The solution to our relationship agitation is pessimism: lower our expectations. "Every human can
be guaranteed to frustrate, anger, annoy, madden, and disappoint us — and we will (without any
malice) do the same to them."
The lower the expectations of relationships, sex, work, children, politics, the greater our
satisfaction in the actual outcomes.
Being a "generous onlooker", interpreter
"Even when they do not know any of the details, generous onlookers must make a stab at picturing
the overall structure of what might have happened to the wretched being before them. They must
guess that there will be sorrow and regret beneath the furious rantings, or a sense of
intolerable vulnerability behind the pomposity and snobbishness… they will remember that the
person before them was once a baby too."
The "weakness of strength" theory
Weakness-free people do not exist; each person's weakness is the inevitable downside / shadow of
one of their strengths. Comfort comes from not viewing a person's weaknesses in isolation, but
as the necessary cost of enjoying the strengths that drew us to them.
E.g. messy but creative; driven but self-centered; uncompromising but honest.
When meeting someone new, it's fascinating to see what new kinds of strengths they have, but
they will always have corresponding weaknesses that will reveal themselves eventually.
True kindness requires uncommon candor in moments
"True niceness does not mean seeming nice; it means helping the people we are going to
disappoint to adjust as best they can to reality. By administering a sharp, clean blow, the
diplomatic person kills off the torture of hope, accepting the frustration that is likely to
come their way: the diplomat is kind enough to let themselves sometimes be the target of hate."
Vulnerability
Failure is what makes friends. Not winning. Hearing about the failure, what we're sad about,
that we're lonely, how we're being embarrassed. It's endearing.
By being vulnerable, you're offering up the valuable opportunity for others to hurt and
humiliate you.
Friendship
"Friendships cannot develop until one side takes a risk and shows they are ready to like even
when there's as yet no evidence that they are liked back."
"We should stop worrying quite so much whether or not people like us, and make that far more
interesting and socially useful move: concentrate on showing that we like them."
A need to be alone
All of us reach a limit for taking external input, and need to retreat to consult with our own
thoughts, alone.
Retreating to be alone allows us to be our best selves when we return to fellow humans. Rested,
processed, full of original opinions.
The cure for unrequited love is more knowledge, so that they cease to look like the ultimate love
for us. More knowledge will "set you free."
Incumbent jobs and partners may seem less attractive than a shiny new alternative, but it's just
that we have an asymmetry of knowledge and don't know the new thing very well.
Partner-as-child; the "infant model of interpretation"
Every child is good at loving little children. With children, we forgive their obnoxious,
hurtful behavior because we don't assign mean intentions to kids. We have benevolent
explanations for their behavior.
Consider doing the same with adults.
"It's very touching that we live in a world where we have learned to be so kind to children;
it would be even nicer if we learned to be a little more generous toward the childlike parts
of one another."
"The problem with adults is that they look misleadingly adult."
"It was meant to be nicer": as children we were cherished. In marriage, that tends to wear off
quickly and our partner isn't all that interested in the details of our lives and feelings. So
don't judge our marital care against how we were treated as kids.
Marriage acts as a formal obstacle to make one's impulses less dangerous.
"We deliberately invite an elderly aunt or uncle whom we don't even like much to fly around the
world to be there. We are willingly creating a huge layer of embarrassment were we ever to turn
round and admit it might have been a mistake."
Virtual friends, mentors, to give us solace and companionship
"Strangely, it appears that certain imaginary friends drawn from culture can end up feeling more
real and in that sense more present to us than any of our real-life acquaintances, even if they
have been dead a few centuries and lived on another continent. We can feel honored to count them
among our best friends." (in the same way that children cling to transitional objects to embody
and reactivate their memories of parental love when their parents aren't there).
What an honor, for one deceased, to be counted a s friend among the future generations of the
living.
Intro
Why don't we teach emotional education? It's assumed to be unteachable, and that people must
operate on intuition.
Religion provided emotional education throughout history. If you don't have religion, the only
other place to get the education is through "culture."
Self-help is a widely discredited genre: garish covers, overblown promises. But this genre is
working on core problems of self that we need to solve.
Once we stop growing physically, and when we plateau at work, we still grow emotionally as we age.
Sometimes dramatically so.
Prior to romanticism, art was meant to "render tough or knotty lessons and make them easier to
absorb." Art amplified ideas.
Ritual was used to combat the frequent forgetting of important but difficult lessons. E.g.
remembering the seasons; remembering the dead; looking inside ourselves.
It's a devastating belief to think that it's possible to be completely and enduringly happy.
Given the difficulty of life, and the presence of original sin, the best we can hope for is
salves: understanding and companionship.
"Melancholy is not rage or bitterness; it is a noble species of sadness that arises when we are
properly open to the idea that suffering and disappointment are at the heart of human experience.
It is not a disorder that needs to be cured; it is a tender-hearted, calm, dispassionate
acknowledgment of how much agony we will inevitably have to travel through."
Knowing the past (chap 2)
We are deeply shaped by our parents. Kids are impressionable during this period.
"We can return to our original home for a holiday when we are parents ourselves and find,
despite our car, our responsibilities, and our lined faces, that we are eight once more."
As children, we can't understand that a parent is sometimes not in control of their own destiny.
We ask ourselves why did they have to move away or travel for work?
No one passes through childhood without incurring deep emotional "primal wounds." Our childhoods
are so long. It's 20 years before we're classified as adults.
The author argues that any perturbations in childhood cause personality imbalances; fears,
sensitivities. Not dramatic, but significant. People are the victims of their environments, not
necessarily inherently mean or flawed.
(Is that really true? Aren't we giving too much credit to the environment?)
The emotionally helpful childhood
(Helpful, dense section).
Children receive whole care from a powerful, generous adult: "They did not, all the while, ask
that we thank them, understand them, or show them sympathy. They didn't demand that we inquire
how their days went or how they were sleeping at night."
A child's behavior is interpreted charitably, along with connecting actions as followup.
Adults are "boringly predictable."
There is some opportunity for moral freedom, to rebel. Children do not have to "comply at every
turn to be tolerated."
The care-giver isn't jealous of the child. They get their recognition somewhere else. The parent
wants the child to do well for their own sake.
"The child learns that things that break can be fixed. Plans can go awry and new ones will be
made."
Life isn't manufactured to be perfect, without disappointment.
Therapies (chap 3)
(A treatise advocating for the use of therapy. Isn't this perspective too rosy?)
Psychotherapy is a tool, like a bucket to help you hold water.
In all of our relationships (friends, lover), we keep a barrier between what we say and what is
really going on in our heads. No one else bears witness to our inner insanity, except therapists.
Therapists are the one relationship we've constructed where it's OK to do so.
Like a parent, therapists do not require us to reciprocate rapport.
The therapists most powerful tools: "do say more", "go on."
Why is therapy spread out over so many months? It's because revealing ourselves and considering
issues longitudinally is important for getting to solutions. We can't get to the bottom of things
in a marathon session. We need time between for our thoughts to marinate.
Building self-esteem: "when things don't go as we want, we can ask ourselves what a benevolent
fair judge would say, and then actively rehearse to ourselves the words of consolation they would
most likely have offered (we'll tend to know immediately)."
Warning against stoicism and relentlessly "manning up" when faced with trials: "we are mental
athletes at shrugging such things off, but there is a cost to our stoicism. From small
humiliations and slights, large blocks of resentment eventually form that render us unable to love
or trust. What we call depression is in fact sadness and anger that have for too long not been
paid the attention they deserve."
The importance of a breakdown
The big disruptions in "business as usual" shouldn't be censored and treated as scandalous.
They're clear indicators that things must change. It's the body's or the mind's attempt to
dislodge us from a toxic status quo.
Kindness, meritocracies (chap 4)
Being a "generous onlooker" or interpreter
"Even when they do not know any of the details, generous onlookers must make a stab at picturing
the overall structure of what might have happened to the wretched being before them. They must
guess that there will be sorrow and regret beneath the furious rantings, or a sense of
intolerable vulnerability behind the pomposity and snobbishness… they will remember that the
person before them was once a baby too."
All of us can be richly generous in our interpretations, and in giving of sympathy. Unlike
financial generosity, which is from rich to poor.
"Losers"
Beware the overly simplistic implications of a meritocracy.
"Our societies are very interested in winners, but don't really know what to do about losers —
of which there are always, by definition, a far greater number."
In a meritocracy, "the status of a person has to be a more or less reliable indicator of their
effort and decency."
In a meritocracy, failure is a catastrophe, because it sets your identity.
The ancient Greeks had a concept for this: the "tragic drama": you could be good, and yet fail.
The "weakness of strength" theory
Weakness-free people do not exist; each person's weakness is the inevitable downside / shadow of
one of their strengths. Comfort comes from not viewing a person's weaknesses in isolation, but
as the necessary cost of enjoying the strengths that drew us to them.
E.g. messy but creative; driven but self-centered; uncompromising but honest.
When meeting someone new, it's fascinating to see what new kinds of strengths they have, but
they will always have corresponding weaknesses that will reveal themselves eventually.
"Contented people have no need to hurt others", so it must be the case that one's enemies must be
unwell in some way.
Diplomacy
"Knowing the intensity of the craving for respect, diplomats — though they may not always be
able to agree with others — take the trouble to show that they have bothered to see how things
look through foreign eyes."
They work on the relationship just as hard as on the issue.
True kindness requires uncommon candor in moments. "True niceness does not mean seeming nice; it
means helping the people we are going to disappoint to adjust as best they can to reality. By
administering a sharp, clean blow, the diplomatic person kills off the torture of hope,
accepting the frustration that is likely to come their way: the diplomat is kind enough to let
themselves sometimes be the target of hate."
Charm (chap 5)
Shyness
This is curable by focusing on the universal identity that we share with everyone. We are not an
outcast, different; we have something to say and contribute.
Local identity vs universal identity
Our local identity comprises our age, gender, skin color, sexuality, social background,
wealth, career, religion, personality type.
"Universal identity is made up of what we have in common with every other member of the
species: we all have problematic families, have been disappointed, have been idiotic, have all
loved, have all had problems around money."
The purpose of social intercourse is to find "an uncensored glimpse of what life looks through
the eyes of another person and the reassurance that we are not entirely alone" in our
experience.
Vulnerability
Failure is what makes friends. Not winning. Hearing about the failure, what we're sad about,
that we're lonely, how we're being embarrassed. It's endearing.
By being vulnerable, you're offering up the valuable opportunity for others to hurt and
humiliate you.
Friendships
In short, be more friendly, and people will reciprocate.
Argues that people don't have well-defined thinking about whether they deeply like you as a
friend. So you can deepen the friendship by showing that you like them.
"Friendships cannot develop until one side takes a risk and shows they are ready to like even
when there's as yet no evidence that they are liked back."
"We should stop worrying quite so much whether or not people like us, and make that far more
interesting and socially useful move: concentrate on showing that we like them."
Good listening
"We come to social life greedy to speak rather than listen, hungry to meet others but reluctant
to hear them."
Good listeners help the speaker move from unconfused and agitated, to clear and serene.
Social catastrophe
In recovering from severe faux pas, the author wonders whether we should just shut up and accept
the failure, rather than profusely apologizing, justifying, or back-pedaling.
Calm (chap 6)
Pessimism: a tool to improve satisfaction. The lower the expectations of relationships, sex, work,
children, politics, the greater our satisfaction in the actual outcomes.
Self-esteem: (success / expectations).
A need to be alone
All of us reach a limit for taking external input, and need to retreat to consult with our own
thoughts, alone.
Retreating to be alone allows us to be our best selves when we return to fellow humans. Rested,
processed, full of original opinions.
The importance of staring out the window
A period of purpose-free calm, where the birds in our mind, the ones that help constitute our
identity, can land and be considered. This activity is not celebrated in a productivity-obsessed
culture.
Nature
Watching a sunset after a hectic work day: "At this moment, nature seems to be sending us a
humbling message: the incidents of our lives are not terribly important. And yet, strangely,
rather than being distressing, this sensation can be a source of immeasurable solace and
calm."
The scene of a desert, where nothing changes day to day, and changes take centuries. Our lives
come and go and mean little on such time scales.
Getting together (chap 7)
Romanticism: "a disaster for love and relationships."
Myths of romanticism
Love will be just as strong 20 years later, after kids.
It's "deeply hopeful about marriage. It tells us that marriage could combine all the
excitement of a love affair with all the advantages of a settled and practical union."
Sex was made the pinnacle expression of love, coupling the two.
Our partner will understand us intuitively.
Intuition beats analysis.
"True love accepts the other person for who they are."
We don't need an education in love.
"We should have no secrets and spend constant time together (work shouldn't get in the way)."
"Classic" framework of love
We're flawed and our partner is too. This primes spouses to be more understanding.
Understanding one another is not a given. It will come with difficulty and require a lot of effort.
Realize that each of us "is a hellish proposition"
"We are necessarily going to bring an awesome amount of trouble into someone's life.
The hellishness of others
Success hinges on how we interpret the reasons behind their repeated failings.
(The author provides some charitable interpretations of bad behavior, often stemming from the
spouse's childhood, which seem to me too convenient to be reasonable.)
Our existing partner is disadvantaged by their incumbency; we know their flaws well. A stranger
is alluring because we're ignorant about them. But the stranger is hellish, just like our
partner.
The longing for reassurance
Argues that the fear of rejection persists daily through long relationships. It's not just the
beginning. Any minor withdraw or tiff can trigger it.
When we deny our own fear of rejection, frequently we become either avoidant or controlling.
He says avoidant coping is learned as a child, when we tried to be close but got rejected or
humiliated. "We grow suspicious, frantic, and easily furious in the face of the ambiguous
moments of love."
Partner-as-child; the "infant model of interpretation"
Every child is good at loving little children. With children, we forgive their obnoxious,
hurtful behavior because we don't assign mean intentions to kids. We have benevolent
explanations for their behavior.
Consider doing the same with adults.
"It's very touching that we live in a world where we have learned to be so kind to children;
it would be even nicer if we learned to be a little more generous toward the childlike parts
of one another."
"The problem with adults is that they look misleadingly adult."
For the ancient Greeks, love is to adore someone's positive traits. For the negative traits, help
educate them out of them.
Nagging is an attempt to educate. But it doesn't work. It can feel self-righteous to nag, but
the actual solution is to try again, and harder, to communicate one's desires in a way the
recipient will actually receive.
Dealing with problems (chap 9)
"An average couple will have between thirty and fifty significant arguments a year." We assume our
relationship is the exception, and that everyone else isn't having frequent severe arguments.
Arguments can't sustainably be avoided; only handled better.
Types of arguments
The interminable argument: Arguments about disagreeing opinions on things, which are actually
about "you don't respect my intelligence."
The defensive argument
People don't change when they are told gleefully by their partner what is wrong with them.
Regarding "winning" arguments: "this is fundamentally to misunderstand the point of
relationships, which is not so much to defeat an opponent as to help each other evolve into
the best versions of ourselves" — the mistaken belief that "whoever is right should win the
argument".
Spoiling argument: spoiling the cheery mood of the other partner so they can be on the same
gloomy level as us. It doesn't work. Once their cheery afternoon is spoiled, they will resent
you rather than connect with you.
Absentee argument: the partner becomes a sink for every large disappointment in our lives, like
a plateauing career, jealousy over the success of our old college friends, declining health.
The author argues that this is a marked cry for love and help. (I don't see how.)
Argument of normality: appeals to majority opinion to justify our preferences.
Appealing to the majority should, logically, have little sway in an argument. The majority is
often wrong/unwise, and the minority sometimes particularly wise.
Argument from excessive logic
While admired, usually what we want more than reason is comfort, reassurance, and emotional
empathy. Logical replies, while correct, can still be unhelpful.
Pessimism
The solution to our agitation lies in a philosophy of pessimism: "in the expectation of a blunt
inevitability that two people will never understand more than a fraction of each other's minds."
The only people we can think of as profoundly admirable are those we don't yet know very well.
"Every human can be guaranteed to frustrate, anger, annoy, madden, and disappoint us — and we
will (without any malice) do the same to them."
Unrequited love
The cure for unrequited love is more knowledge, so that they cease to look like the ultimate
love for us. More knowledge will "set you free."
After getting to know them sufficiently well, we will "learn that, beneath their charms, they
will almost invariably be essentially 'normal' in nature… no worse yet no better than the
incumbents we already understand."
Incumbent jobs and partners may seem less attractive than a shiny new alternative, but it's
just that we have an asymmetry of knowledge and don't know the new thing very well.
"We should extrapolate what we already know of people and apply it to those we don't yet."
The laundry
Romanticism ignores the practical fact that partners will collaborate heavily on all mundane
domestic matters, and doing so well is essential for the relationship. It requires a surprising
amount of energy and attention.
"It was meant to be nicer": as children we were cherished. In marriage, that tends to wear off
quickly and our partner isn't all that interested in the details of our lives and feelings. So
don't judge our marital care against how we were treated as kids.
"The wisdom of compromise": the author argues that it's possible that nursing yourself through a
lifetime of sadness in a relationship is better than the alternatives, and it certainly shouldn't
be labeled as "cowardice."
(Sounds defeatist and depressing.)
A modest argument for marriage
It's good that the institution makes it hard to "throw in the towel."
Marriage acts as a formal obstacle to make one's impulses less dangerous.
"We deliberately invite an elderly aunt or uncle whom we don't even like much to fly around
the world to be there. We are willingly creating a huge layer of embarrassment were we ever to
turn round and admit it might have been a mistake."
Long relationships allow for gradual self-development: "It's too easy to seem kind and normal
when we keep starting new relationships." But true self-improvement can only come when
considering others' views of us over long periods of time.
Some types of investments require security. Like having children, or giving up one's career.
Work (chap 10)
All important, ambitious efforts cause some enemies. Not everyone in our life will be pleased with
the consequences of our pursuing what makes us happy.
A beginner's mind: the belief that we are, by nature, foolish, and the ability to let go of trying
to demonstrate our own dignity, and explore the world as a beginner would.
What else might have been?
As kids, we play at many professions. Each of these "games" is a plausible alternate version of
ourselves.
In adulthood, we're forced to specialize to reap the benefits of mastery, income, and the
stability required to raise a family.
Similarly with our relationships, we must choose just one, and learn to live with the loss of
the many potential alternate lives that we must forego.
On consumerism
"The real crisis of capitalism is that product development lags so far behind the best insights
of advertising. Since the 1960s, advertising has worked out just how much we need help with the
true challenges of life."
A lifestyle ad campaign can make you long for lost moments, like the sweet times past of rolling
around on the carpet with your young kids, but can't deliver any solutions for you. A watchmaker
cannot create for us a beautiful father-son relationship.
Businesses target only the lower needs of Maslov's pyramid.
Culture (chap 11)
(An essay on the differences between classical and romanticism)
Romanticism dominates modern thinking. It has many truths to impart, but must be balanced with
Classical thinking.
"We need to fall silent — more frequently than we do — and simply listen."
Romanticism: "authenticity is the highest form of morality. Politeness is a lid that we place upon
our real selves to suppress the truths that could free us."
Classical: "Strategic inauthenticity is the mark of a kindly soul."
Classical: "they are familiar enough with extremes to welcome things that are a little boring.
They can see the charm of doing the laundry."
Purity: no side is likely to be entirely right. There is worth and something to be learned from
opposing ideas. No political party is "admirable at every turn."
People have come to dislike cheap things.
"Industrialization has inadvertently… robbed certain experiences of their loveliness, interest
and worth" by making those products cheap and widely available. Our psychology devalues them as
a result.
We have mistakenly come to treat price as a token of intrinsic value.
Around age 8, children understand what cheap vs expensive means, and their method of value
becomes price.
Solution? We can't change our knowledge of the price, but we can pay less attention to what
things cost and more to our own responses.
"The price of something is principally determined by what it cost to make", and not how much
value it delivers.
Solace
(These are beautiful, comforting thoughts)
Books are a potential salve for the inevitable loneliness that we all face. They provide
imaginary companions.
A psychoanalyst studying children in the 1950s: "certain children coped with the absence of
their parents through 'transitional objects' to keep the memory of parental love strong even
when the parents weren't there." A teddy bear or blanket became a mechanism for activating that
memory of being cared for.
Virtual friends, mentors, to give us solace and companionship
"Strangely, it appears that certain imaginary friends drawn from culture can end up feeling
more real and in that sense more present to us than any of our real-life acquaintances, even
if they have been dead a few centuries and lived on another continent. We can feel honored to
count them among our best friends."
"Confronted by the many failings of our real-life communities, culture gives us the option of
assembling a tribe for ourselves, drawing their members across the widest ranges of time and
space, blending some living friends with some dead authors, architects, musicians, and
composers, painters and poets."
What an honor, for one deceased, to be counted as a friend among the future generations of the
living.
"Good enough"
Be happy with "good enough." Perfectionism in relationships creates emotional agony. Good enough
relationships can still have very dark moments.
"No child, he insisted, needs an ideal parent. They just need an OK, pretty decent, usually
well-intentioned, sometimes grumpy but basically reasonable father or mother."
Elements of wisdom
Appreciation
As we grow older, we can begin to see the charm of a 3 year old playing in a garden.
Folly
The wise budget for madness in others.
"The wise are unsurprised by the ongoing coexistence of deep immaturity and perversity
alongside quite adult qualities like intelligence and morality."
Politeness
"They'll be aware of how differently things can look through the eyes of others and will
search more for what people have in common than for what separates them."
Forgiveness
The wise are slow to judge.
Regrets
"Regret lessens the more we see that error is endemic across the species. We can't look at
anyone's life story without seeing some devastating mistakes etched across it. These errors
are not coincidental but structural. They arise because we all lack the information we need to
make choices in time-sensitive situations. We are all, where it counts, steering almost
blind."
Calm
The wise know that when an entire day is calm, it's something to be savored and appreciated.