Alain de Botton talking to a packed Sydney Opera House this week. Picture: Yael Stempler

But popular philosopher Alain de Botton is out to subvert our romantic ideals with a healthy dose of realism, and help us understand why we keep failing in the art of love.

De Botton, who is on a speaking tour of Australia this week, sat down with news.com.au to explain his theories on how to make a relationship work in the modern world.

The Swiss-born, London-based TV personality made his name through a close examination of how to negotiate life, from understanding ourselves to navigating the flaws and idiosyncrasies of someone else.

His book, The Course of Love, questions everything we believe to be true about coupledom.

Here’s the complete philosopher’s guide to love.

HOW TO FIND THE RIGHT PERSON

De Botton is not prescriptive on how to find Mr or Mrs Right, which sounds counterintuitive in a world where everyone is searching high and low, swiping left and right and reading endless articles on how to track down that elusive soulmate.

“We live in a society that’s so obsessed by the idea of finding the totally, totally right person that’s going to solve everything,” he explains.

“You’ve probably met someone who’s quite nice, and everybody is right enough at some level.”

The philosopher says too much emphasis is placed on the idea that if we keep looking until we find that special person, “every problem in love is going to be solved.”

His alternative? “If you find them attractive, you get on with them, they like you, etc, that’s going to be as good as you need, and the real challenge is therefore to know how to make a relationship work rather than keep searching on and on for this ever more finely tuned ‘rightness’.”

The philosopher says we need to upfront about how we are crazy. Picture: Yael StemplerSource:Supplied

WHAT YOU NEED TO BE IN A RELATIONSHIP

So how do you make it work? Self-awareness is one of the most important things to take into a fledging romance, the philosopher believes.

We need to recognise that “relationships, even with someone you really, really like are going to be difficult and that other human beings are difficult and one is oneself difficult.”

De Botton’s ideal first date would involve the couple handing each other a manual on their own unique form of craziness.

“The real warning signs are people who say things like, ‘I’m a really easygoing, simple sort of person really, I don’t require anything’,” he adds.

“Everyone’s troubled deep down or from close up, so the more somebody’s got an awareness of that, the better signal it is. If someone says, ‘I’m really easy to live with,’ I would run a mile.”

He suggests this more truthful line: “I’ve got some really tricky sides but I’m committed to letting to you know about them in good time and trying not to upset you with them.”

HOW TO COPE WITH ARGUMENTS

Early arguments, personality clashes and differing opinions or lifestyle habits cause many of us to panic and wonder whether perhaps this is not the perfect person for us.

But breaking up usually isn’t the answer, says De Botton.

“There isn’t some twin out there who’s basically another version of you. That doesn’t really exist, everybody is strangely different, and the task of love is to understand them and work around the differences with humour and tolerance and forgiveness.”

He says our propensity to insist relationships are all about big and meaningful things, rather than “where the keys live or what the cutlery drawer’s like”, means we are more likely to become impatient when these things arise.

“Often petty arguments are particularly bitter and intense and take up a lot of time because we don’t want to give them any time,” he says.

“We do tend to underestimate the role, the importance of the so-called small things in the management and survival of a big relationship, we think that’s slightly beneath what love should be.”

We also overreact to each other’s surface comments without trying to decode the feelings, insecurities or reasons behind the possibly aggressive behaviour.

De Botton suggests thinking of your partner as you might a child, and having compassion and tenderness towards their vulnerabilities and character faults.

We need to be compassionate towards partners and generous in judging their flaws.Source:Supplied

HOW TO KEEP THE SPARK ALIVE

Our adoration for somebody can make us want to be so close to them we unconsciously try to “possess and own them”, says De Botton, but this is dangerous territory.

“Sexuality and to some extent respect and interest in somebody is dependent on a sense of their independence, and if you strip someone of their independence, even if it’s in the name of love, you may end up finding your love is lacking a certain kind of desire.

“It’s the foreignness of another person that is exciting. Why is sex great at the beginning? Because you can’t really believe someone who had seemed so foreign, unknown, independent is with you.

“After a while, you might take all of that for granted — their body, their identity, everything just seems like it’s yours to claim. The more we can remind ourselves that no one owns anyone the easier it might be.”

So how do you know a relationship is wrong? “If you can look at your life and its unhappiness and squarely lay it on the other person then you should leave, they are dragging you down,” says De Botton.

But if your problems come from another source, or could crop up in another relationship, it may be better to stay and explore that, rather than blame the toughness of life on a partner.

HOW TO SURVIVE AN AFFAIR

For all his pragmatism, De Botton says we shouldn’t underestimate the sense that an affair is the end of love.

“Sometimes we try to be mature about this and go, ‘come on, it’s ridiculous’, but I think we shouldn’t, we should just accept that we are wired that way, to basically become slightly demented if we hear our partner has done any of these things.”

His advice for the wounded party is to remind ourselves of what we might have felt or thought when we have been unfaithful, or thought about it, in the past.

It often comes back to a feeling of being neglected, or just meeting someone attractive, rather than wanting to hurt our partner. “It can help to try and empathise with what might be going on in the other person’s head,” he says. “We’re so prone to leap to the worst explanations that tap into our reserves of self-hatred and self-doubt.”

The philosopher isn’t a fan of open relationships, either. They may seem like an answer to our desire for both monogamy and excitement, but he believes jealousy and hurt are so embedded in human nature that polyamory or polygamy are unlikely to work.

HOW TO BE GOOD AT RELATIONSHIPS

The expectations we put on our relationships are huge, says De Botton. We’re trying to be another person’s best friend and ideal sexual partner, while running a household and social life, raising children and often caring for parents together.

“It’s often very far from what initially drew you to a person,” says the philosopher. “Compassion for oneself and one’s partner for the sheer number of tasks that are rolled into that job description called marriage, it’s a very multifaceted occupation.”

What’s more, there’s a huge amount of pressure on succeeding in these tasks. “Everything that’s forever becomes more serious,” says De Botton.

We start thinking that if our partner doesn’t understand us, we have ruined our lives, and are stuck with someone who just doesn’t get it.

It’s not that high expectations are bad, but you need “mechanisms for reaching them” rather than assuming it should happen by intuition.

Thinking about communication, how to talk and why we argue is often seen as taboo, says De Botton. We panic and bail out, and then these same problems pursue us in the next relationship.

“We need some ‘love training’, which sounds really unromantic,” says De Botton. “But to be in love with someone is not just a warm feeling you have, it should be made up of a set of skills and resources you have and direct their way.

“We don’t know how to love, generally, we don’t even know it’s something we need to know.”

HOW TO KNOW YOU’RE READY FOR MARRIAGE

So when is a person ready for a life-partner? Here’s De Botton’s view:

• When you realise you are quite a difficult thing to handle, that you are not an easy person

• When you’ve got a handle on why those reasons exist, what it is about your past

• When you’ve reached a certain level of self-understanding and you’ve realised how you work emotionally

• When you realise a little more about how other people work and that your partner, however perfect they may seem, is unlikely to have escaped all the challenges that make human beings human

• When you’re ready to go into a relationship with a degree of forgiveness and tolerance and charity toward your own and the other person’s quirks

• When you realise that practical life arguments about who does the washing or puts out the bins aren’t an end to love, but part of what love involves

• When you have a capacity for resignation in some areas and an overall sense there isn’t perfection anywhere

• When you recognise that choosing a partner is always going to mean choosing a delightful person to please you in some ways, but it’s also going to mean choosing a person who’s going to make you suffer

“That’s not a sign your life’s gone wrong,” he finishes. “It’s just a sign you’ve found one person and they’re going to make you suffer in particular ways, as everybody makes us suffer that we stick around.”

Alain de Botton’s latest book, The Course of Love, is available now from Penguin Australia.

emma.reynolds@news.com.au