The Problem with Modern Love

thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video more about them in just a moment to love at all is to be vulnerable love anything and your heart will be rung and possibly broken it seems like we have entered a sort of Dark Age for love it has almost become a great unifier across the political and social Spectra no matter who we are and no matter what views we hold everyone seems to agree on one thing the way we approach Love Today is fun fundamentally broken they may disagree on the causes or even what is broken

about it but they tend to concur that something is rotten in the state of Romance when this many people Converge on a single point you can normally bet that there is some excellent philosophy involved and with something as universal important and life affirming as love at stake it is imperative that we take a careful look at the issue so in this video I'll be taking some of the most common complaints about love from across the internet and explore the philosophical background behind those ideas and also consider some constructive criticism for the way we might approach

friendship passion affection and more get ready to learn how optimism and cynicism are close cousins how we have killed commitment and why our ideas about love are not just muddled but outright contradictory as always bear in mind that there is so much more to say on this topic than I will do here and that I absolutely do not have the final word on the issue I largely hope this can simply serve as an aid in your own thinking and Reflections about love I would also like to give a special mention to the works of Simon

May and alandi Boton as they were incredibly helpful while researching this video but before we get started I want to thank the very kind sponsor of this video Squarespace if you are looking to build a website then you know it can be a real struggle first you have to find the domain name then get round to actually building the website and there's always this underlying fear that you are messing up the design but this is where Squarespace can come to the rescue they compress all of that into one unified platform and use templates to take

most of the complexity and headache out of website building I'm currently using it to build my own website cuz I need one of those now and despite my meager technical capabilities it's actually been incredibly straightforward head to squarespace.com unsolicited advice and use the code unsolicited advice to get 10% off your first purchase of a domain or a website but anyway back to love first I recognize that people get a little bit embarrassed when they're talking about love so I want to clear the air by reassuring you that when it comes to love we are all

a little bit mad one the terrifying Power of Love in Johan Von gerta's the Sorrows of young verta we get one of the most extreme yet troublingly honest portrayals of love in all fiction and specifically its darker and more terrifying aspects the plot follows a young romantic man named Vera as he falls deeply in love with a young lady called Charlotte who in turn is promise to her lover Albert in the frustration and pain of his thwarted love verta becomes increasingly erratic whereas before he seemed peaceful calm and generally like a reasonable chap if a

bit eccentric now he was almost violent in his madness he eventually drives both Charlotte and Albert away with his outbursts and alone turns a gun on himself to end his torment now this is obviously a very dramatic story and today it seems incredibly extreme but I bring it up because I think it hits upon an important point that often goes overlooked in discussions about love and specifically that kind of passionate erotic love that can hit us at the early stages of dating I think we all know the experience of getting to know someone and it

becoming clear that our feelings for them have become out of touch with what is reasonable or rational to feel at this stage you become painfully aware of the fact that you are too key you think about the object of your affection far more than you would admit to anyone outside of a therapist's office and suddenly this person who you don't even know all that well is of supreme importance to you and their attitude to you takes on a quasi metaphysical significance the objectively quite trivial details of their actions become tiny opportunities for Obsession the time

they waited before texting you back whether they laughed at your ever so slightly cringey joke whether they broke off eye contact just a second too early each of these probably means nothing but your AOS adult brain hunts them through the night and invest investigates them for Clues like a modern Seer reading the future in the entrails of a cat and the patterns of amorous Insanity do not end there once you are together you start to become ever more attached to this person slowly the sense that you could do without them Fades into the background and

they become a fixture of your life you know that you could very well survive on your own but in some sense that idea remains unconvincing your cognitive faculties are at odds with your emotional reality the other person starts to feel like an all while you know that that is not strictly true you push the idea that you could even be separated far to the back of your mind the concepts that your partner might one day turn around and no longer love you or die in some horrible accident or that you might be split by circumstances

outside either of your control all of these very real possibilities are denied they are viewed as as absurd as asking whether the sun will rise tomorrow you are deep in emotional investment and are willing to ride this thing as long as it goes alternatively maybe something entirely different and equally strange happens your partner does something that you find vaguely irritating and all of a sudden you notice other parts of them that are annoying as well our Rose tinted glasses start to come off but rather than replacing them with a more compassionate kind of love one

that learns to appreciate our lover for who they are our minds immediately flip to the reverse we replace our Ruddy spectacles with dark ones and everything our beloved does strikes us as unconscionably infected with them them we resent them for not living up to our expectations while at the same time crying out for them to love us in the way that we want to be loved paradoxically we both desperately want to stay and desperately want to leave our mind is torn between two poles and we start to go a bit mad to take a fourth

example of Love's Madness we might allow our love to Blind us to someone who is really quite awful they might neglect us or hurt us repeatedly beating us down with their scornful emotions they seem to Us in contempt hate us even yet at the same time this only draws Us in more we say that the problem must be us and we chastise ourselves for not earning their approval the beloved's level of affection becomes the barometer for our self-worth and we drive ourselves crazy attempting to attain it if one of our friends was in this situation

we would tell them to get out say that they are out of their minds that almost anything will be better than their current position and yet we stay inexplicably against our r Ral Wills only realizing our own Insanity after we have already left these four examples illustrate something that will become a general theme over the course of the video it's a thing we all know and yet we hide from it because it makes us really quite embarrassed at almost every level love can make us a little bit irrational insane and erratic it can make us

do things that we would never have dreamed turn an ordinary person into some Earthly Angel and hide the fact that we are being treated in incredibly poorly by someone who professes to love us I want to acknowledge this point because if we're going to talk about love then we're going to have to get over this embarrassment none of us are perfectly rational especially in this sphere and there is a reason why being hit with Cupid's arrow was seen as almost a sign of Madness why it drove Dao to the funeral P even when she had

an entire Kingdom at her disposal many of the complaints we look at today are going to acknowledge the inner emotional chaos of love but I want to let you know that it is totally okay there is nothing to be embarrassed about and that it is Perfectly Natural for this topic to draw out of us all those aspects of our characters we desperately want to hide so for this video I want you to bear in mind n's famous aphorism that which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil with that groundwork laid

let's take a peak behind the curtain of our own affectionate insanity and see the first complaint that people have about modern dating two l expectations a huge number of the issues people have with modern dating come back to the idea that men or women or both have expectations that are far too high we are told that all women really want is an absurdly tall man with baby blue eyes who works in the city and that conversely every man desires a comically proportioned impossibly beautiful young lady who is simultaneously sexually veracious and chased to the point

of parody and to be fair I am sure that there are some genuinely awful expectations out there and that many of them are very shallow but I think that these superficial high standards mask a far deeper more philosophical expectation for love that we really ought to reconsider the idea that love will redeem us totally and unreservedly to a certain extent I think this is baked into the structure of falling in love the early stages of courtship are accompanied by an unprecedented flush of chemicals in our brain that almost resemble a drug binge and this helps

cement the idea that there is something truly special and unique on the horizon additionally we have inherited a whole host of philosophical beliefs about love that promise extraordinary things notably many early church fathers began to place love and specifically Divine love as the thing that grants Humanity its dignity and meaning Simon May explores this point in fantastic detail in his history of love for these early Christian thinkers love eventually Rose to become the Supreme virtue that we humans should strive for we see St Paul write that if we do not have love then we have

nothing we could do whatever great Deeds we wished have faith Beyond imagining and even the Divine gift of Prophecy but if we don't have love then we gain nothing in other words love is painted as a missing ingredient and an essential component of a fulfilled and meaningful life to a certain extent religious thinkers have a lot more leeway here because when they say love they are often talking partly about the Divine love of God since God is omnipotent and all loving there are all sorts of things his love might be able to do save us

from hell for instance or give his only son to redeem Humanity the trouble is many of us are applying this framework not to God but to other people a huge number of romantic narratives present love as having an almost god-like power even when it is felt by us mere mortals some have argued that this is a peculiarity of the Romantic age that emerged in the 18th and early 19th centuries but I think we can see examples before them for instance in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet we often focus on the traged of the protagonists and forget

that it is their love and the consequences of preventing it that caused the two vones families to put aside their deadly Feud it is because of the misadventured pitous overthrows of the two starcross lovers that their death buries their parents Strife as a side note a lot of people really rag on Romeo and Juliet these days but there's a reason it's a classic it's not just two teenagers did stupid things even if it is definitely sometimes that this idea that love is the Panacea the cure for all your psychological and philosophical ills has only increased

in recent years I cannot count the number of romcoms whose plot is specifically about a protagonist's personal problems being plugged by another person romantic love is pitched as the solution to everything from Financial stresses to existential crisis Beyond this we've inherited historical ideas from the 12th and 13th centuries about the ennobling power of love which filtered from the Muslim world into Europe in the wake of the Crusades under this conception it is not just that love can be a motiv Ator to make you better but that love in and of itself had a noble ethical

quality to it this idea was famously dubbed the religion of Love by CS Lewis in his book The allegory of love and it is true that Romanticism has only intensified this idea in everything from Jan Austin to DH Lawrence you see love as the answer to General problems of Life which at least in theory seem to have very little to do with romance in lady chat's lover the protagonist is stuck in a Loveless marriage and her Affair certainly helps with that but it also manages to fix her General onwe about life itself this is actually

a really interesting staple of infidelity plots more generally the affair not only rekindles the protagonist's views on Love It reinvigorates their entire conception of life as I said I think this is partly because falling in love does kind of feel like all your problems are being solved provided that that love is reciprocated we are filled with such rushes of excitement that the very notion of an issue almost seems a bit absurd how could we be unhappy when they are there with Millennia of cultural artifacts supporting this idea it is easy to wholeheartedly believe it but

there is a small problem because while love is wonderful it is not the cure to every problem we have and deep down we know this love did not save Tolstoy from his depression and it will not help us pay the bills the ideal conception of Love rubs up against the nonideal world and does not quite fit this might not be so bad if we became comfortable with this IDE idea that love is great in a whole host of ways but it is not omnipotent however we often draw the exact opposite conclusion we say that since

this love did not solve all our issues it must not be real love we might not even consciously think this in explicit terms but we begin to blame our lover for the things that go wrong in our own lives or as debaton wonderfully put it we confuse being unhappy around someone with being unhappy because of them in voltaire's candid he makes an incisive critique of the idea that we in the best of all possible worlds he shows how an overly optimistic Outlook can not only Cloud our view of reality but also prevent us from actually

bothering to improve our situation he leans towards a sort of moderate pessimism where we approach life safe in the knowledge that things will definitely go wrong and that there is no total solution to the issues of existence and I think this attitude may help us in the way that we approach love it may be very comforting to believe that once you are in love the trials and tribulations of life will gently Fade Into the background and we are constantly bombarded with the idea that this is the case but I don't think it's a concept that

will serve us very well in the long run it expects our beloved to have the power of a God and that is far too much pressure to place on a single mortal person of course unlearning such a deeply rooted cultural belief is far easier said than done but this exaggeration of Love's power can quickly become a destructive cycle because it has the further rather unfortunate effect three The Cult of Aeros as is mentioned in probably every article YouTube video and thinkpiece on Romance the ancient Greeks had a number of different conceptions of Love among others

there is Aeros erotic love filia friendly brotherly love and Agape or Universal spiritual love Plato held that every single type of Love had its place because all of it set us on the road to what he saw as the ultimate goal of Love contemplating the forms of the good and the beautiful today we tend not to agree with Plato about the end goal of love but these distinctions still remain supremely helpful because the prizing of romantic love has also led to the prioritization of Aeros Above All Else and this has potentially quite unfortunate consequences let's

start by considering the Romantic concept of the one in its classic form the one is something like a soulmate they Walts into your lives pre-made and perfect metaphysically destined to be with you perhaps this idea is best expressed by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium where he theorizes that each of us is one half of a single multi-med organism that has been separated by the gods we must then spend our lives searching for our missing half so that we may then be complete this idea has the component of the one that has received the most criticism in

modern years the metaphysical uniqueness of the one this concept that there is one specific person we are destined to be with is falling out of fashion and probably for good reason a te logical conception of the universe doesn't mesh that well with dating apps however predestination and metaphysical specialness are not the only properties of the one that exist in our cultural Consciousness there are a whole other set of qualities that we often skim over but are equally open to philosophical critique to name just a few there's the idea that the one is someone with whom

you are effortlessly compatible that they trigger an instinctive erotic response that has a unique phenomenological character that all-important special feeling that they fulfill all of your emotional and physical needs just by themselves that you do not argue or dispute or disagree and if you do then it's a sign of deep narrative trouble and that they know you intuitively almost to the point of mind reading or Clairvoyance you can see so many of these in our classic romantic narratives when Romeo has one conversation with Juliet he is instantly smitten as she is with him verta describes

in detail the special feeling that Charlotte arouses in him believing that they would be the perfect pair in Notting Hill Hugh Grant is pitched as being just what Julia Roberts needs and while in all of these stories there is dispute or conflict between the lovers and they may not even end up together this is pitched as a great tragedy because of the idea in the audience's mind that they are meant to be together that they display all the characteristics of being each other's ones now some components of the one might be very helpful for some

people there are very few things worse than ending up with a lover who makes you miserable so it is useful to have some idea of what you want out of romance for some people the cultural myth of the one may do just that and nothing more however I want to hone in on this idea that a partner is meant to fulfill all your emotional needs because this is quite an idiosyncratic Concepts and I think it risks idealizing love to the point of unattainability it asks an awful lot of just one person for Aristotle it was

not just romance but friendship that was needed for a satisfying life he wrote more on simple felia than he did on the passions and he specifically praised having a small group of close friends with whom you would all strive to be virtuous the Buddha used to say that being surrounded by a loving caring Community was a good step towards Enlightenment while Michelle deont thought that friendship was how we became known by other people without fear where we can reveal our secret thoughts and be assured that we are not being used but appreciated in some ways

I think we've taken these insights on board in our modern conception of love people are much more likely to describe their partner as their best friend than they were in the previous Century nonetheless if we look at the emphasis we currently place on erotic love and compare it to the meager attention we give to Friendship culturally speaking there is no contest besides a few Staples like the buddy cop movie and the heist film Each of which also tends to involve a romantic subplot we give AOS far more attention than its humbler cousin and we don't

just see this reflected in art friendship itself is on the decline with the number of us adults reporting having 10 close friends dropping from 33% in 1990 to 133% in 2021 though of course the causes for this are multifaceted I don't want to denigrate romantic love here it is a phenomenal part of life and something well worth pursuing but at the same time are we not perhaps putting more of our eggs in one basket than is Wise by valuing AOS so much more than felia we may be simultaneously putting too much pressure on our romantic

pairings and failing to appreciate the finer sides of a good strong friendship emotionally friendship has a lot to recommend it we tend to feel a lot less possessive over our friends we are less interested in impressing them we do not care if they're attracted to us we are not so close that we drive one another insane at the same time they tend to have lower expectations of us they don't expect us to sweep them off their feet or thrill them or show them special devotion while your average friendship does not tend to be as close

as your average romantic partnership it still has great potential to Grant Comfort love understanding and companionship and these are many of the things that people look for in Romance anyway even as an atheist one of my favorite parts of the Bible is the intense friendship displayed between Jonathan and King David where the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David and Jonathan loved him as himself friendship is not inherently less valuable than romance but we treat it as if it is I have mentioned this before but one of the most poignant parts of

the Sorrows of young verta is right at the end where a series of characters that we have heard very little about start to weep over Vera's death these are people who cared about him deeply loved him and treasured him but he was too blinded by his obsession with Charlotte to see it he had become so consumed with Aeros that he had forgotten felia entirely and I think it may be worth learning from his mistakes so we don't fall into the same trap this also links very closely with our previous point because friends help fulfill so

many of our desires for emotional connection understanding and more if we begin to let them go or devalue them then the expectations and pressures on our romantic relationships grow ever higher because they have to fill an Ever deeper hole I can't see a reason why love and platonic friendship need to be opposed in this way ideally they are the perfect complement in a balanced life and yet we have tried to make one the denigrated younger brother of the other with disastrous results but next I want to return to this idea of compatibility in order to

display an unfortunate but liberating truth about both ourselves and our lovers four the mysteries of compatibility there are few buzzword that are thrown around more in dating than compatible one of the most common complaints I have heard from various people both in person and online is I cannot find anyone who is compatible with me and this is a totally understandable concern because you want to be with someone who you mesh with someone who slots into you and you slot into them uh you know what I mean this wish is only intensified by the first component

of the one that we just looked at effortless compatibility we are constantly shown narratives where two people are not just compatible but are so without the slightest hint of struggle or strain often times the reason that lovers are kept apart in these stories is not to do with them they would be perfect it is just some pesky external circumstance or misunderstanding in Disney's Aladdin Jasmine and Aladdin are already compatible the beginning of the film and it is the overcoming of social obstacles to their love that occupies the bulk of the runtime the overall message is

that the old original Aladdin was right all along and he did not need to change in Rossini's The Barber of Seville the count and Rosen are already smitten with one another from the start and the entire plot Works around how they rescue our anenu from the clutches of her guardian in Cinderella The Prince and our aonomus heroin face no issues of compatibility regarding their personality it is just the pesky matter of Cinderella's poverty and shame that keeps them apart all of this reinforces the message that total compatibility comes naturally and to return to a general

theme so far in the video at the start it often seems to when you first meet someone you just don't know very much about them and they don't know very much about you Additionally you are both trying your hardest to put your best foot forward displaying all of your Charming characteristics and hiding all of the ones they might not like you are unlikely to reveal your unhealthy healthy obsession with Legos or your fear of spiders or the fact that you haven't changed your bed sheets in an embarrassingly long time and the beautiful person sat across

from you will also be concealing the way that their last relationship damaged their sense of trust or how they really hate that twe jacket you have inexplicably decided to wear the trouble is that eventually our lovers will do something that deeply irritates us or even hurts us we will discover that at some level our personalities or characters conflict today this is often called by the monosyllabic Monica it that feeling we get when our beloved does something that turns us off and puts a dent in our idealized view of them the thing that strikes me and

many other people about the modern I in dating is just how small and seemingly arbitrary they can be they range from wearing a coat when it's cold to dancing with a friend in a light-hearted and silly fashion I think the reason that the ick hits the person feeling it so hard is because when we meet someone new and we find them attractive we do an incredible Gap filling exercise about every part of them we don't already know about in effect we become Masters at self-deception and storytelling our own personal ESOP crafting fables about our lover

sure we haven't experienced what our newly minted beloved would be like in a crisis but we feel assured that they would somehow remain unflappable we don't yet see our lover for who they are but create an image of a sort of super romantic whose every undiscovered attribute will be somehow irresistible to us as franois de Ros Fuko put it sometimes it is ignorance just as much as knowledge that keeps love alive this issue also goes both ways if relationships are meant to be totally or mostly compatible right from the get-go then there is only one

thing to conclude if our partner criticizes us or mentions that they are upset about something they are about to leave despite all your love and devotion they are going to abandon you because of your fundamental incompatibility it means every problem can potentially trigger an intense fear response because each minor issue is not just something to deal with as a pair but instead a symbol of your ultimate failure to live up to the Romantic ideal the issue here is not so much the problems themselves but again our Strange expectations our habit of imaginatively idealizing our romantic

Partners in the early stages does have certain strengths it can encourage us to take a leap of faith and commit to someone make them seem uniquely endearing and reinvigorate our hope if we have been burned one too many times but by the same token it sets us up for failure in the long term because we all have incompatibilities with one another idiosyncrasies that will get on our Lover's nerves and Neurosis that make us temporarily incomprehensible to the people around us this is not a sign that we are broken or unlovable it is part of Being

Human the trouble with the idea of easy compatibility is that our immediate conclusion upon encountering a problem is to suspect that the whole relationship is doomed and that one or both parties must be deficient in some way they must not have been the one for us after after all we leap from one extreme to the other from they are perfect to we are done for put a pin in this idea as it's going to come up later in the video this pattern idealization disillusionment and abandonment seems to be the cause of a lot of the

dissatisfaction with the current dating Market people understandably Tire of living the same cfan cycle of rolling their Boulder to a first date only to have it come crashing back down the hill just a few months later the truth is the moment we threw ourselves wholeheartedly into idealization we also unwittingly signed ourselves up for the latter two stages the game was rigged from the start but there is another side to this that I want to explore and to do so I'll be drawing from the work of an old favorite of the channel the Danish heartthrob himself

sain ker guard five the aesthetic stage of love one of the most common issues people seem to be facing in Modern Love is a general lack of commitment I've heard people refer to our age as the situationship era and while the majority of both men and women seem to want roughly the same thing a life partner to settle down with this seems to paradoxically be eluding both parties normally when two people want the same thing achieving that thing becomes a hell of a lot easier so a mystery emerges what is happening here to prevent this

well I would argue that part of the problem is that we are experiencing a despair of possibility this is a concept I talk about all the time and it comes from KAG guard's book The sickness unto death it essentially describes a situation where there are too many possibilities and paths to take and as a result commitment to a single path becomes more and more difficult to do until you find that you have wasted all that precious time and now have nothing to show for it at first it feels very strange to think about having too

many choices as a bad thing we come from a very freedom-loving culture and if theorists like John Stuart Miller to be believed more freedom and a greater number of options tends to breed more happiness so surely the Technologies which increase the number of romantic options someone has access to will make them happier in love but if kard is to be believed this is unlikely to be the case for him an essential component of fulfillment in any Endeavor is commitment and commitment is much easier if our options are any golden mean between too many and too

few much of KAG guard's work is run through with his three stages of human life the aesthetic the ethical and the religious more generally the aesthetic is characterized by ISM a general lack of commitment and an unattached exploration of one's options so an aesthetic approach to ideas would be to read widely but to remain uncommitted to any idea in particular taking pleasure in the process of Simply learning the ethical approach broadens our moral Universe to include duties and responsibilities it imates Us in communities and asks what others require of us then the final religious stage

of Life involves an unconditional commitment to a higher power which for kard is God obvious obvously his full views are much more complicated than this and I cannot go into detail on them now but I want to focus on the commitment portion of the stages the aesthetic has little to no commitment the ethicist has some commitments they take responsibility for other people and the religious person is incredibly and almost unconditionally committed to something that they wholeheartedly believe in in other works like the present age kard bemon how excessive options can leave us in the aesthetic

stage of life in a given Pursuit there he talks about how too much information and too many ideas can dull our passion for anyone in particular and we will cease to care about the quality of ideas at all there is a definite link between his despair of possibility and the lack of commitment found in an aesthetic life and in today's romantic context we have at least the illusion of lots of choice dating apps will promise US that there are hundreds of people just waiting for us at the other end of the line our cultural Legends

of Love are filled with handsome strangers chance encounters romance around every corner even when someone is in a committed relationship the image of interrupting the wedding ceremony and asking them to be with you instead has become so cliche it is now just a joke all around us we get the message that if someone is not perfect we can safely drop them or to quote a popular online piece of advice if they won't then find someone who will there is not nothing in this idea total commitments to another person comes with numerous dangers and very few

people would want to encourage enourage others to stay in situations that are making them profoundly unhappy it is just that this General attitude has a philosophical trade-off it encourages us to see love through the lens of the aesthetic for kicker guard strong commitment is always a little bit irrational and to a certain extent I think that's true Faith plays a huge role in his philosophy because he thinks it is a vital component in getting us to do something that seems irrational in the short term but is incredibly helpful in the long run it's a bit

like how believing you will make a jump across AAP will increase your chances of doing so at any given moment committing to a particular thing can seem sort of insane because of the opportunity cost of missing out on all of the other possibilities but if we never commit then we will end up missing out on all of the deeper Joys that lie on the other side of this commitment not least of which is being freed from the question of where the two commit I think this idea of despairing at possibility was best expressed by Sylvia

Plath when she said her existence felt like sitting under a fig tree each of the figs hanging from the branches represented a possible life she could live a direction she could take she felt she was unable to choose any particular one and watched as they eventually fell down to the ground dead and rotten if there were only a few options her decision would have felt that much easier and she probably would have chosen a fig this is a bit like how kard would describe living your entire life in the aesthetic stage and when it comes

to love that is a disaster because it bars us off from the treasures that lie on the other side of commitment in our constant worrying about whether we have chosen the ripest best fig we eventually starve to death surrounded by the corpses of what might have been but of course this is only one side of the equation the problems of excess are balanced by the problems of deprivation and there are a great many who feel like they are deeply underappreciated in Modern Love principally because of their appearance so let's turn to hear this perspective six

the terror of beauty there is a sort of elephant in the room when it comes to romance especially in the modern day and that is that looks are unfortunately supremely important trust me I was an incredibly weird-looking teenager and I am a slightly less weird-looking adult and it is a night and day experience I have many friends both male and female who say exactly the same thing I imagine it has always been harder to date if you are not blessed in the department of looks but as the way people meet one another becomes increasingly image-based

turning to dating apps and social media there is the general perception that things have got much more difficult philosophically this makes a certain degree of sense even as far back as Plato philosophers recognize that love often began with the admiration of someone's physical Beauty these characteristics have always been acknowledged as the starting point of a lot of people's affections though obviously not all however while very few people historically argue that looks do not matter there is a rich philosophical history of pointing out how an overemphasis on beauty can lead to a mountain of suffering when

it comes to love in that very same book where Plato talks about the origins of love in Beauty he also mentions that the higher stages of love should aim to outgrow this physical infatuation while he thinks we begin by appreciating physical Beauty we should aim to develop into treasuring the beauty of ideas again Plato's particular reasoning for this is idiosyncratic but the general thrust of this concept has definitely persisted Beyond him cognitively we tend to know that as long as some attraction exists looks are not highly correlative with where the someone will be a fulfilling

partner for us in the long term we have endless cautionary tales about the seductive yet dangerous Allure of sensual Beauty from the Trojan War to the sirens to T Grant's character in Bridget Jones Diary the message is screamed from all Corners if you are LED on by physical Aesthetics alone disaster awaits the trouble is that people like beautiful things and as far as I can tell this isn't going away if it were that easy to overcome we wouldn't have been telling ourselves the same warning for over 2,000 years and yet still be deceived by a

winning smile however you already know all of that so I'm not going to dwell on it here I instead want to point out that there is a tension between how Beauty functions in society and how we treat the desire to be beautiful or the complaint that one is not sufficiently so on the one hand the evidence that Aesthetics are important is all around us but on the other we judge the wish to become beautiful as in some way shallow from mocking people who work out for aesthetic reasons to decrying makeup is the the domain of

the insecure there is this underlying contempt often shown for people attempting to improve their looks or placing any importance on the at all it is often seen as vapid or indicative of some personal defect if they were truly a great mind or a substantial personality then surely they would not concern themselves with such things I think this is an incredibly cruel societal message to put out while Beauty still clearly matters immensely for people achieving what they would like both out of life and Out of Love this is the first example of a themee that will

become more and more important later in the video the way that we approach love is mired in contradictions and internal tensions For Better or Worse it seems that physical attractiveness is a large component of romantic success but we don't like to acknowledge that it forces us to confront quite an uncomfortable part of ourselves that we are all failing to live up to the ethical standards set by our culture we are all taught not just that looks do not matter but that they should not matter from there it is a short step to to if you

care about looks your own or those of others then you are ethically deficient in some way this then creates a significant philosophical incentive to engage in a sort of double think on the surface we say that beauty does not matter while secretly acknowledging that it absolutely does but if we tell people that looks do not matter then there is only one thing to conclude from romantic troubles it is something to do with our character again it's not that this is never true I'm a massive fan of Aristotle so you'll very rarely catch me saying we

shouldn't work on our characters but it is a bit like telling someone struggling with poverty that they are just not working hard enough as an explanatory hypothesis it seems to miss a huge component of the causal variables at play it also takes something multifaceted and complex and tells someone that it can all be boiled down to one fundamental fact you are not good enough not just descriptively but ethically as well again I think this is a problem of idealization we want to believe that love is selfless and kind and caring about looks is sort of

selfish and sort of not that kind so we reconcile the contradiction by saying that love must not care about looks but rather than this being a soothing balb to someone's romantic issues it is instead a cruel kind of optimism rather than recognizing that we are all partly at the mercy of causal chains that existed long before us and that we will never have full control over any aspect of Our Lives including our love lives we reserve every inch of fault for the person suffering essentially we transform romantic failures from unfortunate circumstances to moral deficiencies with

this comes a whole host of additional baggage like guilt shame and a feeling of personal inadequacy but none of this needs to be there it is an artifact of our idealized picture of love it comes from the same simplistic philosophy that brought you everything that happens in your life is your fault and you can do anything you set your mind to to borrow a thoughts from buun chhan if we can do anything then the only reason we haven't is because we are not good enough far from being a compassionate message to send to someone struggling

with loneliness this strikes me as almost painfully unkind this is the source of thought that sounds friendly on the surface but conceals a whole host of philosophical sins that knowingly or not only increases the sufferer's hardship to continue this point further I want to explore the relationship between the love of others and self-love and how we may have introduced quite a destructive and deceptive principle into our received philosophy of romance seven the expectation of self-love as I was doing research for this video there was one phrase I came across over and over again regarding dating

if you can't love yourself how can you expect others to love you this was often said as if it was ending the discussion a sort of mic drop moment before the enlightened purveyor of this aphoristic Amorous advice strolled into the sunset and I don't want to be unfair here because as we shall see there is not nothing in this but at the same time buried within this phrase is a picture of love that I think both demands far too much of us and obscures its genuinely helpful aspects my primary issue with this piece of advice

is that it treats our self-esteem and our identity formation as something that happens in isolation it paints a picture where we Retreat to our cave for a little while learn to love ourselves and then emerge back into the public sphere with Ironclad self-confidence ready to take Tinder by storm but I don't think this is a realistic expectation to have of people over the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries more and more thinkers came to believe that identity formation is only partly something we do individually and is ultimately Inseparable from how we are perceived

by others jacqu Lan and Jean Paul satra both talked about how we form our self-conceptions by seeing how others react to us and adjusting accordingly I can say I'm a fantastic football player but I can't fully believe it until there is solid evidence and other people to confirm this position when I stroll onto a field and immediately slip over trying to kick the ball not only will other people be unable to believe that I am good at football but I will also struggle to believe it myself this is part of why a lot of child

psychologists Place such an emphasis on the messages parents send to Children through their behavior it forms part of the child's later self-concept whether they see themselves as worthy lovable and safe partly depends on how they are treated by their parents but then this raises a question how on Earth are we meant to fully love our our elves and be confident in ourselves before other people do I'm not suggesting that it's impossible but I do think it is a lot more difficult than it's given credit for this view of Love also stands in stark contrast to

earlier conceptions such as that given by Dante algeri in The Divine Comedy his love beus ascends through Paradise with Dante and eventually Dante even sees the glory of God reflected in the eyes of his beloved this picture implies that love is not simply a matter of two people coming together already complete and self-sufficient but rather a process of mutual development this is echoed in the works of someone like St Thomas aquinus who described loving yourself loving others and loving God as all part of one shared project this is a far less individualistic picture of both

love and self-esteem instead of self-love being something that you learn by yourself and then bring into the world it is something that you and your beloveds support one another in doing by willing the good of the other for the sake of the other we learn both that we are love able and how to love others thereby creating the conditions for self-love to emerge or at least this is how I interpret this idea for dooi it is often the love and care of another person that can spur someone onto their own sort of self-love when aliosha

displays his spiritual love to grushenka this is the first step towards her learning to find her personal dignity and when Sonia loves raskolnikov it is the very thing he needs to embark on the long road to abandoning his self-hatred and making amends for his deed in these Works love is presented as much more of a communal effort and there is no pretense that anyone can wake up one morning and decide to love themselves it is rather that we and by we I mean all of us must help one another to see our lovable aspects or

to again draw from Christian theology to see someone Through The Eyes of an all loving God you don't need to be religious to appreciate that there might be some value in this message it's also worth noting that the love in question need not be romantic in nature and this commun task is pretty vital because the valuable part of the idea that self- Lov is a prerequisite for the love of another is that a poor self-image can lead to all sorts of self-destructive behaviors that make perfect sense to the self-hating lover but baffle everyone around them

including their beloved this is explored in great detail by Debon in various talks books and lectures he concurs with other thinkers like J and Lan that a need to be loved often but not always begins from some feeling of inadequacy we see in someone else both the qualities we wish we had ourselves and someone whose admiration would help complete our self-image as a lovable person it is a bit like how a chef might desire a good review from a particularly harsh critic to serve as the ultimate test of their skill however debaton says that this

is often a catch 22 because when our self-concept is truly in the gutter someone liking us does not become evidence that we were not that bad after all but rather one of two unfortunate things happen we either St to like that person Less on the basis that we do not want to be a part of any club which would have us as a member or we begin to feel incredibly dishonest we suspect that the only reason that they have not abandoned us is because they are yet to discover our fatal flaw we conceive of ourselves

as in some way metaphysically tainted they only like me we say to ourselves because they haven't discovered that I am secretly an ugly repulsive Goblin this can turn the experience of being loved into a source of guilt we feel like we are conning our beloved because if they still love us then we must be playing some sort of trick on them we exist with the permanent anxiety of being discovered either way we are apt to run from the very person we most desire but therein lies the Fatal tension it is hard to convince yourself you

are lovable without love but at the same time it is hard to believe that you are loved if you hold the Deep seated to belief that you are unlovable I certainly don't have a complete solution here but I will refer you back to the previous section of the video where I talked about the importance of friendship friends can help us see our lovability at a much lower Stakes level and as a result can be vital pillars in building our self-esteem yet another reason to reinstate the value of friendship in our society but now I want

to move on to what I think is the root philosophical cause of a great many troubles about love and it's going to be a tricky one to untangle because I think that fundamentally the way we conceive of Love suffers from truly Dee rooted internal tensions that make finding and maintaining love less like discovering a treasure and more like keeping 18 plates spinning at once and that our failure to acknowledge this sets us up for future cynicism eight dissonance and Harmony a brilliant song about love is Bo burnhams lower your expectations I will spare you my

rendition of it but essentially it goes through a series of qualities people desire in a partner and suggest that they are unlikely to find them all at once my favorite line however is you want a good boy a bad boy a good bad boy a half good half bad half boy I love this because I think Burnham here gets to the Crux of the issue in love we don't just want something special we often want a connection where various contradictory properties are kept in perfect tension a great psychoanalyst who touches upon this point is Esther

Perell she has written extensively on how to keep romance alive within long-term relationships and she talks constantly about the two properties of closeness and distance according to her too much has a tendency to kill desire we forget that our partner is another person that they are independent and that they are not simply an extension of ourselves it is hard to feel intense attraction for someone who you view as analogist to your arm but on the other hand too much distance and this can create distress anxiety and damage the very foundations of the relationship in her

therapeutic experience it is only when we simultaneously feel safe and secure with someone but also recognize that they are separate from us that attraction blossoms and blooms over the years this meshes quite well with what a lot of different philosophers and thinkers have said about love in the Bible the togetherness aspect is represented by the two lovers becoming one flesh and the separateness aspect is found in the analogy of the married couple being like Christ and his church two separate entities for Aristophanes it was the existence of a destined other half versus the fact that

they have been cleaved in Twain for Tolstoy it was the illicit availability of count vonsky and the tragedy of Anna's pre-existing marriage for DH Lawrence it is the intense passion that exists between lady chatly and her lover coupled with her unhappy marriage and their class divide for from it is the wish to meld with another person coupled with the recognition that they are not you this tension between self and other togetherness and distance makes love inherently unstable by this I don't mean that it is always chaotic but rather that it does not rest in a

single state it is a bit like shopen how's Will endlessly raging onward never stopping never waiting requiring endless work and struggle luckily there is little that is more meaningful to struggle over and this is only the start of the in attentions in our concept of Love on the one hand we are taught that love is in some way frivolous a thing for children we proclaim the virtues of total self-sufficiency that is what is required to succeed in this world a hard exterior and the unwillingness to rely on anyone else from the men going their own

way to the boss babes The Cult of individualism buries its clause deep but on the other hand we tell people that love is a supreme virtue that it is ennobling kind generous patient that all you need is love and that a life without love is simply meaningless we tell people that love is one of the most important human Pursuits and then denigrate them for wanting it is it any Wonder we end up miserable and Confused to take another example we are often told that love is selfless but on the other hand we're often attracted to

someone who wants us in a slightly selfish fashion we are present presented with a sanitized idea of love that is purely good incredibly chased and stable and then we reach adulthood and a whole chunk of us find that this is not all we want we also want excitement and for our lover to sometimes desire us as an object at the same time we want to be respected and cherished yet also be on the receiving end of someone's occasional selfishness we want them to want the best for us but avariciously we want excitement and comfort risk

and security stability and a rocking boat we want sweetness Vitality gentleness ferocity tenderness Instinct Independence and possession we want our lover to be both our best friend and a beautiful stranger to know them better than we know ourselves and yet for them to remain full of mystery the contradictions abound the tensions are endless and even if not everyone is instantiated in every individual person some of them normally are love as experienced by real existent people is the desire for a Harmony of a whole series of qualities that are at war with one another and when

we are at our most unguarded say when writing or reading romantic fiction we often admit this I say all of this to bring one idea to the Forefront on almost any plausible philosophical analysis love is difficult and only gets more difficult over time there is something in the image of being hit by an arrow or of Romeo's sweet sorrow at parting from Juliet or of hadway following the phrase what is love with baby don't hurt me perhaps this is the biggest myth we tell about love of all that it is meant to be easy straightforward

instinctive and low effort this perhaps sets us up for failure more than anything else and it is an Insidious thing to tell people struggling with love surely it is more realistic to see love as the well- one reward of years of toil growth and development as we learn to integrate a whole another person into our lives and us into theirs as we slowly develop the skill of loving someone how they wish to be loved and teaching them to do the same for us Aristotle used to say that for many skills and virtues there was no

other way to learn them but by personal practice contemplation and habituation he recognized that almost any personal quality worth having was not going to be a simple matter of knowledge that we can reason out in an academy rather we will have to investigate the world for ourselves with the approach that we are learning a skill developing practical wisdom and improving little by little at our chosen Pursuit I would gently suggest that we start to think of love a bit more like this it has numerous strengths whether alone or with our lovers we can start to

look at our romantic failings hiccups or difficulties not as evidence of our fundamental unlovability but of our status as students at Cupid's feet we can follow in the experimental attitude of John Dewey and see this aspect of Our Lives as not simply a goal to be achieved but rather a series of Trials to be slowly refined over time when we inevitably mess up in love we can view it like we've just knocked over our paintbrushes or written a cliche in our notebook it no longer supports the hypothesis that we are broken but rather that we

are learning a lifelong skill and one we won't be finished with when we close our eyes for the final time hopefully with a heart bursting with love I can hear people already saying that this idea of Love requiring constant effort and learning and skill and development has robbed it of much of its luster so allow me to say why I don't think that is true and in any case that it is far better than the alternative nine romantic nihilism in all my research for this video I still did not come across a singular term to

describe the general malays that many people feel about the concept of Love at the moment and I would like to propose one romantic nihilism in my favorite analysis of philosophical nihilism John Stewart identifies that nihilism begins a reaction to broken promises for hundreds of years we were told that there was a God and afterlife and our lives had inherent meaning and gradually people started to view these as false and more than that as lies with nothing to fill the void they became cynical and pessimistic in a moment of empathy ner describes how these nihilists had

put their entire trust and faith into a set of ideas only to discover that they were wrong all along now they feel foolish forever believing them they display the same sort of General undifferentiated skepticism towards the world that many who leave a cult describe in effect they leap from one extreme to the other from optimists and idealists to pessimists and cynics and I think nature is really on to something here about the dangers of idealization in any sphere we like to think that if we present a Rosy and optimistic view of the world or of

key Concepts then that will protect us and if they turn out to be false well then we'll just adjust our views accordingly but this is not necessarily the case if nature is right then once the ideal Falls away we just as often collapse into total despair we reject wholeheartedly the thing that we used to desire recognizing that it is unachievable in the way we wanted we fall into resentment and Scorn we view the object of our wishes as childish and we declare that it is dead this analysis fits almost uncannily well with how many of

our attitudes to romance have shifted strangely it is easier to go from from Love is Everything To Love doesn't exist without our philosophies ever resting in the Middle Ground the promises of love we were fed as children are being broken and we are reacting in a classically 19th century fashion straight from the frying pan of the ideal to the fire of the cynic if love is not to be effortless endlessly glorious and solve every one of our existential problems then we don't want it anymore and I think this is a real shame because at heart

I am a total romantic I firmly believe in the powerful things love can do be it romantic platonic or familiar I think that it can stand alone free from its mythical adornments it can bring us someone to commit to someone to know us and for us to know them it does have the potential to make us Kinder and more caring it is a natural way to infuse life with felt value it can bring out our selfless and generous Natures it can truly be patient kind non-judgmental and non-transactional we can learn to love someone in a

way that makes them feel truly fulfilled and teach them how to do that to us it is not that love will be the cure to every one of our ills but we have every reason to think that it can be a real pillar of our meaning but we also have to recognize that it will come with struggle and strife endless effort tension and contradiction however if we continue to think that love must be easy that it is endlessly Pleasant without trouble or conflict that our partners must be Gods rather than men and that the ability

to love is innate rather than taught then I fear the greater sides of love may be forever out of our reach so if there is one idea you consider from this video I hope it is this much like a lover love itself is neither Angel nor demon it starts out seeming faultless then shows its flaws and then finally we learn to love those flaws too but this is not our god-given gift but rather the end result of long protracted efforts to learn how to love to see our lovers as humans damaged and battered by by

the world fractured and faulty in ways that will drive us insane but when all is said and done we see them as they are and we care for them all the same safe in the knowledge that they are looking at our broken bruised and slightly mad psyches and thinking the exact same thing the more false promises we sell people now the more future nihilists we will create when the scales finally fall from their eyes and they wonder what else we have lied about but as always I encourage you to think about each one of these

ideas critically there was a lot in this video to take in and every single part is open to further discussion criticism and development I hope this acts more as a pump for your own ideas than as a lecture and if you want a totally different perspective on love then click here to watch my take on dov's radical and revolutionary philosophy about love and care in all its forms thank you for watching and have a wonderful day