The Sorrows of Love
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About this ebook
- A UNIQUE MEDITATION ON THE COMPLEXITIES OF LOVE
- A CONSOLING TOOLKIT for navigating the despair and heartbreak that come hand in hand with love.
- ILLUSTRATED WITH FULL COLOR IMAGES THROUGHOUT
- PART OF THE SCHOOL OF LIFE'S GIFTABLE ESSAYS SERIES other titles include Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person, Why We Hate Cheap Things, and Self-Knowledge.
The School of Life
The School of Life is a global organization helping people lead more fulfilled lives. Through our range of books, gifts and stationery we aim to prompt more thoughtful natures and help everyone to find fulfillment. The School of Life is a resource for exploring self-knowledge, relationships, work, socializing, finding calm, and enjoying culture through content, community, and conversation. You can find us online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the world offering classes, events, and one-to-one therapy sessions. The School of Life is a rapidly growing global brand, with over 5 million YouTube subscribers, 343,000 Facebook followers, 183,000 Instagram followers and 160,000 Twitter followers. The School of Life Press brings together the thinking and ideas of the School of Life creative team under the direction of series editor, Alain de Botton. Their books share a coherent, curated message that speaks with one voice: calm, reassuring, and sane.
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Reviews for The Sorrows of Love
13 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book tell you how to see love not only as a happy feeling, but also the sad feeling may happen in your life
Book preview
The Sorrows of Love - The School of Life
I
Introduction
We expect love to be the source of our greatest joys. But, in practice, it is one of the most reliable routes to misery. Few forms of suffering are ever as intense as those we experience in relationships. Viewed from outside, love could be mistaken for a practice focused almost entirely on the generation of despair.
We should try to understand our sorrows. Understanding does not magically remove problems, but it sets them in context, reduces our sense of isolation and persecution, and helps us to accept that certain griefs are highly normal. The purpose of this essay is to help us develop an emotional skill that we term ‘Romantic Realism’. This can be defined as a correct awareness of what can legitimately be expected of love and the reasons why we will, for large stretches of our lives, be disappointed by it, for no especially sinister or personal reasons.
The problems begin because, despite all the statistics, we are inveterate optimists about how love should go. No amount of information seems able to shake us from our faith in love. A thousand divorces pass our doors; none seem relevant to us.
We see relationship difficulties unfold around us all the time, yet we still retain a remarkable capacity to discount negative information. Despite the evidence of failures and loneliness, we cling to some highly ambitious ideas of what relationships should be like – even if we have never seen such unions in real life.
The ideal relationship is the equivalent of the snow leopard; our loyalty to it as a realistic possibility cannot be based on the evidence of our own experience. Instead it derives from a range of reckless ideas circulating in our societies about what sharing a life with another person might be like. The problem starts with the wedding. In a wiser world than our own, our marriage vows would set the tone from the outset.
A wedding day signals a commitment by two deeply imperfect people to endure a range of arduous difficulties until the end. It is a vow to be pretty unhappy together for much of the time without blaming one another unfairly. The family and friends gathered will be aware of their own relationship sufferings, will admire the couple’s courage and wish them luck – while worrying (and knowing) that a rocky – and in many ways, devastating – experience lies ahead of the couple.
How happy we are depends to a large extent on whether we judge certain problems to be normal or not. Because our societies have failed to normalise and speak honestly about a great many issues in love, it is easy to believe ourselves uniquely cursed. We not only feel unhappy; we feel unhappy that we are unhappy. When difficulties strike, we start to feel that we are going out