Shivani’s Reviews > How to Find Love > Status Update

If things are a bit bad, it's probably because we're doing it right.

in order to help us make our peace with the only thing that is actually on offer: a radically imperfect but genuine love for another flawed person and a necessarily troubled but still valuable shared life.

The real skill is not always to strive to make better choices; it's to know how to make our peace with our necessarily bad choices. We keep on supposing that our lives would turn out well if only we could somehow make an ideal right decision. But Kierkegaard is firmly opposed to this naive error. We should with cheer accept that we never had ideal options in the first place.

We have to be at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to have any chance of forming a good relationship, or we'll love no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us being so.

The way to greater confidence isn't to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; it's to grow at peace with the inevitable nature of our ridiculousness. We are idiots now, we have been idiots in the past, and we will be idiots again in the future - and that is OK. There aren't any other options available for human beings.

For real kindness, we need to have the courage to allow ourselves to be hated. The psychological imperative to appear nice at all costs will guarantee that we'll be nothing other than quietly, exceptionally cruel. We owe it to those we no longer love to kill all hope and allow them to hate us, confident that we can withstand their anger. In the end, that is true kindness.

We can embrace a person's hopes for a close and deep relationship with us simply on the basis that we are all a bit odd and broken. The need that the lover has of us is not delusional; it is an accurate request that any flawed human might make of another comparably damaged example.

We should learn to tolerate ourselves, not by believing we are wonderful, but via a secure realisation that everyone is both OK and sometimes a bit awful.

The affection of our partners can end up tinged with a feeling of familiarity. In their arms, in an emotional sense, we come home.

And, without anyone giving the matter too much thought, they sweetly call us 'baby'.

When we are finally with the ideal endorsing candidate, we feel engaged in a small conspiracy against the rest of the world. We don't have to explain very much about ourselves. They just know. They 'get' things quickly, without us having to speak. They read our souls, so we don't have to spell out their contents in the normal, arduous way. Our love is a dividend of gratitude for their magical ability to understand.

One would become aware of a variety of symptoms, amply described in literature and art: a quickened heartbeat, a sense of having alighted on 'The One', difficulty sleeping, an urge to speak (to almost everyone) about the beloved and a desire to listen to music and go into nature, together with The One.