Our last Meetup on 2019 will focus on the topic of Love (if I had to choose only one thing to grow globally in 2020, it would be this one).
In this video, the philosopher Alain de Bottom demystifies some ideas we have grown to believe about Love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ6K_f7oSdg
And here is a great resume of this video by Nicola Gray (one of our dear members), if you don't have time to watch (thank you Nicola!):
Romanticism places unrealistic expectations on us. Eg. That we will spend our time together in romantic places doing romantic things, that we will understand our partner perfectly without communication, that we will never feel lonely again, that we shouldn’t give our partner feedback on how to improve, that sex and love go together, and that sex is the ultimate expression of love; that you should ‘be yourself’ in a relationship
Alain’s ideas – that we are all mad or on the edge of madness and ‘deeply dangerous to be around’ and we need to be honest with ourselves about that; that according to psychoanalysis we choose partners based on our (usually) subconscious experience of love as a child, which may not always be healthy and may draw us to people who won’t make us happy; that we choose ‘love’ over true honesty over what we really desire or feel.
Ideas for how we can move forward – we have to reinvent love; we have to move away from being guided by instinct; we should treat our partners with the same sympathy and empathy that we demonstrate to young children; that we should recognise that our partner may be broken inside in some way; humour is important – we should try to see our partners as ‘lovable idiots’ instead of ‘idiots’; secrets are ok; feeling lonely is normal and don’t blame your partner for not understanding everything about you.
But if you do have 19 minutes, its really worth watching. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ6K_f7oSdg