Love is a skill, not a feeling | Alain de Botton: Full Interview

My name is Alain de Botton. I'm a philosopher,  psychotherapist and founder of the School of   Life. Chapter 1 - Our Destructive Romantic Culture  We know in theory that love matters a lot. It's in   every pop song, it's the center of most religions.  We sometimes lose sight of what that word actually   means. It's really about connection. And it is  one of the most beautiful and one of the most   complicated of all phenomena. Even though we think  we've been around on this planet for a long time   trying to figure things out, I'd say we were still  at the dawn collectively of making sense of this   phenomenon we call love. And it's no surprise that  most people will go to their deathbeds thinking, not quite sure I figured that side of life out.  At least many of us will still be grappling with   some of the complexities of love by the time  time runs out on us. The most central kind of   love that people are obsessed about, concerned  about, is romantic love. That is the intimate   connection between two human beings who have a  sexual contact. It's worth saying that there are   other forms of love. We can love our children,  we can love animals, we can love ideas, we can   love tables, chairs, clouds, all sorts of things.  We are capable of many forms of love, but I'd say   that when people sing about love and when they cry  about love, it tends to be the love of one very   special person we tend to call our soulmate, our  partner. It used to be the case that when people   found partners, they would do so according to  fairly pragmatic considerations. In most nations   and most parts of the world, for most of history, couples were formed not by the individuals   themselves, but by the wider society, families,  the village, the court. There were, if you like,   dynastic marriages. You would get together with  somebody because they had a plow and you had an   ox and it seemed like a good match, or you were  the Duke of Brabant and they were the Princess   of Naples and that was seen as a wonderful union.  So you got together for reasons that were nothing   to do with emotional compatibility. There were  a lot of tears, there was sadness, there was   loneliness, but it didn't seem to matter because  relationships were seen to be about something   else. There was then a momentous change that  occurs in, towards the end of the 18th century,   starting in Britain, France, Germany, parts of  Italy, a revolution in feeling that we now know   as romanticism. And one of the central tenets  of romanticism is that each individual should   be left to decide on their partner by their own, the movements of their own heart. They   should be left to decide for themselves.