How to Find Love

We should remind ourselves that our room for manoeuvre is limited. The task is not to hate a partner for their deficiencies; it is to get interested, in a kindly way, in their development.

One of the most important principles for choosing a lover sensibly is not to feel in any hurry to make a choice. Being satisfied with being single is a precondition of satisfactory coupledom. We cannot choose wisely when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to have any chance of forming a good relationship, or we’ll love no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us being so.

The liberating move is to see that what we want exists in places beyond the pain-inducing characters we have already identified it in.

But, in fact we’re big now. We have the capacity to cope very well. Should this relationship fail, we’ll be sad for a while but won’t actually be destroyed. We are not in as much danger as the primitive part of the mind thinks – and as we once were. We are no longer the children for whom loss was unbearable.

The solution is to remind ourselves that we can, despite our fears, survive the loss of hope

The origins of a sentimental interpretation of love usually lie with parents who could not tolerate their children’s shadow sides. Somewhere in the past, a child had to be perfect in order to deserve affection.

e are appalled by reciprocated love when we operate with a background idea of sentimental love. This states that loving ourselves is what we can do only when we are totally pure, and that loving another is what we can do only when someone is perfect. Yet we are, of course, all deeply flawed.

We will feel that someone is sickeningly ‘needy’ when we don’t see ourselves as appropriate targets of someone else’s need

We feel they are naive in finding us wonderful

The task is not to hate a partner for their deficiencies; it is to get interested, in a kindly way, in their development.