The School of Life: An Emotional Education

We lie by attacking and denigrating what we love but haven’t managed to get.

The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation.

Chances of development can increase hugely when we stay put and don’t succumb to the temptation to run away to people who will falsely reassure us that there’s nothing too wrong with us.

It is too easy to seem kind and normal when we keep starting new relationships

We
resist attempts at being changed, naively asking to be loved “for who we are.”

But the process of our maturation can be agonizingly slow and complicated

Unfortunately, the lessons that are most important for us—the lessons that contribute most to our increasing wisdom and rounded completeness as people—are almost always the most painful to learn.

The point of marriage is to be usefully unpleasant—at least at crucial times. Together we embrace a set of limitations on one kind of freedom, the freedom to run away, so as to protect and strengthen another kind, the shared ability to mature and create something of lasting value, the pains of which are aligned to our better selves.

To marry is to recognize that we require structure to insulate us from our urges. It is to lock ourselves up willingly, because we acknowledge the benefits of the long-term: the wisdom of the morning after the storm.

Marriage is a giant inhibitor of impulse set up by our conscience to keep our libidinous, naive, desiring selves in check.