Sunday Times

LAURA BARBER for the Sunday Times, 8 February 2009. Read the article on their website HERE.

Can you learn how to conduct affairs of the heart by going back to school? An editor of anthologies of poetry on life and love signs up for a masterclass on romance.

I am sitting cross-legged on the floor with a glue pot in one hand and a wavy green ribbon representing my first love in the other. After sticking “him” down between a circle of blue foil and a zigzag of black corrugated card, I lean back to assess my efforts. All that’s missing is a spiral of pasta and some glitter and it could pass for a toddler’s art project. But this is my own personal Map of Love — complete with a meadow of contentment, a volcano of passion and a patch or two of desert — and any minute now I’m going to have to share it with the rest of the class.

There are 20 of us gathered in a Bloomsbury shop for this weekend’s course at the School of Life, and we’re here to learn about love. I’d heard about the school from a friend. A friend who is newly married — and extremely happily married. Having triumphed in love himself, he now believes that any romantic situation can be improved if you apply yourself to it with sufficient determination. For him, the ultimate “improvement” results in bridesmaids. And, for the past few months, he’s been applying himself to other people’s romantic situations with a zeal not seen since Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs Bennet set about marrying off her daughters. The last time we met, he was beaming.

“A solution!” he declared, waving the school’s brochure at me. “A weekend of love, with professional supervision. I’m going to hand you over to the experts.” It is difficult to trust the man who once tried to set me up with his wife’s cousin, whom he’d always previously referred to as being “mad as a box of foxes”, only to suddenly insist he was just a little idiosyncratic. But I’m intrigued by the brochure. And by the idea of thinking about love in a setting that doesn’t involve any peer pressure. I have to concede that this is the most sensible proposal my friend has made since he popped the question to his (very lovely) wife.

Whatever I might have been expecting from London’s newest cultural enterprise, it certainly didn’t involve a classroom featuring a red velvet chaise longue and a coffee table laden with aphrodisiac nibbles. Before the weekend started, I’d had plenty of fears. What if it turned out to be an encounter group for dysfunctional romantics? Or a covert pick-up event for thoughtful singletons? Or an arid intellectual gathering, attended solely by those who’ve always followed the head, not the heart? All of these fears were — thank Venus — unfounded. The one thing I’d not thought to worry about was my cartography skills. But then, I do have a history of shocking neglect in this area.

My “complete lack of geographical knowledge” was once cited as reason number three (on a list of 10) for why a relationship wasn’t working out. Post-break-up, I immediately bought a concise world atlas and spent an entire weekend weepily memorising capital cities, main rivers and gross national product per capita, while consuming a good chunk of Belgium’s annual chocolate export. I then moved on, forgetting the geographical facts and figures more quickly than I was able to shed the chocolate. Fifteen years later, I have just stuck my love map to the wall when I suddenly realise that I’ve failed to label any of the topographical features. It is less a landscape than a confusing assortment of abstract shapes. This is a classic example of the inability to learn from experience.

And that’s where the School of Life comes in. Independent but not for profit, this tiny outfit is unashamedly concerned with big ideas. Its ferociously intelligent faculty includes the essayist Alain de Botton, the photographer Martin Parr, the novelist Geoff Dyer and the psychotherapist Brett Kahr. Its founder is Sophie Howarth, the former curator of public programmes at the Tate. She’s on a mission to teach us how to lead more fulfilled lives by drawing on the wisdom of those who have lived — and, in this case, loved — before us. This might seem like the basic premise for any educational establishment, but the subjects they offer — work, play, politics, family and love — never (politics aside) appear on the national curriculum. And, unless you’ve been blessed with a wise relative who dispenses worldly advice, you’re unlikely to receive tuition on these topics outside the classroom either. As Sophie puts it, by the time we’re adults, “We have to screw up in order to learn how to do things better. But what if we could gain more wisdom through conversations and less by hard knocks?”

Surely we talk enough about love already? Certainly, we can easily spend hours gossiping about the latest car crash in a celebrity’s love life, or helping a friend interpret an ambiguous text message. But we tend to find most to say about love when things are volatile — either because we’re exploding with amorous feelings at the beginning of a relationship, or because we’re self-combusting with anger and hurt at the end. If we’re happily, mutually, in love, there’s nothing to say. Or rather, there are a million different ways of saying “I love you” (some in endearing squeaky voices), but this isn’t the kind of thing you can share with anyone other than your beloved. No, it’s far easier to talk about love when we’re “falling” in or out of it. But, if we give heed to the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, we’d be far less accident-prone if we spent more time thinking about “standing” in love instead.

This doesn’t sound terribly romantic. Isn’t the very essence of love obsessive and irrational?

A quick survey of the class reveals that each of us has suffered the familiar symptoms of all-consuming love, when the mood lurches between exhilaration and despair, the heart beats faster, the appetite wanes, the attention wanders, and every song on the radio seems to mean something. The sleepless nights and the hapless daydreams seem to be pretty universal. And if this is the state in which romantic decisions are made, it’s a miracle that the divorce rate isn’t far higher. Lesson one: we need to use reason and emotion together.

But first a coffee break. I pop an aphrodisiac aniseed ball and chat to the more talented cartographers. As you’d expect, they’re mostly thirtysomething and fortysomething urban professionals, but the sheer variety in the love maps is indicative of their different backgrounds, which range from finance to fashion, and their different reasons for being here. Everyone has, at some point, travelled through rocky romantic terrain, but this course isn’t about personal confession. We know nothing about each other’s current romantic status. And whatever underlying motivations brought us together, the thing that counts now is intellectual curiosity and a willingness to talk honestly about love.

We return to our semicircle of chairs. Sophie announces that we’re going to explore our unconscious desires. Of course. There’s only so long you can talk about love without Freud butting in and mentioning your mother.

We are instructed to make lists. Firstly, the things we fear in love. I jot down a few terrors. They’re the usual suspects: betrayal, rejection and loss. Next, the frustrations we experienced as children and the way we dealt with them. Here I struggle trying to recall an infant tantrum: does a violent dislike of bananas count? Finally, the qualities we look for in a partner.

Ah, now this is far easier. I’ve covered half a page with adjectives and am beginning to feel quite excited about this fairy-tale prince. Then I remember something a friend said a few years back, having just met the love of her life: “The most surprising thing is that he’s nothing like the man I would have constructed from my Boyfriend Kit.” I look over my list again and see that the kind of boyfriend who’d come from this kit would almost certainly guarantee betrayal, rejection and loss, with no possibility of a refund. But before I have time to revise the checklist, we’re told to get into pairs and take turns on the metaphorical couch (apparently the chaise longue has a wobbly leg).

As Will, the guy next to me, and I think back to our childhoods, our mothers don’t get a look-in. Instead, we both “discover” that we’ve always been anxious to please Daddy and still worry that we’re never quite good enough. This makes sense, though it’s hardly a thunderbolt revelation. Not even to my father. When I call to tell him later, he just says it sounds like I’m having fun. Others are having more dramatic insights. Someone reports a flashbulb moment of clarity about why a marriage broke down; another makes the link between his infant habit of hiding in wardrobes when things got nasty and his adult impulse to flee to France at the first sign of trouble.

There’s a healthy amount of scepticism in the air as we discuss “the talking cure”, but this turns into a static crackle of resistance during the next session. Sophie has invited Angela, a couples counsellor, to demonstrate the importance of good communication. The moment she mentions the “sacred relational space” that exists between two people, it’s clear that there are quite a few heretics in the room. But two brave souls offer themselves up for role-play. They improvise a confrontation between work colleagues, and the argument runs along the predictable lines of attack and retreat. Next, Angela gets them to move their chairs closer together and to make and maintain eye contact. She patiently talks them through the process by which one person is invited to “cross the bridge” into the other’s world and see things afresh. Angela’s technique seems to be leading us right into the quagmire of touchy-feely woo-woo. The dialogue is highly formulaic and uses a lot of therapeutic jargon, but the “energy” between the pair is undeniably different this time round, and they seem to have experienced something quite powerful.

By this point, the atmosphere in the underground classroom is a little intense. With impeccable timing, Caroline, the school’s programme manager, ushers us back up to street level for pink martinis. Night has fallen outside and the school’s bookshop has been transformed into a candle-lit dining room. As we take our places at the table, the menu promises a feast of love-inducing dishes, from pomegranate salad to chocolate mousse and figs. But the lessons aren’t over. With each course, we are required to ask our neighbours a series of questions. Such “conversational meals” have already proved to be one of the school’s most popular activities. Instead of moaning about house prices or lazy colleagues, as we might do to our friends, diners are encouraged to discourse with strangers on their ideas, beliefs, regrets and aspirations.

Tonight’s conversational topics have been carefully cooked up to match our theme. So I hear how the entrepreneur on my left found love in a rowing boat, and I tell him about my first kiss: I was five. Over the main course, I find myself dispensing “romantic advice to my younger self’’ with the still-very-young graphic designer on my right. And the pudding is accompanied by a heated debate with the rest of the table about the role of argument in long-term love affairs.

It’s heady stuff, especially with the mousse and martinis. Suddenly — and perhaps detecting the passionate memories smouldering around the table — the fire alarm goes off. Sophie and Caroline encourage people to decamp to the pub down the road, with the strict reminder that classes begin promptly at 10am the next day. The subject for the Sunday-school slot? Sex.

Sunday morning is always a busy time for the school, which also offers secular sermons. But even in the classroom we can’t escape the religious stricture. For any discussion about sex has to take into account the long Christian legacy of sin, guilt and shame. We begin with St Augustine, the man who asked God for “chastity, but not yet” and later (prayers answered) adopted a radical anti-sex position. Then it’s a romp through several centuries of blushing and denial until the church authorities handed over to the scientists. Havelock Ellis, Freud and Kinsey pulled the covers back to reveal our desires, with all their pathologies and perversities, before the artists took over and thrust sex in our faces. So where are we today? Almost unshockable, and barely able to buy a new perfume without imagining that we’ll seduce anyone who smells it.

There’s no question that this new willingness to acknowledge and talk about the physical side of love has made us more tolerant, and less tortured, than we were even a few decades ago. But does it actually make us any better at choosing our partners and sustaining loving relationships? To find out, we’re off to meet Dr Mark Lythgoe, a cutting-edge neuroscientist at University College London. And — it emerges — a man with his own personal reasons for wanting science to provide some answers.

Instead of a white coat, he’s in jeans, T-shirt and a black velvet jacket. He may look like he’s auditioning for the role of Doctor Love, but as soon as he starts talking about lust, attraction and attachment — the three biochemically defined phases of love — it’s clear that he’s seen it all from the patient’s side too. “In the past, I’ve been addicted to the chemical rush of infatuation,” he tells us. “I always seem to cock up when I try to move from stage two to stage three? And then, when it’s ended, the darkness, oh God, the darkness that comes over me?”

He shakes his head and gestures back to a Technicolor brain scan on his PowerPoint presentation. “You know, 40% of people with a broken heart actually count as clinically depressed. It’s the chemical crash? Just knowing that has been a real comfort to me.”

It seems that there’s a biological explanation for almost every aspect of love — even those that seem unexpected and unique when they’re happening to us. Whether we fancy someone is determined more by their body language than what they say, as well as by a subconscious assessment of their physical symmetry and an instinctive response to their pheromones. Whether we stay with someone relies on the action of “cuddling” chemicals too. Almost wistfully, Dr Lythgoe tells us about the male prairie vole, who takes months to find the right mate. The first time they have sex (which lasts 24 hours minimum) the hormone vasopressin is released, rendering him hopelessly devoted to his mate for the rest of his life. There’s a collective “ah” from the females in the class, before Dr Lythgoe goes on to speculate about the ethics of discreetly injecting the hormone into the buttock of a sleepy post-coital partner.

And so to the local pub, where we try to draw boozy conclusions from Dr Lythgoe’s research over a Sunday roast. So much of it seems to work on an involuntary level, but three things might have practical application. First, catch your partner by taking them on a rollercoaster ride (the adrenaline rush simulates the feeling of falling in love). Second, check your marital compatibility by comparing the lengths of your middle fingers (married couples tend to have similar lung volumes and metabolic rates too). Third, make it last by having lots of sex (which stimulates release of the “bonding” chemicals).

The problem with Dr Lythgoe’s scientific model is that the three stages of love, from lust to attachment, only last about three years. What happens after that?

Back at the school, Sophie has an alternative theory. Rather than seeing love as an experience (or indeed an extended chemical trip), we need to think of it as an art. An art that can be learnt — if we’re willing to apply ourselves to it, as we would to mastering a musical instrument, a language or a computer game. It seems to be the kind of pursuit that probably can’t be fitted in around a full-time job, and I briefly wonder if we’re all going to need a sabbatical while we raise our romantic game. But, according to Fromm (the advocate of “standing” in love), it isn’t a case of trying to make ourselves more lovable, in the hope that someone might find us attractive/rich/popular enough. No, it is about being more loving in general: being prepared to listen patiently, to talk bravely, to give people our time and to allow them their own space.

The day ends with champagne and a toast to love. As we head out into the cold, it feels like the last day of term. It’s a little sad to be saying goodbye. On the way home, my friend texts to ask if I’ve come away with any qualifications. “No,” I reply. “But plenty of homework.”

A week later, an envelope lands on my doormat. It is addressed to me and it is in my handwriting. I’d almost forgotten about the course’s final exercise. We’d had to note down on a postcard the most significant lesson we’d learnt about love, for Sophie to send out a few days after we’d gone. I’d panicked. This was an exam nightmare come true.

I thought back to the fears I’d had before the course started.

There was a big one that I hadn’t admitted: the fear of what I might find if I looked too closely at my own past experience of love. Something I’d read years before in a novel had stuck with me: the idea that some people carry their emotional life round with them “like a dead rat in a shoe box, ready to whip it open and flash it under people’s noses”.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. If there is one thing that the love weekend had taught me, it was that if you’re willing to take the lid off your emotional shoe box, and shed some light on what’s happened in the past, it’s far more likely to lead to a meeting with your own human equivalent of the prairie vole in the future. Instead of trying to put all this into words, I did a drawing.

Now, I open the envelope and pin the postcard above my desk. It is a sketch of a small twitchy-nosed creature, setting off into new romantic territory, this time holding a map and a compass.