Name: Alain de Botton: On Love
Uploaded: 2016-10-15T14:12:39.000Z
Duration: 1 h 12 min 49 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...

Thank you so much for coming out tonight.

As Ann's just said, I've written a novel, but I don't want

to talk particularly specifically about the novel.

Please buy it after if you feel inclined.

But what I really want to do is talk about some

And some of these people say to me you know,

'why did you even bother to write a novel?

I thought you were supposed to be a nonfiction writer.

And the reason I wrote a novel is that I believe that many

of our ideas on love come from reading novels.

We tend to think that we love spontaneously

that we're not influenced by what we read and by what we see,

We love within a very historical social context.

It's that lovely biting aphorism from La Rochefoucauld he says

"There are some people who would never have fallen in love

if they hadn't heard there was such a thing."

That's a little extreme, but you get the idea that really

when we love we're taking a lot of our cues

We honour certain feelings that we experience

because other people are telling us to honour them.

We suppress other feelings because people have told us not

Now we are nowadays firmly in a very distinctive era

writers in the middle end of the 18th century and nowadays even

if you've never heard of a single romantic poet or novelist

and you're just having your love life here

So whether you don't necessarily know about it, or feel it,

Now what does Romanticism tell us about love.

It has a very distinctive set of arguments

about what love is like, what we should expect from love

And let me run you through a few romantic assumptions.

I think first, and most central assumption is that for all of us

out there, there is most definitely a soul mate.

We may not have met them already, we may be swiping left,

right furiously in order to try and locate them.

And eventually if we keep going hard enough we will find them.

And when we find them our soul will fuse with theirs.

All areas that have previously been confused

We will no longer feel ourselves worthless, agonising,

This, ladies and gentleman, is the person waiting

The dominant answer of romanticism is by instinct.

You know for most of history the way that people were matched

up was by the elders of the community, by parents,

by other people than the couple themselves.

It was what was known as a marriage of reason.

So-called reasonable criteria, which is maybe

that you had a goat and they had a sheep.

Or you had a plot of land and they had an adjoining part

that the so-called domestic marriages were made.

And that was the way in which people married, have married

for thousands of years, really since the beginning of time.

But along comes Romanticism and says no, we're going to marry

in a different way, we're going to marry by instinct.

that somewhere along the line you will feel a special feeling.

And you don't know when it will strike you.

Maybe you're at the bar, maybe you're at the swimming pool.

Maybe you're just waiting in line for something,

you'll spot somebody and without necessarily knowing too much

about them de the romantics will quack in on it happening

without knowing anything about them other

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Alain de Botton: On Love

love

person

kind

people