The Truth About Love and Anger: Driven By Hope and Optimism

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“To love, what does it really mean to love? To love ultimately is to have a willingness to interpret someone’s – on the surface – not very appealing behavior in order to find more benevolent reasons why they may be unfolding, in other words, to love someone is to apply charity and generosity of interpretation. Most of us are in dire need of love.”

Alain De Botton

The core of love needs to be realized. The need for proper communication and safety in expression of emotions needs to be better understood and realized.

Check out this video: “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person” from the School of Life, by Alain De Botton, British Philosopher. Try not to misinterpret the message based on the title… as they say; “don’t judge a book by its cover”… don’t judge a helpful lesson about love by the title that may lead you astray. This is a fantastic perspective on focusing on what is most important, and that is LOVE & LOGIC.

_{It is 22 minutes long.. and a great intro into watching all of his videos!}

Life is pretty rough in every single way right now. It seems that the anger is mounting as every feeling, idea or instance of hope to try for something better is shot down by irrational measures put in place to hold us back. Then on top of it we aren’t in environments where we feel we are allowed to be scared, angry or have feelings to express. With this, the feeling of loneliness is getting out of hand and overwhelming everyone.

Wait though, things will get better and this isn’t forever. This can be an opportunity to learn, to do and love better. There is still hope, we can learn love as a skill and allow it to lead our lives toward better understanding and acting. We can take the time required for better relationships. Perhaps for too long we have allowed misunderstanding to lead us astray as we have tried to lead with unrealistic expectations of ourselves and others when we need to lead with logic and love instead.

Lead with Love

The premise of this video by Alain De Botton is such a fresh and positive perspective on love, anger and feelings. It’s about time to be able to look at these things through logic and care to do better with them because we need them. We are humans and we need to start acting and accepting ourselves as such. He refers to turning anger to sadness and rage to grief, because ultimately what needs to be understood is that behind rage is optimism and hope but those hopeful expectations need to be managed more reasonably. We have high expectations, hopes for certain things, romantic ideas, needs for certain feelings and believing we are loved.

We misinterpret one’s anger to be from a place of darkness, but that isn’t really the case. It’s okay to have this negative exist and need to express it. What we are looking for is space to be our ugly selves with another human being and still loved as ourselves by them. We want to know that we are loved for who we are and not what we are doing for someone so that when we hit rock bottom, we can still be loved and helped up when we can’t perform.

To give us that safe space to be vulnerable as our hurt, angry, scared or authentic self even if it isn’t likeable. Alain delivered this notion in a way that really does make sense; we aren’t all great or perfect, so realize that and move on from it. Learn how to manage these things in a more mature and reasonable way for your feelings. While nurturing the need to be loved as well as loving, as you show sympathy to the other person’s feelings too.

Learn What Is Good Enough

Anger has long been misunderstood, people try to assume that anger stems from something irrational and out of no where, demonizing them and their negativity. Instead of thinking it may be a surmounting reaction to all that is happening inside of a person and the external around them. Sometimes this can actually get bigger and louder because the person is expressing themselves to try to be loved, but still not receiving what they need and thus, lash out more to be understood and feel loved.

Love is tolerance of weakness and admiration as well. We are on a path to suffer because we are always searching for what is familiar. All that is good is also wrapped up in suffering what is bad and so we stay within that cycle of familiarity to feel loved. Those in touch with their feelings and stepping upon their breaking point, they reach out in their vulnerability to be loved through it. The strong want to be loved in spite of their strength and also for their weaknesses. The need to be vulnerable to be in love creates fear and then we create a response to the perceived danger of being vulnerable whilst in love.

He highlights 2 major themes in response: some become anxiously attached and thus, procedural in trying to find out if someone cares about them. While others may go avoidant and shut down, deciding they don’t need them anyways. Creating a wonderful cycle of breaking the trust of the other.

Watch out for what romance has told you… these expectations can be our greatest demise at times, but if we manage these expectations we can make our way through everything that much better…

Anyone that we love is going to be filled with what we perceive to be good and to be bad, but instead of dividing those and idealizing one over the other, it would be more helpful to recognize that both can and do exist and that is okay and something to learn through. A person can still be good enough, even with these perceived bad parts because we must realize that these same possible traits can exist within us too and we need to again, love and be loved through them.

“The good thing is that none of us are perfect, and therefore we don’t need perfection. But the demand for perfection will lead you to only one thing: loneliness. You cannot have perfection and company. To be in company with another person is to be negotiating imperfection everyday. Incompatibility; we are all incompatible but it is the work of love to make us graciously accommodate each other and ourselves to each other’s incompatibilities, and therefore compatibility is an achievement of love. It isn’t what you need from the outset, of course you’re not going to be incompatible, that’s not the point, it is through love that you gradually accept the need to be compatible.”

Alain De Botton

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Here’s another video with Alain De Botton on Sternstunde Philosophie, delving deeper into being in love and developing relationships.

There are subtitles for the interviewer’s questions, Alain responds in English:

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At the beginning of love, we love someone for their strengths, but we don’t want to be loved only for our strengths, we also want to be loved and forgiven for our weaknesses.

Alain De Botton

To summarize it all; all we have control over is our response to the types that set us off to suffering, the types we are set to love, developing a more mature response to the fear and anger of not feeling loved by those types, by finding better means to communicate those needs in order to find a way to love and be loved.

This striving for perfection is damaging to everyone, creating a false sense of purpose within our societies and each other. But we can find acceptance in being who we are and understanding that as it’s own version of perfection for us.

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