible the proverbial ‘red flags’…
Articles by The School of Life
- 01. The Unwitting Comedy of Resort Hotels
- 02. The Wisdom of Liming
- 03. Three Essays on Flight
- 04. The Wisdom of Islamic Gardens
- 05. A World Without Air Travel
- 06. Walking in the Woods
- 07. Why We Argue in Paradise
- 08. The Advantages of Staying at Home
- 09. The Wisdom of Nature
- 10. The Holidays When You’re Feeling Mentally Unwell
- 11. The Shortest Journey: On Going for a Walk around the Block
- 12. How to Spend a Few Days in Paris
- 13. Why Germans Can Say Things No One Else Can
- 14. Travel as Therapy – an Introduction
- 15. Lunch, 30,000 Feet – for Comfort
- 16. The Western Desert, Australia – for Humility
- 17. Glenpark Road, Birmingham – for Boredom
- 18. Comuna 13, San Javier, Medellin, Colombia – for Dissatisfaction
- 19. Pumping Station, Isla Mayor, Seville – for Snobbery
- 20. Eastown Theatre, Detroit – for Perspective
- 21. Capri Hotel, Changi Airport, Singapore – for Thinking
- 22. Cafe de Zaak, Utrecht – for Sex Education
- 23. Corner shop, Kanagawaken, Yokohama – for Shyness
- 24. Monument Valley, USA – for Calm
- 25. Heathrow Airport, London – for Awe
- 26. Pefkos Beach, Rhodes – for Anxiety
Self-Knowledge
Three Consequences of Having Had Very Angry Parents
The children of angry parents bring with them, at times, serious difficulties of their own. It might be important for everyone, especially their partners, to recognise some of the dangers and have the courage to take a few gentle mitigating steps.
Relationships
How To Be a Great Lover
However pleasing accomplishments might be, what truly nurtures love is someone’s relationship to their flaws: a basic and calm recognition that they may – somewhat surprisingly – have a great many of them.
Self-Knowledge
The Terror of Love
Of course love has its sweetness, but that is precisely why it brings such trouble. It asks us to shed our usual defences; it gets otherwise fierce and practical people to put away their scepticism. Then it starts to pull its surprises.
Self-Knowledge
The Burden of Childhood
Without us noticing, we picked up ‘rules’ about what happens when you give yourself to someone, what value we might have in another’s eyes, what is required of us to build up affection or maintain loyalty.
Relationships
How Sane Are You to Be With a ‘Mad’ Person?
We can rail all we like about the wrong people, we can nurse our sadness with immense tenderness, but when we are done, when we have poured over their follies for months, we may need to spare a few enquiries for ourselves.
Relationships
Why People Fall in Love in War Zones
There is an unusual-sounding, commonly observed behaviour to be found in wars. Against a background of destruction and chaos, there is a notable increase in the tempo and intensity of love.
Relationships
There Is No Ultimate Safety in Love
We mustn’t – to be kind to ourselves – ever be searching for eternal satisfaction. We can’t believe in total safety. We must never assume that we can reach any sort of a conclusive destination.
Relationships
Our Love of Unavailability
Why might we be drawn to the tedium and pain of unavailability, even in its less stark forms? Why would we be detained by absence when the entire ostensible purpose of love is to connect?
Relationships
Reasons We Lie in Love
There is a particular kind of person in love who is highly liable to attract our unbounded hatred: the person who – though they have a partner, often a kind, tender and beautiful one at that – nevertheless feels compelled to look around, often online, for hours, for alternatives.
Self-Knowledge
Happiness Is Not a Still Image
It’s a curious feature of the way we imagine the future, especially its happy varieties, that we typically base our impressions on just one or two still images – as if happiness is not a destination we travel through in time, but a single frozen scene we might one day inhabit.
Leisure
The Ugliness of the World
Occasionally, at a moment of special vulnerability, the truth can burst through with special force: the modern world, the world of the last hundred years, is ugly.
Relationships
Love and Cleopatra’s Nose
The psychology of attraction ensures that we have no option but to do a succession of mad things in the name of noses that secretly charm us; we shouldn’t add to our follies by pretending that we could ever conclusively escape them.
Self-Knowledge
Why Everyone We Could Love Will Be Mad
The follies of our partners can be understood in a simple dictum: they are the result of people continuing to do in grown-up environments what it was necessary for them to do to survive their childhoods.
Relationships
Honesty On Early Dates
The goal of love isn’t to be admired, but to be known; it isn’t for someone to believe that we are marvellous, but for them to understand us as pitiful and not take fright.
Relationships
Leaving in Search of a Worse Relationship
Without ever quite saying so to themselves, let alone their heartbroken partner, a person may decide to leave in search of greater isolation, increased suffering and more intense misunderstanding.
Relationships
On Seeing An Ex’s Profile on a Dating App
The modern world has generated a properly distinctive contribution to the canon of romantic suffering – the ache of seeing your ex (the one who became so very much against your will) on a dating site.
Self-Knowledge
How All Meanness Is Inherited
The meanness we witness around us in the here and now – in shops, in boardrooms, in bedrooms and in online forums – is always, by a law of psychological economy, something that has been, with appalling diligence, passed down from one person to another.
Relationships
The Repetition Compulsion
In Freud’s eyes, what we are trying to do is repeat an old story with one important caveat: we are seeking to give it a different ending.
Self-Knowledge
Mental Illness and Love
Mental illness is overwhelmingly not about inherent anatomical damage or chemical disturbance. What it does seem to be about – perhaps surprisingly – is the link between love and mental health, specifically the consequences of a lack of love.
Self-Knowledge
The Importance of Feeling Our Feelings
Beneath states of anxiety and depression, irritability and moodiness, there often lie sufferings we haven’t properly looked at – and therefore haven’t attended to with necessary care – because they don’t fit our ideas of what properly deserves our time and sympathy.
Relationships
How to Make Someone Fall in Love With You
If we closely analyse a raft of successful early dinner dates, walks in the park, movie nights and phone calls, we can be almost certain that a few distinct modes of conversation will have been in train.
Relationships
Anxious and Avoidant Couples and Their Phones
By offering us constant, seamless contact, our phones have simultaneously opened us up to perpetually renewed opportunities for doubt, disconnection and anguished speculations as to the loyalty and interest of the other person.
Self-Knowledge
How Hard It Is to Be Patient
It’s not really our fault that waiting feels so terrible. All babies are born with marked tendencies towards impatience – or, more plainly put, outright panic.
Sociability
On Not Being Able to Listen
We are, most of us, familiar with a particular kind of challenging human: the sort who seems unable to listen to much of what we might have to say to them.
Relationships
Cures for Love
‘Cures for Love’ is the title of a self-help book written by the Roman poet Ovid in 2 AD that offers consolation and companionship to those who have suffered abandonment in love.
Self-Knowledge
The Theory of Triangulation
We should be generous with ourselves for our triangulating tendencies. We have them not because we are bad, but because we have suffered and because we were disappointed and terrified at an extremely vulnerable stage in our development.
Relationships
The Ordinariness of the Lovers Who Devastate Us
When we hear certain stories of devastating heartbreak – the kind where the longing and the suffering seem limitless – it is normal to conclude that the people at their centre must have possessed truly unusual qualities.
Relationships
How Heartbreak Ends
Instead of immediately turning against our former lover for the devastation they have caused us, for an extended period, we simply miss them with new intensity.
Relationships
Ruminating on One’s Ex
We can spend a great deal of time – years, perhaps – wondering why certain people, whom we loved very much and who hurt us very deeply, were the way they were and acted as they did.
Relationships
Learning To Trust Again
When we have been the victims of treachery or adultery in love, the loss is not just of the person we once adored but of a broader capacity to trust human beings going forward.
Relationships
Stick At It
We’re complaining and wanting to run because we assume that fighting and misery are abnormal, but only because we’ve been insufficiently exposed to genuine normality.
Relationships
The Wisdom of Taking It Slowly
Slowness does not necessarily have anything to do with prudishness or social mores; it can be where we land once we’ve built up a more profound understanding of the psychology of love.
Relationships
What Kinks Are About
Not only are we typically highly selective about who we sleep with, but many of us are – in addition – extremely particular about what will adequately excite us when we do.
Relationships
What We Truly Long for in Love
We don’t want to be adored and admired; we want – beneath the terror and the shadow play, the games and the subterfuges – to be witnessed and held loyally in affection.
Sociability
‘I’m Fine, Thank You and How Are You?’
‘I’m fine, thank you and how are you?’: an innocuous, ubiquitous sentence in which so much of the tragedy and loneliness of our lives comes to rest. Because we’re not – of course – ever remotely fine, and nor is our questioner.
Relationships
Partners Who Punish You for Loving Them
For some of us, love is as terrifying in practice as it is desirable in the abstract – and our chief response to being loved may not be kindness and welcome but, strangely and yet with dark logic, cruelty.
Self-Knowledge
People Who Are Missing a Sense of Self
One of the odder features of life is that, without there being too many significant outward signs of the problem, many people are to be found wandering the earth lacking any sense of self.
Self-Knowledge
When People Tell You Who They Are, Believe Them
One would think that such alarming truths would immediately enter our consciousness and lead us to walk away and defend our interests. The problem is that some of us are not remotely built to notice the attacks made on us by others.
Relationships
The Ex You Can’t Get Over
It’s when a very meaningful relationship comes to an end that we stand to discover a highly peculiar fact about ourselves: our brains appear to have two separate centres of consciousness, which operate according to very different principles.
Relationships
When to Get Out of a Relationship
To prevent ourselves from wasting our time in fruitless couplings, we should learn to ask ourselves a simple sounding but imperative question about any person we are attempting to build a future with: ‘When I complain to them, do they listen?’
Self-Knowledge
On Not Being Able to Believe Your Own Luck
For some of us, the lucky breaks – when they finally come along – far from being simple to assimilate and build upon, set off an insuperable background level of anxiety that may end up with us destroying much that we ostensibly want.
Relationships
The Brutality of Dating
For those of us who know the activity from the inside, who suffer from despondency and fury and may have found ourselves bursting into tears after yet another disappointment, the word ‘brutal’ may be an understatement.
Work
How to Steal a Very Expensive House
The most effective ‘thieves’ aren’t the ones who strip people of material possessions; it’s the ones who quietly and harmlessly sit down and think about the beauty of what they desire.
Self-Knowledge
When Evil Walks Into Our Lives…
Rarely but significantly, someone may enter our lives who is seismically dangerous: someone who is deep down extremely unwell and compelled to externalise their sickness by harming others…
Relationships
After They Left
What unexpected rates of interest happiness charges. If only the sweet times had come with warning labels.
Relationships
Why Hurt People Hurt People
In certain cases, one partner will punish another not for doing anything wrong, but precisely the opposite. They are being punished for their sweetness, crushed for their gentleness and tormented for their faith.
Leisure
The Wisdom of Stoicism
Stoicism was a philosophy invented by leading minds in Ancient Greece and Rome to help us cope with agonising periods of our lives – especially those created by the selfishness and insanity of dictators and demagogues…
Calm
When We All Lived in Villages…
It was hard to get around, life was narrow and judgemental, there wasn’t much to do in the evenings…but there was one enormous advantage: there were so very few options to choose from.
Relationships
Can Our Partners Change?
We’re up against one of the central tripwires of existence. We’re trying to remake a human being; we’re attempting to retool DNA with our bare hands.
Self-Knowledge
How We Respond When Life Gets Frustrating
Life is inherently filled with frustrations but how we interpret these frustrations – what we take them to mean, who we think is responsible for them and how we opt to complain about them (or don’t) – is fascinatingly diverse.
Relationships
The Psychology of Anxious Attachment
If the anxious can accept that their condition isn’t a sign of random sickness but is the result of a very identifiable sort of upbringing, they may develop the courage one day to explain their fears to a partner.
Relationships
The Psychology of Avoidance
One of the most perplexing of all our behaviours is our tendency – in relationships – to flee from the warmth and affection it is so natural for us to want.
Calm
Keep Going
Here is humanity as we seldom allow ourselves to see it: neither triumphant nor defeated, but doggedly persisting – despite so many arguments against it.
Relationships
Emotional Maturity in Love
When the dust settles, the most attractive quality in a partner is not beauty, money or wit, but – hands…
Relationships
How To Be a Great Lover
The idea of learning how to be a great lover has a tendency to bring up certain stock images: a…
Self-Knowledge
The Terror of Love
It could sound like an odd word to associate with love. Surely love, especially in its early stages, is mostly…