Kind Partners Feel Boring When Love Is Supposed to Hurt

Alain de Botton was standing before an audience that had come to hear why love so often goes wrong, and he warned them not to trust their instincts about it. Romantic culture tells us to follow our feelings, he argued, but our feelings were trained long before we started dating.

Adult love, he said, sits on top of what we learned as children. That early love included tenderness, kindness, and generosity, but it was also bound up with being let down, humiliated, scolded, and made to feel small. For most of us, in other words, care and suffering arrived together.

So when we "go out into the adult world," he argued, we think we are looking for "partners who will make us happy." In fact we are looking for "partners who will feel familiar and" that familiarity can mean a particular kind of torment.

That, he said, is why a promising setup so often fizzles. Friends introduce us to someone wonderful, good looking, and charming. We meet, we can see the virtues, and then we tell our friends there was no spark. We say the person was "not sexy or a bit boring."

What we really mean, in his account, is that we have detected someone who will not "make us suffer in the way" that "we need to suffer in order to feel that love is real." As he put it, "we are not merely on a quest to be happy we are on a quest to suffer in ways that feel familiar."