Name: Love is a skill, not a feeling | Alain de Botton: Full Interview
Uploaded: 2026-03-04T18:15:46.000Z
Duration: 58 min 13 s
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I'm a philosopher, psychotherapist and founder of the School of Life.

Chapter one Our Destructive Romantic Culture we know, in theory that love matters a lot.

We sometimes lose sight of what that word actually means.

it is one of the most beautiful and one of the most complicated of all phenomena.

Even though we think we've been around on this planet for a long time, trying to figure things out, I'd say we were still at the dawn collectively, of making sense of this phenomenon we call love.

And it's no surprise that most people will go to their deathbeds thinking, not quite sure I figured that side of life out.

At least many of us will still be grappling with some of the complexities of love by the time time runs out on us.

The most central kind of love that people are obsessed about, concerned about, is romantic love.

That is the intimate connection between two human beings who have a sexual contact.

It's worth saying that there are other forms of love.

We can love our children, we can love animals, we can love ideas.

We can love tables, chairs, clouds, all sorts of things.

But I'd say that when people sing about love and when they cry about love, it tends to be the love of one very special person.

We tend to call our soulmate our partner.

It used to be the case that when people found partners, they would do so according to fairly pragmatic considerations.

In most nations, in most parts of the world, for most of history, couples were formed not by the individuals themselves, but

by the wider society, families, the village, the court.

There were, if you like, dynastic marriages, you would get together with somebody because they had a plough and you had an ox and it seemed like a good match.

Or you were the Duke of Brabant and they were the Princess of Naples, and

So you got together for reasons that were nothing to do with emotional compatibility.

There were a lot of tears, there was sadness, there was loneliness.

It didn't seem to matter, because relationships were seen to be about something else.

There was then a momentous change that occurs towards the end of the 18th century, starting in Britain, France, Germany, parts of Italy.

A revolution in feeling that we now know as romanticism.

And one of the central tenets of romanticism is that each individual should be left to decide on their partner by their own, the movements of their own heart.

They should Be left to decide for themselves.

And we have been in the romantic age now for, you know, 200 years, perhaps shorter, perhaps a little longer, that kind of time period.

And let's put it plainly, it's been a disaster.

We are not any appreciably happier now in a romantic culture than we were in a dynastic culture where marriages were made for dynastic reasons.

Because we have failed collectively to focus with enough intent on the difficulties that couples will have when they choose each other according to the movements of their own heart.

Look, I think a really key prejudice of the romantic worldview is that if love is working well, it should be following instinct.

There's been an enormous veneration, almost a worship of instinct.

Not in a set of ideas, not a sense of rationally observable principles, but a feeling.

You either have the feeling or you don't.

There's even a prejudice against language.

You know, true lovers shouldn't talk too much.

They should just feel the fluttering of their own hearts.

That's why music has a huge prestige, higher than, you know, philosophy.

When we're in love, we don't want to read philosophical tracks.

That is to do with our sense that emotion should be guiding us, not reason.

Reason is the enemy in the romantic worldview of truly happy relationships.

And, you know, there are so many things that are considered unromantic.

And I would love to train our audience that every time something seems unromantic, question it.

Is it truly unromantic if we define romanticism as the pursuit of a workable relationship on that basis?

Is it unromantic to think long and hard about childhood patterns of psychological development?

Is it anti romantic to spend a lot of time thinking about families and friends and compatibility at that level?

All these things, in my view, belong to a truly adequate way of surveying whether a couple should be together.

But I'm also aware that nowadays these things are considered very unromantic.

To live in a romantic culture means to live in a culture that has a set of ideas about how good couples should form.

They should be formed by instinct, that everybody has a soulmate, that you'll recognize your soulmate by a special fluttery feeling that you shouldn't be asked to account for that feeling.

You should simply go for it and marry in Vegas in two weeks if that's what seizes you.

And that you should be able to communicate deeply with your partner without using language through that special medium of the heart, through the silence.

Also, that you shouldn't criticize your partner.

That true partners should love each other for who they really are, which means no desire to grow or change.

Couples in romantic culture will sometimes complain, you're trying to change me.

It's like, what, you know, you complain to your friends, my partner's trying to change me.

If you went to an ancient Greek, if you went to Athens in 400 B.C.

and you said to an ancient Greek, what is love?

They would say, love is a process of education.

And lovers should, of course, be able to pick each other up for things that they don't spot in one another.

And they should be trying to develop into the best version of themselves rather than simply staying stuck in an admiration for who they are today.

Become who you could be, not worship who you happen to be right now.

All of this sounds very strange in romantic culture, which is why relationships are so difficult in our time.

Let's remember that a person's life satisfaction is determined by up to around 70% by the quality of their personal relationships.

A Martian hearing that statistic visiting planet Earth would think.

Well, clearly Earthlings, given the enormous role of love, will be spending 70% of their money and 70% of their educational time working out how on Earth this business of love works.

We spend hardly any time rationally thinking about it.

None of us are made to sit through classes in attachment theory classes, in apology classes, in listening classes, in communication.

No, we're, you know, physics is important.

Geography is important, don't get me wrong.

But is there no time for this, given its role in our lives?

Do we really want to leave this to chance?

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Love is a skill, not a feeling | Alain de Botton: Full Interview

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