last year which went under a rather dramatic heading.

It was called, "Why you will marry the wrong person."

And perhaps we can just begin -- we're among friends -- by just asking how many of you

in the room do feel on balance that you have married the wrong person?

[ Laughter ] I mean, where are my friends?

Yeah, a lady there, a couple people there.

Five, ten.

I see 30 people in the room, and so we always have to triple that.

[ Laughter ] So there's a pretty hefty majority.

But I'm here to give counsel and to give 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 -- [ Laughter ]

If we manage to turn rage into grief, we will have made psychological progress.

And this is 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 to mysteriously traffic-free.

It is hope that is turbo charging their rage.

So if we are to get a little bit less sad 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.

There's a wonderful quote from the German philosopher Theodor Adorno who in the 1960s

said the most dangerous man in America was Walt Disney.

And 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.

And he thought that it was the task of philosophy to let us down gently, which is what I'm going

to be doing 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.

I should say that it's not that bad.

And the reason is that all of us will not manage to find the right person, but we will

probably all of us manage to find a good-enough person.

And that's success as you will come to see.

[ Laughter ] One of the reasons why we are not going to

be able to pull this one hope as successfully as we might have hoped at the early -- at

the outset of our teenage hurdle 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.

We're not going to do anything very dangerous, but we are basically psychologically quite

strange.

We don't normally know very much about this strangeness.

It takes us a long, long time before we are 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 see me afterwards.

[ Laughter ] I know -- I know that you're not easy to live

with.

And the reason is that you're Homo sapiens and, therefore, you are not easy to live with.

No one is.

But there's a wall of silence that surrounds us from a deeper acquaintance with what is

actually so difficult about us.

Our friends don't want to tell us.

Why would they bother?

They just want a pleasant evening out.

Our friends know more about us and more about our flaws.

Probably after ten minutes' 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 conceived.

Of course, they followed us from the crib.

They know what's wrong with us.

They're not going to tell us.

[ Laughter ] They just want to be sweet.

And our ex-lovers, a vital source of knowledge.

They know.

Absolutely they know.

[ Laugher ] But do you remember that speech that they

gave?

It was moving at the time when they said that they wanted a little space and were attracted

to travel and were interested in the culture of southeast Asia.

Nonsense.

They thought lots of things were wrong with but they weren't going to be bothered to tell

you.

They were just 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 -- a low sense of what is

actually wrong with us.

Not least all of us are addicts.

Almost all of us are addicts, not injecting heroin as such but addicts in the sense we

need to redefine what addiction is.

I like to define addiction not in terms of the substance you're taking.

In other words, 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 sort 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, as long as it keeps you away from tricky self-knowledge.

And most of us are addicts.

Thanks to all sorts of technologies and distractions, et cetera, we can have a good life where we

will almost certainly be guaranteed not to spend any time with ourselves except maybe

for certain kind of airlines 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 to another person.

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'm vulnerable before you."

And there's a very strong impasse 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

is a danger of needing to be extremely vulnerable, dangerously vulnerable, and exposed to another

person.

The first response is to get what psychologists call anxiously attached.

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 are ten minutes late," or, "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.

We get procedural.

The other thing -- the other pattern of behavior, which psychologists have identified -- and

it tends to apply to people who are in this room, in other words, A types, very outgoing

types, strivers -- 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 more vulnerable, you say, "I'm quite busy at the moment.

I'm fine.

Thanks.

I'm busy today."

In other words, you don't reveal the need for another person, which sets them off into

a chain of wondering whether you are to be trusted.

And it'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 have got a beard, maybe I have been

alive for a long time, I'm 6'2", et cetera, 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 love.

In short, we don't know very much how to love.

And it sounds very odd because imagine somebody said, 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 in your

life.

What is love?

Ultimately love, I believe, is something -- first of all, there is a distinction between loving

and being loved.

We all start off in life by knowing a lot about being loved.

Being loved is the fun bit.

That's when somebody brings you something on a tray and asks you how your day at school

went, et cetera.

And we grow up thinking that that's what is going to happen in an adult relationship.

We can be forgiven for that.

It's an ununderstandable 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.

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 be -- we need to have

some slack cut for us because our behavior is often so tricky that if we don't do this,

we wouldn't get through any kind of relationship.

But we're not used to thinking that that is the core of what love is.

Core of what love is, is the willingness to interpret another's behavior.

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 psychoanalyst called Melanie Klein, who was active in the '50s and '60s,

originally from Vienna, 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 really at an infant stage.

So what you do is you split into the good mother or -- and the bad mother.

And it takes a long, long time.

Melanie Klein thought it might be until you are 4 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 are able not to run away from that situation.

You are able to say, "I love someone and hate them and that's okay."

And Melanie Klein thought this was an immense psychological achievement when we can no longer

merely divide people into absolutely brilliant, perfect, 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 heros or sinners really among human