A video talking about what are preventing us to find our loves

youtube link by Alain de Botton, Creator of The School of Life and narrator on the majority of our videos, talking at a Google event in London in 2017.

Reasons why love is tricky:

1. It’s difficult to tell someone we need him/her
   1. We are reluctant to reveal our vulnerabilities
   2. Two behavioral patterns for people when he/she has to be vulnerable:
      1. Anxious attach - start to get strict/mean instead of asking “do you still care about me”.
      2. Avoidant - try to hide our needs to another person. This will set the other person off and begins a vicious cycle.
2. We are bad at recognizing our loved one is a perplexing mixture of a good and a bad
   1. Infant will split their mom into “a good mom”(when she gives candies) and a “a bad mom”(when she is mad). A kid cannot recognize mom is one single character and become ambivalent, both hate and love until about age of 4. - by Melanie Klein, a Australian-British psychoanalysts
3. We think we are out to find partner who makes us happy, but in fact, we are out to find partner who makes us feel familiar
   1. Childhood memory of parental situation plays a huge role.
   2. Sometimes we look forward to suffering, but want to suffer “in a familiar way”.
4. We thought our true lovers should know what we think wordlessly - wrong
   1. That is why we tend to sulk (even be mean) to someone who we love, because we expect him/her to be a mind-reader
   2. Solution: to have the ability to become a good “teacher” - not to criticize, but use a easy-to-accept way to voice out.
5. May not be the right person, but can become a “good-enough” person
   1. The demand of perfection will lead us to one thing - loneliness
   2. We cannot have perfection and company at the same time, to be in company with another person is to be negotiating imperfection everyday.
6. Change our response to tricky types
   1. We cannot change our own types or the types we hate, but we can response to those types in a more mature way.
7. Compromise is always needed in a relationship.