Relationships
The Sorrows of Love
Louis-Léopold Boilly, Les Malheurs de l’amour (The Sorrows of Love), 1790 If we happened to pass this painting in its home –…
View
Articles by The School of Life
Browse themes
Full Article Index
Relationships
The Sorrows of Love
So often, our suffering is deepened by a sense that we are unusual and cursed to be feeling it.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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?
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
Self-Knowledge
Why We Love Our Bears
We gathered at The School of Life to discuss something unusual: our teddy bears.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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…
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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…
Read Article
Relationships
After They Left
What unexpected rates of interest happiness charges. If only the sweet times had come with warning labels.
Read Article
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…
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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…
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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…
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
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).
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read Article
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.
Read ArticleArticles
Select themes
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Self-Knowledge
The Importance of Hating People
The idea that we might, at points, need to create room for hatred – that mental well-being might rely on…
View
Self-Knowledge
On Not Being Able to Believe Your Own Luck
It would be natural to assume that luck was something it was very easy indeed to believe in: what could…
View
Relationships
The One Question We Forget to Ask Ourselves in Love – And Why
There’s one question that people who are deeply enmeshed in love – who might have been pursuing someone in vain…
View
Relationships
The Brutality of Dating
The word ‘brutal’ may sound a little hyperbolic and self-pitying when applied to an activity whose chief outward requirements involve…
View
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:…
View
Self-Knowledge
Why We Love Our Bears
We gathered at The School of Life to discuss something unusual: our teddy bears. A group of us, all of…
View
Work
How to Steal a Very Expensive House
There’s a common assumption that the only way to own a beautiful house, or car or piece of clothing is…
View
Calm
The Consolations of Deep Time
Thinking about the age of the earth is – unexpectedly perhaps – among the more consoling and calming of all…
View
Select themes
Self-Knowledge
The Importance of Hating People
The idea that we might, at points, need to create room for hatred – that mental well-being might rely on…
View
Self-Knowledge
On Not Being Able to Believe Your Own Luck
It would be natural to assume that luck was something it was very easy indeed to believe in: what could…
View
Relationships
The One Question We Forget to Ask Ourselves in Love – And Why
There’s one question that people who are deeply enmeshed in love – who might have been pursuing someone in vain…
View
Relationships
The Brutality of Dating
The word ‘brutal’ may sound a little hyperbolic and self-pitying when applied to an activity whose chief outward requirements involve…
View
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:…
View
Self-Knowledge
Why We Love Our Bears
We gathered at The School of Life to discuss something unusual: our teddy bears. A group of us, all of…
View
Work
How to Steal a Very Expensive House
There’s a common assumption that the only way to own a beautiful house, or car or piece of clothing is…
View
Calm
The Consolations of Deep Time
Thinking about the age of the earth is – unexpectedly perhaps – among the more consoling and calming of all…
View
