Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

I've been asked to talk to you today about an essay that I wrote, uh, for the New York Times, um, last year, which went under a rather dramatic, uh, heading. Uh, it was called "Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person." And perhaps we can just begin, um, we're among friends, um, by just asking how many of you in the room do feel, on balance, that you have married the wrong person? I mean, we're among friends. Honest, any? Yeah, lady? A couple of people? That’s 5, 10? I'd say 30 people in the room, and we always have to trle that, uh, so there's a pretty hefty majority.

But I'm here to give counsel and to give, uh, consolation for this situation. You know, there's a lot of anger around our love lives, privately held, but a lot of us go around feeling quite enraged, angry privately about the way that our love lives have gone. My task today is to turn that anger into sadness. If we manage to turn rage into grief, we will have made psychological progress.

This is, uh, the task today. What lies behind rage very often is an unusual quality because we tend to think that very angry people are sort of dark and pessimistic characters. Absolutely not! Scratch the surface of any regularly angry person and you will find a wild optimist. It is in fact hope that drives rage. Think of the person who screams every time they can't find their house keys or every time they get stuck in traffic. These unfortunate characters are evincing a curious but reckless faith in a world in which keys never go astray; the roads are mysteriously traffic free. It is hope that is turbocharging their rage.

So if we're to get a little bit less sad, uh, and a little less angry about our love lives, we will have to diminish some of our hopes. It's very hard to diminish hope around love because there are vast industries designed to inflate our expectations of love. Um, there was a wonderful quote from the German philosopher, Theodore Adorno, who in the 1960s said that the most dangerous man in America was Walt Disney.

The reason for his attack on Walt was because he believed that Walt was the prime agent of hope and therefore of rage and therefore of bitterness. He thought that, um, it was the task of philosophy to let us down, uh, gently, which is what I'm going to be, uh, doing, uh, today.

So remember the theme of the talk: why you will marry the wrong person. There are a number of reasons why this is going to happen to you, or has maybe already in the privacy of your heart happened to you. Um, I should say that it's not that bad. The reason is that all of us, uh, will not manage to find the right person, but we will probably all of us manage to find a good enough person. So, and that's success.

Um, as you will come to see, one of the reasons why we're not going to be able to pull this one off as successfully as we might have hoped at the outset of our, probably, our teenage hood when we were contemplating love is that we are very strange. I'm very strange and you're very strange. You don't let on, and you know we're not going to do anything very dangerous, but we are basically psychologically quite strange.

Um, we don't normally know very much about this strangeness. It takes us a long, long time before we're really on top of the way in which we are hard to live with. Does anyone in this room think that they're quite easy to live with on balance? Yeah? Oh my goodness. Okay, I don't want to be rude, but please come and see me afterwards. I know, I know that you're not easy to live with.

Um, and the reason is that you are Homo sapiens, and therefore you are not easy to live with. No one is, um, and but there's a wall of silence that surrounds us from a deeper acquaintance with what is actually so difficult about us. Uh, our friends don't want to tell us. Why would they bother? They just want a pleasant evening out.

They're not our friends. They know more about us and more about our flaws probably after a 10-minute acquaintance. A stranger will know more about your flaws than you might learn over 40 years of life on the planet. Our capacity to intuit what is wrong with us is very weak. Our parents don't tell us very much. Why would they? They love us too much. They know; they can see, of course.

I mean they've followed us from the crib; they know what's wrong with us. They're not going to tell us, uh, because they just want to, you know, be sweet. Uh, and our ex-lovers, a vital source of knowledge, they know absolutely, they know. Uh, but do you remember that speech that they gave? It was moving at the time when they said that they wanted a little more space and were attracted to travel and were interested in the culture of Southeast Asia? Nonsense!

They thought lots of things were wrong with you, but they weren't going to be bothered to tell you. They were just off out of there. Why would they bother? So this knowledge that is out there is not in you. It's out there, but it's not in you. And so, therefore, we progress through the world with a very, uh, low sense of what is actually wrong with us.

Um, not least, all of us are addicts. Almost all of us are addicts, not injecting heroin as such, but addicts in the—we need to redefine what addiction is. I like to define addiction not in terms of the substance you're taking. In other words, you know, I'm a heroin addict, I'm a cocaine addict—no! Addiction is basically any pattern of behavior whereby you cannot stand to be with yourself and certain of the more uncomfortable thoughts and, more importantly, emotions that come from being on your own.

And so, therefore, you can be addicted to almost anything so long as it keeps you away from yourself, so long as it keeps you away from tricky self-knowledge. And most of us are addicts, and thanks to all sorts of technologies and, uh, distractions, etc., we can have a good life where we will almost certainly be guaranteed not to spend any time with ourselves.

Um, except maybe for certain kinds of airlines that still don't have the gadgets to distract us, but otherwise you can be guaranteed you don't have to talk to yourself. And this is a disaster for your capacity to have a relationship with another person because until you know yourself, you can't properly relate, uh, to another person.

Um, one of the reasons why love is so tricky for us is that it requires us to do something we really don't want to do, which is to approach another human being and say, "I need you. I wouldn’t really survive without you. I am vulnerable before you." There’s a very strong impulse in all of us to be strong and to be well-defended and not to reveal our vulnerability to another person.

Psychologists talk of two patterns of response that tend to crop up in people whenever there's a danger of needing to be extremely vulnerable, dangerously vulnerable, and exposed to another person. The first response is to get what, um, uh, psychologists call "anxiously attached." This attachment theory some of you may know.

So when you are anxiously attached to somebody, rather than saying, "I need you. I depend on you," you start to get very procedural. You say, "You're ten minutes late," or "I think the bin bags need to be taken out." Or you start to get strict when actually what you want to do is to ask a very poignant question: "Do you still care about me?" But we don't dare to ask that question, so instead we get nasty, we get stiff, uh, we get procedural.

The other pattern of behavior, which psychologists have identified and it tends to apply to people, uh, who are—this room, in other words—A types, very outgoing types, uh, strivers, uh, you become in relationships—tell me if I'm wrong—you become what is known as "avoidant," which means that when you need someone, it's precisely at that moment that you pretend you don't. When you feel most vulnerable, you say, "I'm quite busy at the moment. I'm fine, thanks. I'm well busy today."

Uh, in other words, you don't reveal the need for another person, which sets them off into a chain of wondering whether, uh, you are to be trusted. And there's then a cycle of low trust. So we get into these patterns of not daring to do the thing that we really need to do, which is to say, even though I'm a grown person, maybe I've got a beard, maybe I've been alive for a long time, uh, I'm 6'2", etc., I'm actually a small child inside and I need you, like a small child would need its parent.

This is so humbling that most of us refuse to make that step and therefore refuse the challenge of, uh, love. Um, in short, we don't know very, very much how to love. We—and it sounds very odd because imagine if somebody said to you, look, all of us probably in this room would probably need to go to a school of love.

We think, "What? A school of love? Love is just an instinct." No, it's not! It's a skill and it's a skill that needs to be learned, and it's a skill that our society refuses to consider as a skill. We are meant to always just follow our feelings. If you keep following your feelings, you will almost certainly make a big mistake, uh, in your life.

What is love ultimately? Love, I believe, is something—first of all, there's a distinction between love, loving, and being loved. We all start off in life by knowing a lot about being loved. Being loved is the fun bit. Uh, that's when somebody brings you something on a tray and asks you how your day at school went, etc. And we grow up thinking that that is what's going to happen in an adult relationship.

We can be forgiven for that; it's an understandable mistake, but it's a very tragic mistake and it leads us not to pay attention to the other side of the equation, which is to love. And what does it really mean to love? To love, ultimately, is to have the willingness to interpret someone's, on the surface, not very appealing behavior in order to find more benevolent reasons why it may be unfolding.

In other words, to love someone is to apply charity and generosity of interpretation. Most of us are in dire need of love because actually we need to have some slack cut for us. Because our behavior is often so tricky that if we don't do this, uh, we wouldn't get through, uh, any kind of relationship, but we're not used to thinking that that is at the core of what love is.

The core of what love is is the willingness to interpret another's behavior. Um, what we tend to be very bad at is recognizing that anyone that we can love is going to be a perplexing mixture of the good and the bad. There's a wonderful, uh, psychoanalyst called Melanie Klein, who was active in the 50s and 60s, originally from Vienna, uh, active in North London studying how children learned about relationships from the parental situation.

And she came up with a very fascinating analysis. She argued that when children are small, very small, they don't really realize that a parent is one character. They actually do what she called "split a parent" into a good parent and a bad parent. And so, this is when a baby is, you know, really at the infant stage.

So what you do is you split into the good mother and the bad mother, and it takes a long, long time—Melanie Klein thought it might be until you're four—um, until you actually realize that the good and the bad mother are one person. And you become ambivalent. In other words, you become able to hate someone and really go off them and at the same time also love them. And you're able not to run away from that situation. You're able to say, "I love someone and hate them," and that's okay.

Uh, and Melanie Klein thought this is an immense psychological achievement when we can no longer merely divide people into absolutely brilliant, perfect, "What marvelous!" and "Hateful, let me down, disappointed me!" Everyone who we love is going to disappoint us. We start off with idealization and we end up often with denigration. The person goes from being absolutely marvelous to being absolutely terrible.

Maturity is the ability to see that there are no heroes or sinners really among human beings, that all of us have this wonderfully perplexing mixture of the good and the bad. And adulthood, true psychological maturity—and you may need to be 65 before it hits you; I'm not there yet—is the capacity to realize that anyone that you love is going to be this mixture of, uh, the good and the bad.

So love is not just admiration for strength; it is also tolerance for weakness and recognition of ambivalence. Um, the reason why we're going to probably make some real mistakes when we choose our love partners—some of you in this room have made some stunning mistakes—now why is this? The reason is that we've been told that the way to find a good partner is to follow your instinct, right? Follow your heart!

That's the mantra. And so we're all the time reminded that if we stop, uh, reasoning, analyzing—by the way, are there people in this room who think that you can think too much about your emotions? There are sort of a few people who go, "You can think too much." A few people? Okay, I—you can't think too much; you can only ever think badly, but there's no such thing as thinking too much about emotions.

But the problem is we live in a romantic culture that privileges impulse. Now, when it comes to love, something tricky occurs because you don't have to be a paid-out believer in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis to realize that the way we love as adults sits on top of our early childhood experiences. And in early childhood, the way that we learned about love was not just via experiences of tenderness and kindness and generosity.

The love that we will have tasted as children will also be bound up with experiences of being let down, being humiliated, maybe being with a parent who treated us very harshly, who scolded us, who made us feel small in some way. In other words, quite a lot about our early experiences of love abound with various kinds of suffering.

Now something quite bad happens when we start to go out into the adult world and start to choose love partners. We think we're out to find partners who will make us happy, but we're not. We're out to find partners who will feel familiar— and that may be a very different thing—because familiarity may be bound up with particular kinds of torture.

And this explains why sometimes, um, people will say to us, "Look, there's a wonderful person. You should go and date them. They're good-looking, they're charming, they're all sorts of things," and we go out with them, and we do recognize that they're really wonderful and amazing, but we have to confess to our partners, to our friends, that actually we found this person—often we struggle with the vocabulary.

We say, "Maybe not that exciting," or "Maybe not sexy" or "A bit boring," but really what we mean is that we've detected in this really quite accomplished person someone who will not be able to make us suffer in the way that we need to suffer in order to feel that love is real. And that's why we reject them.

So we are not merely on a quest to be happy; we are on a quest to suffer in ways that feel familiar, and this radically undermines our capacity to find a good partner. Here's another reason why we're going to come unstuck in the field of love. We tend to believe that the more a lover is right for us, the less we're going to have to explain about who we are, how we feel, what upsets us, what we want.

We believe, rather, as a young child believes of its parent, that a true lover will guess what is in our minds. One of the great errors that human beings make is permanently to feel that other people know what's in their minds without us having said what's in our minds.

It's very cumbersome to use words. It's such a bore. And when it comes to love, we have this deep desire that we will simply be understood wordlessly. It's touching; it's a beautiful romantic idea, but it also leads to a catastrophic outbreak of sulking.

Now what is sulking? Sulking is an interesting phenomenon. We don't just sulk with anyone; we sulk with people who we feel should understand us and yet for some reason have decided not to. And that's why we tend to reserve our sulks for people who we love and who we think love us.

And they tell us something, you know, they unwittingly will trigger a negative reaction in us, and we'll sulk, and they'll say, "What's wrong with you, darling?" And we'll say, "Nothing." And they'll say, "But come on, you're upset," and we'll go, "No, I'm not. I'm absolutely fine." And it's not true, and we'll go upstairs and we'll shut the door and we won't tell them what's wrong with us.

And then they'll knock at the door and they'll say, "Please, just tell me," and we'll say no. Because we want them to read our souls because we expect that a true lover can understand what we feel and who we are without us speaking.

This is a catastrophe for our capacity to form lasting relationships. If you do not explain, you can never be understood. The root to a good marriage and to good love is the ability to become a good teacher. Now, teaching sounds like a narrow profession—those guys in tweed jackets and fussy with a chalkboard, etc. I'm not talking about that kind of teaching.

All of us, whatever our job aspirations, whatever it is we do, have to become teachers. Now teaching is merely the word that we give to the skill of getting an idea from one head into another in a way that is likely to be accepted. And most of us are appalling teachers. Most of us teach when we're tired, when we're frightened.

What are we frightened of? We're frightened we've married an idiot. And because we're so frightened, we start screaming at them, "You've got to understand!" And the thing is that unfortunately, by the time you've started to humiliate the person you want to understand something, less, and over, you will never get anyone to understand what you want them to understand so long as you make them feel small.

In order to teach well, you need to be relaxed. You need to accept that maybe your partner won't understand. Um, and also you need a culture within a couple that two people are going to need to teach each other and therefore also learn from one another.

And this brings me to the next reason why you're going to have a very unhappy relationship probably, and that is because you probably believe that when somebody tries to tell you something about yourself that's a little ticklish and a little uncomfortable, they are attacking you. They're not! They're trying to make you into a better person.

And we don't tend to believe that this has a role in love. We tend to believe that true love means accepting the whole of us. It doesn't! No one should accept the whole of us. We're appalling! Really! Want the whole of you accepted? No, that's not love! The full display of our characters, the full articulation of who we are should not be something that we do in front of anyone that we care about.

Um, so what we need to do, uh, is to accept that the other person is going to want to educate us and that it isn't a criticism. Criticism is merely the wrong word that we apply to a much nobler idea, which is to try and make us into better versions of ourselves, but we tend to reject this idea, uh, very strongly.

Um, is there any hope? Of course there's hope! Look, I mentioned the word good enough. It's a phrase taken from a wonderful English psychoanalyst called Donald Winnicott. He had a lot of parents who would come to him and say things like, "I'm so worried I'm not a good parent," um, "my child has this problem or that problem," etc. And he came up with a wonderful phrase. He said, "You are most likely to be a good enough parent."

And it's a relief from our otherwise punishing, uh, perfectionism. The good thing is that none of us are perfect; and therefore, we don't need perfection. And the demand for perfection will lead you to only one thing: loneliness! You cannot have perfection and company. To be in company with another person is to be negotiating imperfection every day.

Um, incompatibility—we are all incompatible—but it is the work of love to make us graciously accommodate each other and ourselves to each other's incompatibilities. Um, therefore, compatibility is an achievement of love; it isn't what you need from the outset. Of course, you're not going to be totally compatible. That's not the point. It is through love that you grow gradually to accept the need to be compatible.

Um, we probably can't change our types, right? So all of us, pro many of us, have got types who are going to cause us real problems. They may be too distant; they may be arrogant. They're going to torture us in some way. Now friends casually say to us, "Chuck them! Get out the relationship!" Etc. Right? No, I don't—you know we’re realists here at Google and I'm giving you realistic advice: you're not going to manage to change your type.

Let's get that for granted. What you can do, and this is a big achievement, is to change how you characteristically respond to your tricky type. Most of us have formed the way that we respond to tricky types in early childhood. So, we had a distant parent; we've now chosen a distant lover. When we were very young, we responded to that distant parent by attention-seeking.

We rattled and banged, and now we're adults, we rattle and bang in our own way and we think that's going to help. It doesn't! It creates a cycle that's going to be a vicious, uh, cycle that's not going to get us anywhere. It is open to us at any time to have a more mature response to the challenges that the types of people we're attracted to are going to pose for us.

And that is an immense step forward, an immense achievement. Um, the other thing we should do is recognize the nobility of compromise. One of the most shameful things to ever have to admit is to say, "This is my partner. I've compromised in choosing them. I've compromised."

Oh, why have you compromised? "Well, I'm not that attractive myself. I've got lots of problems. I'm a bit nutty, frankly. I couldn't pull anyone better, but they're very nice. They're okay." Now, you would think, loser! It's not true! Compromise is noble! We compromise in every area of life; there's no reason why we shouldn't compromise in our love lives.

Maybe we're sticking around for the children. Good people say, "Oh, they're only sticking around for the children." That's a wonderful reason to stick around! Why else are you going to stick around, okay? So let's look a bit more benevolently at the art of, uh, compromise. It's a massive achievement, uh, in love.

I'm going to end, um, with a quote from one of my favorite philosophers: Danish 19th-century very gloomy philosopher called Kierkegaard. And Kierkegaard, in his book "Either/Or," had a wonderful outburst where he basically said, of course, you're going to marry the wrong person and make the wrong decisions in a whole row of areas. And the reason you're going to do this is that you're human! Therefore, do not berate yourself for doing what humans do.

This is what he says: "Marry and you will regret it! Don't marry, you will also regret it! Marry or don't marry, you will regret it either way! Laugh at the world's foolishness, you'll regret it! Weep over it; you'll regret that too! Laugh at the world's foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both! Hang yourself, you will regret it! Don't hang yourself, you will regret that too! Hang yourself or don't hang yourself, you'll regret it either way! Whether you hang yourself or don't hang yourself, you will regret both!"

This gentleman is the essence of all philosophy. Thank you very much!

[Applause]

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