When you start a new job, you’re not expected to know everything on your first day. You’re trained. You get a handbook. After a while, you catch on. With this in mind, The School of Life makes an interesting point: we should approach our romantic relationships similarly.
As they point out, love as an aspiration is almost impossible. We’re expected to “get” the other person right away and feel some deep, magical connection even if we haven’t known them very long. Even if the first few weeks or months of your relationship feels this way, reality eventually sets in. Then, we get hurt when our partner doesn’t automatically understand or empathize with us.
Here’s how The School of Life puts it:
In the romantic ideology, love is understood to be an enthusiasm, rather than what it really is: a skill that needs to be learned….work culture knows that people don’t improve if they’re feeling threatened and humiliated. Home life finds us far less able to be competent teachers…We think we need to be loved just for being who we are. Though we all are, of course, terribly flawed, we imagine love has nothing to do with education, and therefore, the lover who is trying to point something out to us is being nasty, rather than doing what all lovers should in fact do, which is their utmost to improve those they care about through their love.
At work, we’re given performance reviews and feedback. With love, it’s just supposed to work. Of course, this isn’t to say you should stick with a relationship that’s abusive or otherwise harmful. At some point, you do have to call it quits, but that’s a different story altogether.
The point here is, making a relationship work might not be an instinctive thing. As unromantic as it might seem to compare love to our jobs, approaching it this way seems to lend itself better to actually caring for another human being. Check out the full video above or at the link below.
Why Work is Easier Than Love | The School of Life (YouTube)
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