Name: Who Dreams of the Greatest Love? (it's not who you expect)
Uploaded: 2026-03-04T16:48:15.000Z
Duration: 4 min 25 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

It's natural to imagine that those who expect most from love, those who dream most intensely of one day alighting on, as it were, a prince or a princess who will answer all their needs, must also be those who've already enjoyed the most promising experiences of relationships.

Modal verbs - B1

Idealism must, we suppose, be the fruit of a pre existing surplus of very satisfying moments.

The greatest idealists in love are not, as we might think, those who've had the most blessed passage through their love lives.

It's precisely those who've been most starved of affection, who have often been most lonely, who go on to expect most of other people.

Deprive someone of love at the start, and

you will generate an adult who wants only the greatest love, the highest love, the most perfect love.

You will breed an idealist, which also means someone who finds most relationships, probably all those they've had until now, disappointing.

Someone very inclined to leave partnerships in search of something better and higher, closer and deeper.

Cut someone off from love and you breed not someone who will be grateful for whatever comes their way, but

someone who threatens never to be content with what earthly existence can provide.

Imagine a lonely boy growing up isolated in a tall apartment building in a large city.

His parents are absent, mocking and punitive.

Back from school, he often gazes out of the window at a threadbare park below.

Somewhere out there, away from the bullies and the jocks, is a friend.

Not just a casual friend, not just any old friend, but a very perfect friend.

They want to play the same games all the time.

They feel all the same losses, all the same sadness.

Later on, the dream shifts to relationships.

Somewhere in the vast new university, there is the perfect person.

Blue eyes, ringlets in her hair, tenderness, kindness.

There is simply laughter, communion and gentleness.

The great idealists are those who have, for the longest time, had no one to play with.

In turn, tragically, idealism becomes its own prison.

One has no time for what is there and is half good.

Because one has been deprived, one can't forgive, one can't tolerate the compromise, whatever lip service one might pay to it.

One keeps the dream alive in secret, as one had to in childhood.

That's why one rejects the slightly overweight person who is distinctly sweet, the slightly irritating person, who is nevertheless bright, the one who doesn't get everything but does understand a few things.

Why aren't there enough crisps in the larder?

There are many flies indeed in the ointment.

When one's been starving, one doesn't fantasize about a sandwich.

The answer to all this is simple enough to sketch, to loosen one's grip on the dream of a flawless being.

Not because one has to or it's entirely silly, but

because one understands where the dreams came from and that they just aren't overly helpful.

They were what one's young mind invented to stop one going crazy from loneliness.

But now one can realize that one doesn't need this adaptation.

One's an adult, someone who can deal with imperfection in oneself too.

Someone who knows how to laugh at the gap between hopes and reality.

So what if they're always a bit late and don't always understand?

One can develop into someone who has the inner resourcefulness to cope with the half crappiness of most things and most people.

Someone who can love and be nourished by what is imperfect, that is, someone who can love on this earth.