The School of Life: An Emotional Education

A philosophy of consolation directs us to two important salves: understanding and companionship. Or grasping what our problem is – and knowing that we are not alone with it.

We emerge into adult life determined never to rely on anyone or are desperate for another to complete us. We are overly intellectual or unduly resistant to ideas. The encyclopedia of emotional imbalances is a volume without end. Yet because we are reluctant historians of our emotional pasts, we too easily take our temperament as our destiny. We bel

First formulated by the philosopher St Augustine in the closing days of the Roman Empire, ‘original sin’ generously insisted that humanity was intrinsically, rather than accidentally, flawed. That we suffer, feel lost and isolated, are racked with worry, miss our own talents, refuse love, lack empathy, sulk, obsess and hate: these are not merely pe

We make our lives tougher than they should be because we insist on thinking of people, ourselves and others, as inept and mean rather than, as is almost invariably the case, primarily the victims of what we have all in some ways travelled through: an immensely tricky early history.

Here there is no such call. Like a parent who doesn’t need a small child to reciprocate, the therapist voluntarily forgoes equality in the relationship; they won’t talk of their regrets or insist on their anecdotes. They simply want to help us find what is best for us, understood on our terms. They won’t have a preconceived view of how we’re meant

They have ceded control to their animal selves. But we get a more nuanced view of the role of sex in affairs by asking a deliberately obtuse, philosophical-sounding question: why is sex so nice? One possible answer, which can sound a little odd, is: because we have advanced tendencies to hate ourselves and find ourselves unacceptable. And sex with

The tragedy of every sorry argument is that it is constructed around a horrific mismatch between the message we so badly want to send (‘I need you to love me, know me, agree with me’) and the manner in which we are able to deliver it (with impatient accusations, sulks, put-downs, sarcasm, exaggerated gesticulations and forceful ‘fuck you’s).

We hear the offer of friendship as something synonymous with insult because our Romantic culture has, from our youth, continuously made one thing clear: love is the purpose of existence; friendship is the paltry, depleted consolation prize.

Those we love, we honour with our worst moods, our most unfair accusations, our most wounding insults. It is to our lovers that we direct blame for everything that has gone wrong in our lives; we expect them to know everything we mean without bothering to explain it; their minor errors and misunderstandings occasion our sulks and rage. By compariso