Dating (The School of Life Love Series) - Hardcover

The School Of Life

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1912891042 ISBN 13: 9781912891047

Publisher: The School of Life, 2020

Synopsis

Dating might seem a trivial and relatively inconsequential part of love, but it is in fact key to getting into the kind of relationship that can last and help us flourish. The process we call dating sits on top of some of the largest themes of love: how to know whether or not someone is right for us; how soon to settle and how long to search; how to be at once honest and seductive; how to politely extricate oneself without causing offence.

This little book is an indispensable guide to the dating process. It teaches us about the history of dating (and why the way we are dating now is so novel and so perplexing), the reason why our dating days can be so anxious, how we should discuss our past on a date, what questions we might ask a new partner, how to optimize our attempts at dating―and how to digest and overcome so-called "bad" dates. The book is at once heartfelt and perceptive and never minimizes the agony, joys, and confusions of our dating days and nights. It provides us with the ideal wise road map to the varied, sometimes delightful, sometimes daunting realities of dating.

"It is so natural to want our dating days to come to an end: but we should never lose sight of the genuine merits and delights that lie closely entwined with their pains. We should continue to seek our life partner, while not ignoring the real pleasures that emerge from not yet having found them."

About this title

About the Author

The School of Life is a global organization helping people lead more fulfilled lives. It is a resource for helping us understand ourselves, for improving our relationships, our careers, and our social lives―as well as for helping us find calm and get more out of our leisure hours. They do this through films, workshops, books, and gifts―and through a warm and supportive community. You can find The School of Life online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the globe.

The School of Life Press was established in 2016 to bring together over a decade of research and insights from The School of Life’s content team. Led by founder and series editor Alain de Botton, this is a library to educate, entertain, console, and transform us.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Should We Play It Cool When We Like Someone?

One of the paradoxes of the dating game is that we know that by coming across as enthusiastic at an early stage – if we ring them the next day, if we are open about how attractive we find them, if we suggest meeting them again very soon – we are putting ourselves at a high risk of disgusting the very person we would so like to build a relationship with.

It is in order to counter this risk that, early on in our dating lives, we are taught by well-meaning friends to adopt a facade of indifference. We become experts at deliberately not phoning or sending messages, at treating our dates in a carefully off-hand manner and in subtly pretending we don’t much care if we never cross their paths again. We are told that the only way to get them to care about us is to pretend not to care for them. And in the process, we waste a lot of time, we may lose them altogether and we have to suffer the indignity of denying that we feel a desire that should never have been associated with shame in the first place.

But we can find a way out of the conundrum by drilling deeper into the philosophy that underpins the wellflagged danger of being overly eager. Why is detachment so often recommended? Why are we not meant to call too soon? High levels of enthusiasm are generally not recommended for one central reason: because they have been equated with what is a true psychological problem: manic dependence. In other words, calling too soon has become a symbol of weakness, desperation and the inability to deal adequately with life’s challenges without the constant support of a lover, whose real identity the manically keen party doesn’t much care about, because their underlying priority is to ensure that they are never alone without someone, rather than with any one being in particular.

We should, however, note that what is ultimately the problem is manic dependence, not high enthusiasm. The difficulty is that our cultural narratives have unfairly glued these two elements together with an unnecessarily strong and unbudging kind of adhesive. Yet there should logically be an option to disentangle the two strands, that is, to be able to reveal high enthusiasm and at the same time, not thereby to imply manic dependence. There should be an option to appear at once very keen and very sane.

The ability to do so depends on a little known emotional art to which we seldom have recourse or introduction: strong vulnerability. The strongly vulnerable person is a diplomat of the emotions who manages carefully to unite on the one hand self-confidence and independence and on the other, a capacity for closeness, self-revelation and honesty. It is a balancing act. The strongly vulnerable know how to confess with authority to a sense of feeling small. They can sound in control even while revealing that they have an impression of being lost. They can talk as adults about their childlike dimensions. They can be unfrightening at the same time as admitting to their own fears. And they can tell us of their immense desire for us while simultaneously leaving us under the impression that they could fully survive a frank rejection. They would love to build a life with us, they imply, but they could very quickly and adroitly find something else to do if that didn’t sound like fun from our side.

In the way that the strongly vulnerable speak of their desire for us, we sense a beguiling mixture of candour and independence. They don’t need to play it cool because they carry off high enthusiasm in a way which sidesteps the dangers it has traditionally and nefariously been associated with.

What is off-putting is never in fact that someone likes us; what is frightening is that they seem in danger of having no options other than us, of not being able to survive without us. Manic dependence, not enthusiasm is only ever the problem. With this distinction in mind, we should learn to tell those we like that we’re really extremely keen to see them again, perhaps as early as tomorrow night, and find them exceptionally marvellous – while simultaneously leaving them in no doubt that we could, if the answer were a no, without trouble and at high speed, find some equally enchanting people to play with and be bewitched by.

About this edition

• Publisher: The School of Life
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 1912891042
• ISBN 13: 9781912891047
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 128