Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

I was asked to talk to you today about an essay I wrote for the New York Times last year that had a rather dramatic title. It was called "Why You'll Marry the Wrong Person" and maybe we can get started. um, we're among friends um, just asking how many of you in the room feel like you've married the

wrong

person

, I mean, we're among honest friends, yes, ma'am, that c, a couple of people who 5 10, I Let's say 30 people in the room and we always have to deal with it, so there's a pretty sizable majority, but I'm here to give advice and give comfort for this situation, you know, there's a lot of anger around our love lives.

It's a private company, but many of us walk around feeling pretty privately angry about the way our love lives have gone. My task today is to turn that anger into sadness. If we can turn anger into pain, we

will

have made psychological progress and This is the current task. What hides behind anger is very often an unusual quality because we tend to think of very angry people as some kind of dark and pessimistic characters who do not at all scratch the surface of any regularly angry

person

and you

will

find a wild optimist. . In fact, it is hope that drives anger: think of the person who screams every time she can't find the keys to her house or every time she gets stuck in traffic.

These unfortunate characters are demonstrating a curious but reckless faith in a world where keys are never lost. The roads are mysteriously free of traffic, it's hope that's turbocharging your anger, so if we're going to be a little less sad and a little less angry about our love life, we're going to have to lower some of our hopes, it's very difficult. to diminish hope around love because there are vast industries designed to inflate our expectations of love. um, there was a wonderful quote from the German philosopher Theodore Adoro, who in the 1960s said that the most dangerous man in America was Walt Disney and the reason he attacked Walt was because he believed that Walt was the primary agent of hope. and therefore of rage and therefore of bitterness, and he thought it was the job of philosophy to let us down gently, which is what I'm going to do. uh today so remember the topic of the talk why you will

marry

the

wrong

person there are several reasons why this is going to happen to you or maybe it has already happened to you in the privacy of your heart um I should say that it is not like that . that bad and the reason is that all of us, uh, won't manage to find the right person, but we will probably all manage to find a good enough person, so that's success.

As soon as you do, we'll go see one of One of the reasons we're not going to be able to accomplish this as successfully as we would have hoped at the beginning of our probably teenage Hood when we were contemplating love is that we're very strange. I'm very strange and you're very strange, you don't let it be known and you know we're not going to do anything very dangerous, but basically we're pretty strange psychologically. Normally we don't know much about this strangeness. It takes us a long, long time before we are really on top of the way we are hard to live with.

Does anyone in this room think they're pretty easy to live with in general? Yeah, oh my god, okay, I don't think so. I want to be rude, but please come see me later. I know that it is not easy to live with you and the reason is that you are Homo sapiens and therefore it is not easy to live with anyone. a there is a wall of silence that surrounds us from a deeper knowledge of what is actually so difficult about us uh our friends don't want to tell us why they would bother they just want a nice evening they are not our friends they know more about us and more about our defects probably after knowing each other for 10 minutes a stranger will know more about your defects than you could learn in 40 years of life on the planet our ability to intuit what is wrong with us is very weak our Parents do not tell us a lot because they love us too much.

They know they can see, of course. I mean, they've followed us since the cradle. They know what happens to us. They're not going to tell us. They just want you to know, be sweet, and our ex-lovers, a vital source of knowledge, absolutely know it, they know it, but do you remember that speech they gave? It was touching at the moment when they said they wanted some. more space and we are attracted to traveling and interested in the culture of Southeast Asia. Nonsense, they thought a lot of things were wrong with you, but they wouldn't bother to tell you that they had just left there for what reason.

Would you be bothered that this knowledge that is out there is not in you? It is out there but it is not in you and therefore we progress through the world with a very low sense of what is really wrong with us. Not least, all of us are. Addicts Almost all of us are addicts, we don't inject heroin as such, but we are addicts. We need to redefine what addiction is. I like to define addiction not in terms of the substance you are taking. In other words, you know I'm addicted to heroin. I'm a cocaine addict.

No addiction is basically any pattern of behavior whereby you cannot stand being with yourself and certain more uncomfortable thoughts and, more importantly, emotions that arise from being alone and therefore you can be addicted to almost anything for a long time. as it keeps you away from yourself as long as it keeps you away from the complicated knowledge of yourself and most of us are addicts and thanks to all kinds of technologies and distractions etc., we can have a good life in which almost certainly guarantees us not to spend time with ourselves, except maybe certain types of airlines that do not yet have the devices to distract us, but otherwise, you can be sure that you do not have to talk to yourself and this is a disaster for your ability to have a relationship with another person because until you know yourself you cannot properly relate to another person.

One of the reasons why love is so complicated for us is that it requires us to do something that we really don't want to do, which It is approaching another human being and saying I need you. I really wouldn't survive without you. I am vulnerable before you and there is a very strong impulse in all of us to be strong and well defended and not reveal our vulnerability to another. Personal psychopsychologists talk about two patterns of response that tend to arise in people whenever there is a danger of needing to be extremely vulnerable, dangerously vulnerable and exposed to another person.

The first answer is to get what psychologists call anxiously attached to this attachment theory. Some of you may know, when you are anxiously attached to someone instead of saying "I need you, I depend on you", you start to become very procedural, you say you are 10 minutes late or I think the trash bags need to be taken out or We start getting strict when really what you want to do is ask a very poignant question. Do you still care about me? But we don't dare ask that question, so instead we get nasty, we get rigid, we get procedural, the other thing. the other pattern of behavior that psychologists have identified and tends to apply to people who are in this room, in other words, very outgoing, feisty guys, in relationships, tell me if I'm wrong, you become what is known. as avoidant which means that when you need someone it is precisely at that moment that you pretend that you don't need them when you feel most vulnerable you say I'm quite busy at the moment I'm fine thank you I'm quite busy today uh in other words you don't reveal the need to another person, which triggers them into a chain of questions about whether you can be trusted and then there is a cycle of low trust, so we get into these patterns of not daring to do what we really need to do is say, even though I'm a grown person, maybe I have a beard, maybe I've been alive for a long time, I'm 6'2, etc., I'm actually a little guy. child inside and I need you I would like a little child to need his parents this is so humiliating that most of us refuse to take that step and therefore reject the challenge of uh of Love um in short, we don't know much how to do it .

I love us and it sounds really strange because imagine if someone said to you look, all of us probably in this room would probably need to go to a love school, we think love school, love is just an instinct, no it's not, it's A skill. and it is a skill that must be learned and it is a skill that our society refuses to consider as a skill that we must always follow our feelings. If you continue to follow your feelings, you will almost certainly make a big mistake in your life. What is love? Ultimately, love. I think it's something.

First of all. There is a distinction between loving. Love and be loved. We all start out in life knowing a lot about being loved. Being loved is the fun. That's when someone brings you something on a tray. and ask you how your day was at school Etc. and we grow up thinking that that is what is going to happen in an adult relationship, we can be forgiven for that. That is an understandable mistake, but it is a very tragic mistake and it leads us to not pay attention to the other. side of the equation, which is love and what it really means to love, love is ultimately having the willingness to interpret someone's not-so-attractive surface behavior to find more benevolent reasons why they may be developing.

In other words, to love someone is to apply charity and generosity of interpretation. Most of us have a great need for love because we really need to be, we need to be cut a little because our behavior is often so complicated that if we do. If we did this, we would not achieve any type of relationship, but we are not used to thinking that this is the core of what love is. The core of what love is is the willingness to interpret another person's behavior, which we tend to do. be very bad at recognizing that anyone we might love will be a bewildering mix of good and bad.

There is a wonderful psychoanalyst called Melanie Klein, who was active in the 50s and 60s, originally from Vienna, active in North London. By studying how children learned relationships from the parenting situation and came up with a very fascinating analysis, he argued that when children are young, they don't really realize that a parent is a character, they actually do what which she called dividing a parent into a good father and a bad father and this is when a baby is really in the infant stage so what you do is you divide yourself into a good mother and a bad mother and it takes a long time.

Melan Klein thought it might be until you're four years old, until you realize that the good mother and the bad mother are one person and you become ambivalent, in other words, you become capable of hating someone and really getting angry with them. and at the same time also loving him and able to not run away from that situation, you can say I love someone and I hate him and that's okay uh and Melanie Klein thought that this is an immense psychological achievement when we can no longer just divide people into absolutely brilliant, perfect, wonderful and hateful.

I was disappointed I was disappointed Everyone we love is going to disappoint us We begin with idealization and many times we end with denigration The person goes from being absolutely wonderful to being absolutely terrible Maturity is the ability to see that there are no heroes or really sinners among the Human beings, we all have this wonderfully bewildering mix of good and bad and the true psychological maturity of adulthood and you may need to be 65 before you realize it. I haven't gotten to that point yet. uh, it's the ability to realize that whatever you love is going to be this mix of good and bad, so love is not just admiration for strength, it's also tolerance for weakness and recognition of ambivalence, That's why we probably make some real mistakes when we choose our love partners.

Some of you in this room have made some surprising mistakes. Why is it like this? The reason is that we have been told that the way to find a good partner is to follow your instincts, follow your heart, that is the Mantra and So all the time we are reminded that if we stop reasoning and analyzing, by the way, are there people in this room who think you can think too much about your emotions? There are a few people who can think too much. Okay, you can't think too much, you can only think badly, but there is no such thing as overthinking emotions, but the problem is that we live in a romantic culture that privileges impulse now, when it comes to love, something complicated happens because it's not It takes being a staunch believer in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis to realize that the way we love as adults is above our early childhood experience and that in early childhood the way we learned about love was not just through tender experiences. and the kindness and generosity, the love that we will have experienced when we were children, will also be linked to experiences of disappointment, of humiliation, perhaps of being with a father who treated us very harshly, who scolded us,that made us feel small in some way, in other words. much about our first love experiences abound with various types of suffering now something quite bad happens when we start to go out into the adult world and start choosing love partners, we think we are looking for partners who will make us happy, but we are not, We look for partners who are familiar to us and that can be a very different thing because familiarity can be linked to particular types of torture and this explains why sometimes people tell us look, there is a wonderful person, you should go out and date them. , they are, they are handsome, they are charming, they are all kinds of things and we go out with them, we, and we recognize that they are really wonderful and amazing, but we have to confess to our partners that to our friends that we actually meet this person often We struggle with the vocabulary that we say may not be so exciting or maybe not sexy or a little boring, but really what we mean is that we have detected in this truly accomplished person someone who cannot make us suffer in the way we need. suffer to feel that love is real and that is why we reject them, so we are not simply on a quest to be happy, we are on a quest to suffer in ways that are familiar to us and this radically undermines our ability to find a good couple.

Here is another reason why we are going to get unstuck in the field of Love. We tend to believe that the more suitable a lover is for us, the less we will have to explain who we are how we feel what bothers us what we want we believe rather like. A small child believes in his parents that a true lover will guess what is on our mind. One of the big mistakes that human beings make is to constantly feel that other people know what is on their minds without us having said what we have in mind. the mind is very cumbersome to use words it is so boring and when it comes to love we have this deep desire that will simply be understood without words it is touching it is a beautiful romantic idea but it also leads to a catastrophic outbreak of bad mood.

What is bad mood? Bad mood is an interesting phenomenon. We don't just get angry at anyone, we get angry at people who we think should understand us and yet for some reason they have decided not to and that's why. we tend to reserve our suks for people we love and who we think love us and they say something to us that you know will inadvertently cause a negative reaction in us and we will suk and they will say what's wrong with you honey and we. I won't say anything and they'll say but come on, you're upset and we'll leave, no, no, I'm absolutely fine and it's not true, and we'll go up and close the door and We won't tell them what's wrong with us and then they'll knock on the door and say please. , just tell me and we will say no because we want our souls to be read because we hope that a true lover can understand what we want.

We feel and who we are without us speaking this is a catastrophe for our ability to form lasting relationships if you do not explain you will never be able to understand the root of a good marriage and Good Love is the ability to become a good teacher now teaching sounds as a limited profession , those guys in Tweed jackets and fussy with a blackboard, etc. I'm not talking about that kind of teaching all of us, whatever our career aspirations, whatever they may be, we have to become teachers, now teaching is simply the word we give ourselves to the skill of getting an idea from one head to the other. another in a way that is probably accepted and most of us are terrible teachers most of us teach when we are tired when we are afraid what are we afraid of?

You are afraid, we have married an idiot and since we are very afraid we start yelling at them, you have to understand and unfortunately when you start humiliating the person you want to understand something less and furthermore, you will never get anyone to understand what you want them to understand, as long as when you make them feel small in order to teach well, you have to be relaxed, you have to accept that maybe your partner doesn't understand it and you also need to There is a culture within a couple where two people are going to need to teach each other and therefore, also learn from each other and this brings me to the next reason why you will probably have a very unhappy relationship and that is because you probably believe that when someone tries to tell you something about yourself that you find a little touchy and a little uncomfortable, they are attacking you. , it's not like that, they are trying to make you a better person and we don't tend to believe that this has a role in love we tend to believe that true love means accepting all of us it's not like that no one should accept all of us we're terrible we really want everyone you accept no that is not love the full display of our characters The full articulation of who we are should not be something we do in front of anyone we care about, so what we have to do is accept that the other person is going to want to educate us and that is not so. a critical critique is simply the wrong word that we apply to a much nobler idea which is trying to become better versions of ourselves but we tend to reject this idea uh very strongly um there is some hope of course there is hope look I mentioned it the word Good enough is a phrase taken from a wonderful English psychoanalyst called Donald Winot.

He had a lot of parents coming to him and saying things like I'm really worried. I'm not a good father. My son has this problem. or that problem, etc., and he came up with a wonderful line, he said that you are more likely to be a good enough parent and that it is a relief from our otherwise punishing perfectionism, the good thing is that none of us are perfect and, therefore, you do not You do not need Perfection and the demand for Perfection will lead you to only one thing loneliness you cannot have Perfection and Company to be in the company of another person is to be negotiating imperfection every day um incompatibility we are all incompatible but it is a work of love making us kindly adapt to each other and ourselves to each other's incompatibilities uh and therefore compatibility is an achievement of love is not what you need from the beginning of course you are not going to be totally compatible that is not it's the point through love you grow gradually you accept the need to be compatible um we probably can't change our types properly so we're all professionals many of us have types that are going to cause us real problems they may be too distant they may be arrogant, they are going to torture us in some way, now friends casually tell us to leave them, get out of the relationship, etc., right, no, I don't know, we are realists here at Google and I'm giving it to you. realistic advice you will not be able to change your type let's take it for granted what you can do and this is a great achievement is to change the way you characteristically respond to your deceptive type most of us have formed the way we respond to difficult types in the Early childhood, so we had a distant father, now we chose a distant lover when we were very young, we responded to that distant father by seeking attention, we rattled and knocked and now we are adults, we rattle and knock on our own. way and we think that's going to help, right?

It creates a cycle that will be a vicious cycle that will get us nowhere. It's open to us at any time to have a more mature response to the challenges that the kind of people we're attracted to are going to pose for us and that's an immense step forward, an immense achievement, um, the other thing we need to do is recognize the nobility of compromise, one of the most shameful things we have ever had to do. To admit is to say that this is my partner. I have made a commitment by choosing them. I got engaged.

Oh, why did you get engaged? I'm not that attractive. I have a lot of problems. I'm a little crazy, frankly, I might. Doesn't attract anyone better, but they are very nice, they are fine now you would think loser, wouldn't you, commitment is noble, we compromise in every area of ​​life, there is no reason why we shouldn't compromise in our love life , maybe we will stand firm. around for the kids, good people say, "Oh, they're only staying for the kids, that's a wonderful reason to stay, why else would you stay?" So let's look a little more kindly at the art of commitment, it is a huge achievement. uh, lover, I'm going to end with a quote from one of my favorite philosophers, a very gloomy 19th century Danish philosopher named kard and kard in his book, or he had a wonderful outburst where he basically said, of course, you're going to get married. with the wrong person and makes wrong decisions in a whole host of areas and the reason you're going to do this is because you're human, so don't beat yourself up for doing what humans do, this is what he says , get married and you will do it. you will regret it don't get married you will also regret it get married or don't get married you will regret it either way laugh at the nonsense of the world you will regret it you will cry for it you will also regret it you will laugh at the nonsense of the world or you will cry for it you will regret both hang yourself you will regret it no hang yourself you will regret that too hang yourself or don't hang yourself you will regret it either way whether you hang yourself or don't hang yourself you will regret both This gentleman is the essence of all philosophy.

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