Articles by The School of Life

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Relationships

The Wisdom of Taking It Slowly

Slowness does not necessarily have anything to do with prudishness or social mores; it can be where we land once we’ve built up a more profound understanding of the psychology of love.

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Leisure

The Most Beautiful Woman in London

She is beautiful because, in her sorrows, she is ready to meet you in your depths.

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Relationships

When Anxious and Avoidant Couples Spiral

Both anxiously and avoidantly attached people carry a distinctive and exaggerated core fear – typically the result of an unattuned and neglectful childhood.

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Relationships

How Regrets Increase As We Grow

The more we learn about ourselves and others, the more regrets we are liable to feel about how our lives have unfolded.

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Relationships

What Kinks Are About

Not only are we typically highly selective about who we sleep with, but many of us are – in addition – extremely particular about what will adequately excite us when we do.

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Relationships

When Love Feels Like Pressure: The Pains of Attachment

Two people who may have been on the cusp of building a whole world together part company, both nursing a sense of being mishandled – while not fully fathoming why or how.

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Relationships

What We Truly Long for in Love

We don’t want to be adored and admired; we want – beneath the terror and the shadow play, the games and the subterfuges – to be witnessed and held loyally in affection.

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Leisure

What Love Looks Like

It is, at one level, just a ‘view’ – and yet it might bring tears to our eyes.

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Relationships

Why We Should – out of Love – Sometimes Not Love Too Much

When we truly love someone, it may be the greatest kindness not to love them too much, too suddenly or too insistently.

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Relationships

How We Help Our Exes Have a Lovely Future

None of us is perfect, and the arena in which these imperfections are first identified and grappled with is in the close-up conditions of love.

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Calm

The Anxiety That Never Ends

Perhaps the greatest peace available to us comes from knowing that our torment is never quite going to end.

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Sociability

‘I’m Fine, Thank You and How Are You?’

‘I’m fine, thank you and how are you?’: an innocuous, ubiquitous sentence in which so much of the tragedy and loneliness of our lives comes to rest. Because we’re not – of course – ever remotely fine, and nor is our questioner.

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Relationships

Why People Who Were Never Chosen Will Have a Hard Time Choosing You

We may be far into a relationship before a somewhat puzzling and difficult realisation starts to dawn on us: we’re not in love with a single person.

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Relationships

Partners Who Punish You for Loving Them

For some of us, love is as terrifying in practice as it is desirable in the abstract – and our chief response to being loved may not be kindness and welcome but, strangely and yet with dark logic, cruelty.

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Self-Knowledge

People Who Are Missing a Sense of Self

One of the odder features of life is that, without there being too many significant outward signs of the problem, many people are to be found wandering the earth lacking any sense of self.

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Self-Knowledge

On Mocking the Superstitious

What the self-congratulatingly rational are missing is that their rationality is not, and never was, an achievement of the intellect.

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Relationships

The Best and Worst Ways to Be Left in Love

Being left by someone who once loved us – and whom we still adore – has to count among the most soul-destroying of all emotional eventualities.

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Self-Knowledge

When People Tell You Who They Are, Believe Them

One would think that such alarming truths would immediately enter our consciousness and lead us to walk away and defend our interests. The problem is that some of us are not remotely built to notice the attacks made on us by others.

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Relationships

Why – and How – We Need to Make Our Peace With Being Single

Only those who have fully made their peace with the prospect of being single can have the calm, steadiness and courage to face down the problems in love with the necessary conviction.

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Relationships

The Ex You Can’t Get Over

It’s when a very meaningful relationship comes to an end that we stand to discover a highly peculiar fact about ourselves: our brains appear to have two separate centres of consciousness, which operate according to very different principles.

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Relationships

When to Get Out of a Relationship

To prevent ourselves from wasting our time in fruitless couplings, we should learn to ask ourselves a simple sounding but imperative question about any person we are attempting to build a future with: ‘When I complain to them, do they listen?’

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Relationships

Stay Away From All but the Most Enthusiastic

It can take a very long time indeed for some of us to come to a highly basic-sounding realisation: we should only contemplate going out with people who are very enthusiastic about us.

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Relationships

The Sorrows of Love

So often, our suffering is deepened by a sense that we are unusual and cursed to be feeling it.

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Self-Knowledge

The Importance of Hating People

We are so scared that hatred might be the last word on a situation that we forget to honour its legitimate role in any process of recovery.

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Self-Knowledge

On Not Being Able to Believe Your Own Luck

For some of us, the lucky breaks – when they finally come along – far from being simple to assimilate and build upon, set off an insuperable background level of anxiety that may end up with us destroying much that we ostensibly want.

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Relationships

The One Question We Forget to Ask Ourselves in Love – And Why

Why do some of us end up associating the word love with a lack of calm, an absence of generosity, a strong degree of disdain or disregard – and what’s more, not even notice that we do so?

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Relationships

The Brutality of Dating

For those of us who know the activity from the inside, who suffer from despondency and fury and may have found ourselves bursting into tears after yet another disappointment, the word ‘brutal’ may be an understatement.

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Relationships

Starting New Love While Still Hung Up on an Ex

In the pantheon of modern villains of love, there is one character who stands out as worthy of particular condemnation: the fiend who starts a new relationship while still not fully over their ex.

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Self-Knowledge

Why We Love Our Bears

We gathered at The School of Life to discuss something unusual: our teddy bears.

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Work

How to Steal a Very Expensive House

The most effective ‘thieves’ aren’t the ones who strip people of material possessions; it’s the ones who quietly and harmlessly sit down and think about the beauty of what they desire.

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Calm

The Consolations of Deep Time

Thinking about the age of the earth is – unexpectedly perhaps – among the more consoling and calming of all activities.

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Self-Knowledge

A Simple Exercise to Help Us Find Direction

The familiar structure of films, ingrained in us since childhood, has a particular power to counteract our self-defeating impulses.

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Self-Knowledge

How Wounded People Seek Out Further Punishment

The true toll of bad childhoods isn’t circumscribed to their actual duration; it’s exacted via a lifelong search for their sad echoes.

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Self-Knowledge

When Evil Walks Into Our Lives…

Rarely but significantly, someone may enter our lives who is seismically dangerous: someone who is deep down extremely unwell and compelled to externalise their sickness by harming others…

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Self-Knowledge

What Are Germaphobes Really Scared Of?

A ‘germ’ has come to stand in for some other concern hovering just off stage. Germaphobes may be scrubbing away trying to expunge something; it’s just not what they tell us it is.

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Self-Knowledge

Why Are Some of Us Hoarders?

Hoarding is motivated by a fear of loss. By holding on to everything, the hoarder hopes that no further important things will be thrown away.

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Self-Knowledge

Politics, Mental Health and Virginia Woolf

For those of us who are not wholly steady inside, what happens in the political realm is not as distinct from us as it might be – and may prove especially charged and especially dangerous.

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Self-Knowledge

What Alien Delusions Tell Us About Our Minds

Alien delusions have to be read as a persecuted mind’s ingenious, desperate but highly understandable attempt to cope with awfulness.

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Relationships

On Being Terrified of Love

The mystery is not that men and women occasionally go strange at the prospect of love, but that they ever dare do anything else…

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Relationships

After They Left

What unexpected rates of interest happiness charges. If only the sweet times had come with warning labels.

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Relationships

Six Reasons Why Being Single is So Awful

The less we are able to admit to our despair, the more intense it will be. Here are some of the low points that deserve lamentation…

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Relationships

Why Hurt People Hurt People

In certain cases, one partner will punish another not for doing anything wrong, but precisely the opposite. They are being punished for their sweetness, crushed for their gentleness and tormented for their faith.

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Relationships

‘I Love You, but I Don’t Think We Should Be Together’

It is hugely honourable to do one’s utmost to be with someone. It may be greater love still to adore a person – and leave them well alone.

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Relationships

How to Get Over an Ex by Correcting Our Misfiring Brains

In order to outsmart our obsessions, we need to understand how badly our brains often work – and then figure out canny ways to work around their many cognitive glitches.

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Leisure

The Wisdom of Stoicism

Stoicism was a philosophy invented by leading minds in Ancient Greece and Rome to help us cope with agonising periods of our lives – especially those created by the selfishness and insanity of dictators and demagogues…

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Calm

The Fear of Losing Control Over Our Bodies

There is definitely something up with us; it’s just that the issue lies in our minds rather than in our bowels or stomachs.

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Self-Knowledge

How to Check in on Ourselves

We might be the stated owners of our whole beings; yet we consciously inhabit only a very small part of ourselves.

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Work

Why Isn’t There Peace in the World?

When the people we call historians talk about conflicts, the blame is almost always laid at the door of material factors. But the truth may be rather different – and far stranger…

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Self-Knowledge

What Does a Silence Have to Mean?

It’s a feature of our minds that we cannot help but fill silences; we automatically develop notions of what an absence must signify.

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Relationships

Wild Advice for Those Who Have Lost Their Minds Over an Ex

The world is not short of advice for those who are struggling to get over their exes. The problem is how much of it is extremely sensible and therefore, in its way, utterly ineffective.

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Relationships

Red Flags for Everyone: How Therapy Has Made Love Harder

Once we are done with rightfully expelling every last demented and unworthy partner from our domain, we may be extremely proud of how well we have followed the principles of emotional maturity; we may also be entirely alone.

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Relationships

To Get Back Together – or Not? An Exam for Couples

What follows is a sequence of questions that exes who are meeting up again after a long break should discuss with one another before coming anywhere near to holding hands (let alone going to bed).

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Calm

When We All Lived in Villages…

It was hard to get around, life was narrow and judgemental, there wasn’t much to do in the evenings…but there was one enormous advantage: there were so very few options to choose from.

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Self-Knowledge

How We Encourage the Behaviour We Feel We Deserve

People’s behaviour towards us is to a large extent determined by what we unconsciously communicate that we deserve from others.

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Relationships

Why We Should Treat Dates Like Job Interviews

Every date is at heart a recruitment interview, for which we need to show up with a privately held brief and the right set of questions. This is possibly the most serious work of our lives.

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Relationships

Can Our Partners Change?

We’re up against one of the central tripwires of existence. We’re trying to remake a human being; we’re attempting to retool DNA with our bare hands.

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Relationships

How to Work Out the Level of Emotional Maturity of Prospective Partners

It can help to begin with a sense of what it is we should be looking out for in terms of markers of emotional maturity – so that we may know as early as possible who we have on our hands.

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Relationships

The Mark of True Love: Simplicity

There is only so complicated a relationship ever needs to be. When it is viable, love is – all told – fairly obvious.

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Relationships

Eight Rules for Ending Relationships

There are a host of rules around ending relationships that all decent people understand – and here, framed for our consciences, are eight of the most important.

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Self-Knowledge

How We Respond When Life Gets Frustrating

Life is inherently filled with frustrations but how we interpret these frustrations – what we take them to mean, who we think is responsible for them and how we opt to complain about them (or don’t) – is fascinatingly diverse.

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Relationships

The Psychology of Anxious Attachment

If the anxious can accept that their condition isn’t a sign of random sickness but is the result of a very identifiable sort of upbringing, they may develop the courage one day to explain their fears to a partner.

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Relationships

The Psychology of Avoidance

One of the most perplexing of all our behaviours is our tendency – in relationships – to flee from the warmth and affection it is so natural for us to want.

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Relationships

Changing Yourself Rather Than Trying to Change Your Partner

Here are seven ways in which we can improve our relationships – not so much by asking them to evolve as by altering the mindset we approach them with.

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Relationships

A Chance to Be Bad in Relationships

To love is not to confront someone with the full might of moral judgement at all times. It is to be able to bear something less than ideal at points.

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Relationships

Four Kinds of Sexual Deviancy and What They Really Mean

We don’t typically imagine that sexual deviants have very much to teach us about anything. But this is to miss out on a disquieting reality: these deviants are manifesting in an extreme form proclivities in which we are all to some extent implicated.

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Calm

Keep Going

Here is humanity as we seldom allow ourselves to see it: neither triumphant nor defeated, but doggedly persisting – despite so many arguments against it.

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Relationships

The Wisdom of Taking It Slowly

It sounds, on the surface, like the most withholding and mean-minded of strategies: to go very slowly when we might,…

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Leisure

The Most Beautiful Woman in London

After a painful two-year absence, the most beautiful woman in London is finally back home, on the upper floor of…

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Relationships

When Anxious and Avoidant Couples Spiral

One of the most distressing eventualities in romantic life occurs when an anxiously attached partner and an avoidantly attached one…

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Relationships

How Regrets Increase As We Grow

There is a paradox around regret when it comes to relationships. The more we learn about ourselves and others, the…

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Relationships

What Kinks Are About

One of the great puzzles of psychology is why kinks exist. Not only are we typically highly selective about who…

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Relationships

When Love Feels Like Pressure: The Pains of Attachment

One of the more awful risks in love is when a relationship that might well have been viable is scuppered…

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Relationships

What We Truly Long for in Love

What is it we really hope for and crave in love? One suggestion – deceptively simple to state but hugely…

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Leisure

What Love Looks Like

If we think about what love might look like in a work of art, certain stock images tend to come…

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Relationships

Why We Should – out of Love – Sometimes Not Love Too Much

It sounds, at one level, absurd to have to hold back from expressing the full intensity of our feelings for…

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