Do you need lessons in love?

Is love an emotion to feel or a skill to learn? This deceivingly simple question is posed by Alain de Botton who offers a philosophy of modern life through his books and business enterprise The School of Life.

The rise of dating apps make it seem as if we have more opportunities than ever to look for 'the one' (or the many), but when it comes to love we are not as free as we might think.

The way we have come to recognise love - and how we like to experience it - has echoes of our past. Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel speaks of how the love and affection we experienced from caregivers in early childhood affects our relationships throughout life and that love was very often bound up with problematic dynamics. Maybe we grew up in a home with a mental illness or a death, or a home where one sibling was favoured over another or where love was only ever offered conditionally.

Just as we learn a language of symbols and words during our earliest years, we also learn an emotional language. This is particularly true up until the age of seven. Stem cell biologist Bruce Lipton explains that children up to this age are in a theta or hypnoses state, a time characterised by creativity and intuition, which allows a child to learn a vast amount in a short space of time. As children, we figure out how to navigate the world and the information we gather is stored in the subconscious. That child remains in all of us and the clue to who we are today almost always lies in dynamics that appeared before our 10th birthday.

De Botton and others such as psychoanalyst Melanie Klein maintain that we love in tracks laid down in childhood. When it comes to love and relationships, we tend to map what feels familiar onto those tracks. We are likely to be attracted to someone who evokes the past rather than someone who might contribute to our contentment in the present. With love, we seek out what is known to us.

How love has become a commodity

Sociologists such as Eva Illouz show us that we are living in an intensely emotional world. This can be seen with the rise of popular psychology that promises to make us better lovers and leaders, the growth in wellness holidays and the inclusion of wellness and happiness as indicators in public policy.

Most of us are familiar with love through cultures of consumption, be that greeting cards, cinematic experiences or the gamification of love through online dating apps. Love has been presented to us as an entity that can be managed and manipulated, which goes some way in explaining the continued reliance on dating apps, which has increased to 349 million users worldwide, and why divorce rates are on the rise in Ireland.

From a young age, some of us became quite comfortable with the cosier side of love, which is being loved, but it is not as easy to embrace another side of love, which is to love. To love, de Botton advises, can be compared to applying charity of understanding to another’s behaviour. Everyone is, to some degree, a wounded soul. For such reasons, de Botton highlights the importance of studying love quoting German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who maintained that the secret to life is to turn tears into knowledge.

We can do this with love by becoming aware of patterns in our own behaviour and by learning lessons of trust and vulnerability. The repetitive nature of these lessons is important as our minds tend to act as sifts. World religions are acutely aware of this fact, explaining why repetition is built into prayer and ritual in most traditions.

Romance is a place: the allure of Romantism

One main caution accompanies discussions about love and that is the allure of Romantism. This artistic and intellectual movement of the late 18th and early 19th century has been powerful in shaping how we view love today. It encourages us to follow our desires, believe in one true love, and think love in its truest sense means being able to know what the other is thinking without ever having to ask.

But a healthy degree of pessimism helps in offering everyday alternatives. It is useful to accept that we are all imperfect and are sure to annoy those who come to love us - just as we will equally be irritated by them. De Botton claims that compatibility should be the achievement of love and not its prerequisite. Love means helping another reach their fullest potential through generosity of understanding. The most significant lesson of all, however, might come from interrogating the verdicts handed down to us as children.

This piece originally appeared on RTÉ Brainstorm