How To Fall In Love With Someone Yale Conversations With David Brooks

TITLE: How to Fall in Love with Someone | Yale Conversations with David Brooks | Yale University CHANNEL: Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs DATE: 2026-04-26 ---TRANSCRIPT--- It’s great to be back here. I’ve been teaching on and off since the 90s here at Yale. And I just had lunch with about 16 or 20 students at Timothy Dwight College. Uh, and every time they remind you why it’s worth a 5-hour train ride from Washington to come here. They’re electric. They disagree with you. Um, they’re smarter than you are. Uh and so for those of you who are undergrads and some of you who are overgrads uh uh I just can’t tell you what a pleasure it’s been to be up here. Now uh I am uh I this is the fourth of the talks and I noticed somebody told me that one of the talks has roughly uh 500,000 views on YouTube. So that surprised me a little. Uh you can never tell what’s going to go viral. Um, but now I realized um I need to up my game. Uh, I need to really if I’m going to have a big audience, I got to provide you with some practical wisdom. So, as sort of an amuse bouch before we get to the main subject, I decide to pass along some of my favorite life hacks. Uh, which and some of these were collected by a guy named Kevin Kelly. Some are mine, some are other people’s, but I’m just going to pass along a few bits of wisdom that I’ve encountered on the internet. And where else can you find wisdom? So, so these are some life hacks. Uh, when you have 90% of a large project completed, finishing up the final details will be another 90%.

Anything you say before the word but does not count.

Denying or deflecting a compliment is rude. Accept it with thanks.

Getting cheated is a small price to pay for trusting the best in everyone. Because when you trust the best in others, they will treat you the best.

The thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult.

It’s not an apology if it comes with an excuse.

Just because it’s not your fault doesn’t mean it’s not your responsibility.

If you think you saw a mouse, you did. And if there’s one, there are others.

Something does not need to be perfect to be wonderful, especially weddings.

If you can’t make up your mind between two options, flip a coin. But don’t go by how the coin came up. Go by your emotional reaction to how the coin came up.

Take photos of the things your parents do every day because this is how you’ll want to remember them. And finally, and this one comes from Warren Buffett, you can always tell somebody to go to hell tomorrow.

So take the extra day. So I I admire those life hacks, so I’m passing it along. And now I asked people uh at Yale and elsewhere, what should I talk about? Uh and two of the words that came up again and again, the first one was agency. How do people claim agency within a system like that? And the second one uh was love.

So people said talk about love. And I once taught a class here on humility. Uh, and I thought it was hilarious to have a New York Times columnist teaching humility at Yale University, but you might as well do something that’s kind of absurd and ridiculous. And so me on one hand, me talking about love, especially for the undergrads in the audience, um, is kind of ridiculous in that my social life is I radically different from yours. And I don’t pretend to understand it. I’m not going to talk about it. There are people who study dating and romance these days. I am not one of them. But I have written four books on social connection starting with a book called The Social Animal and the most recent one called How to Know Person. And so I have over the last 20 years spent a lot of time reading about social connection and even the most intimate of connections which is the love relationship. And so I’ve harvested from some of those people some wisdom that I thought I’d pass along. One of my favorite sayings about being a writer is writers are beggars who tell other beggars where they found bread.

And if I find something that I find useful in my own life, I like to pass it along. And that’s what I’m going to try to do today. Now, the first thing to say about love is that the meritocracy has a tendency to make loving harder than it should be. Because the meritocracy is a system of competition and exclusion that encourages people to become shrewd animals to uh enter into life with the spirit of calculation. How can I get ahead? And CS Lewis has a paragraph on what will happen to you if you approach life not with a poetic frame of mind but with a calculating frame of mind. He writes, “Love anything and your heart will certainly be rung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries. Avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless. It will change. It will not be broken, but it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

And S. Lewis is writing about the process of not falling in love, of manufacturing a coldness in the heart. Now, falling in love, I’m going to just walk us through the steps as experts smarter than me have described them. The first is a glance.

You can be at a dinner party and you exchange what they what uh Deborah Tannon calls an anchoring gaze. When someone holds your eye for an extra two or three or four seconds, that is an extremely powerful reaction.

I myself have never experienced love at first sight. The people I’ve been in love with, I was friends with or for years. But I met a woman or I met a guy actually who was a hairdresser in Houston. And he told me the story of a woman who was uh a pianist in Houston and was going to move to San Francisco to be with her fiance. So she walked into this salon called Etude de Perry and she walking in and she’s going to the room in the back where you get your gown and she sees a guy cutting another woman’s hair and she goes into the room with get her gown, pulls out her phone and calls her mom and says, “I’ve just seen the man I’m actually going to marry.”

So she’s in the chair and she’s in the chair, the guy I had just spoken to and his name is Davided. and he asked her a life story and she says,“Well, I’m pianist. I’m going to San Francisco to be with my fiance, but I won’t do it if you’ll marry me.”

And as David told me the story, he said, “I never felt more free in my life.” And he said, “It’s a deal.”

And so they got to know each other and got married. So that’s love at first sight. That’s not typical.

Usually it takes a little longer. And so after the glance, after the first exchange, the next stage uh is curiosity. They say love is blind, but really love is the opposite of blind. We want to know a lot about the things we love, whether it’s a person or a subject or anything. So we ask them questions. Uh we want to see you know the joyous exploration absorption a sense of deprivation sensitivity that when you’re not with this person you wish you were with them and these this curiosity begins to sow interest and so you start uh dialoguing and when any humans talk to each other this doesn’t have to be a loving relationship uh we synchronize we synchronize our breathing we synchronize our wording we synchronize our vocabulary levels so we’re equal and So we’re getting along, we achieve what you might call uh lirance. And when couples are getting together, first they start laughing. And you would think laughter would be a response to jokes. But the laughter experts, yes, there are some, uh, say that only 15% of laughs are in response to a joke. 85% of laughs are in response to synchronicity. There’s been a difference in our relationship. we realize we see the same thing and people start laughing and they produce what they call the duchain smile which is when you’re you can’t control a certain muscle in consciously and so when you have a genuinely natural smile it’s a different eyebrow motion than others and when we see that we know bingo something good is happening

and so that’s synchronicity and you’re looking for similarity you’re like do we have the same musical taste do we have the same post poster on our bedroom as a kid do we both think $6 cupcakes is ridiculous. It’s like the those things and synchronicity and similarity brings begins to bring people together and warm the heart.

Uh now the biggest phase problem in the dialogue phase is fear. Fear of intimacy. The process is like a tennis court. I volley a little intimacy, you volley a little intimacy back. And we’re secretly asking ourselves, if I unveil, will you protect me? If I pause, will you respect my privacy?

Will you hold me when I need healing?

And so, the non-obvious point is the timing and collaboration of the trust spiral. As we learn to trust each other, it takes a lot of skill. It takes a lot of patience to not go too fast, to not go too slow. And it’s an extremely delicate skill. I remember you you might think of it as pushing open the gates. I’m going to walk through this doorway. Well, can I walk through that door? You can walk through this door of mine. Can we walk through that door? I was once beginning a friendship with somebody and it was over email. And I sent an email that was a little pushing the vulnerability a little further than we’d had established. And I get on a flight. It’s a cross-country flight and I’m desperate to know did she respond? and the flight has no Wi-Fi and I’m stuck there for five hours thinking, “Oh no, did she respond? Oh, this is over. She hates me.” Fortunately, it was a nice response. So, our relationship deepened. And what strikes me about this is the power of words to incite strong emotions. Just the act of communication can produce extremely strong emotions.

One of my heroes is a guy named Isaiah Berlin. Isaiah Berlin lived in England. Uh he was visiting Moscow during World War II and he hears his friend says, “Would you like to meet Anna Akmaktova?” Ana Maktova was a poet and Berlin didn’t know much about her, but he said, “Sure.” And so they went over to apartment at about 4 in the afternoon and they start talking and uh she told him about her first husband. Then she told him about some of her loneliness. Uh, and then they start talking about literature and first they she begins to write a poem from Byron’s Don Juan and then she begins to read some of her poetry and by now it’s midnight and they keep talking and by 4 in the morning they’re talking about Pushkin and Czechov. Uh, Berlin likes uh, Tanyv, she likes Dosfki. They read all the same books and they’re just talking and talking and she’s confessing her loneliness. She’s talking about the death of her husband, her her internal exile. She was really brutalized by Stalin. But they just kept talking and talking about all the big ideas from people who take big ideas seriously.

And Berlin desperately has to go to the bathroom, but he doesn’t want to break the spell. And so he finally returns home after talking all night at 10:00 a.m. He flops down on his hotel bed and says to his roommate, “I’m in love. I’m in love. I’m in love.” And they never touched each other. It was all conversation.

And Michael Ignatv, who writes Berlin’s biography, calls it the most important night of Berlin’s life because he established such a deep human connection. And Akmaktova wrote a poem and a book about it later called The Visitor from the Future.

And that’s just the power of love. The power of love to create enchantment. Uh, and so it’s that power of love to create intimacy. Gary Chandling is a comedian who said, “My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem, but they don’t really know me.”

And so about a fifth of adults, according to the experts, fear intimacy. They just don’t want to get close because they’re afraid of what will happen. And you can tell someone fears intimacy if they disappear from the relationship all of a sudden or if they don’t like terms like girlfriend and boyfriend or if they ask you a lot of questions but never say anything about themselves. These are all signs that somebody’s fears intimacy.

But if you go through the intimacy gradient you achieve what Stendal called crystallization and that’s idolization of the other person. You idealize them. And Stendal said he wrote a great book called Love and he said it’s like there’s a salt mine near Salsburg and if you dip a branch in and leave it there for a month when you pull the branch out it’ll be covered with crystals and it’ll shimmer. That’s what falling in love is like. You think the other person is vastly better than they actually are.

Virginia Sadair who was a writer and therapist said love uh flourishes in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated. Mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible. And so if you can create that kind of culture within yourself, you’re creating a kind of enchantment. The weird thing about love is something outside you touches something deep inside you and you get combustion. And that could be another person, it could be a book, it could be a subject, it could be an activity. anytime you fall in love with anything. And one of the things I try to emphasize uh especially at undergrads is that life is more about more like falling in love than it is like making a decision. The big transformational chases of your life will because you fell in love with an activity, you fell in love with a town, you fell in love with an idea, you fell in love with a job. And that happens when there’s combustion. No great thing was ever achieved in a prosaic frame of mind. A poetic frame of mind is really what you trust when you make these big decisions. George Washington doesn’t strike me as the most romantic human being in American history. But he once wrote to a stepdaughter or granddaughter, “In the composition of the human frame, there is a good deal of inflammable matter, however dormant it may lie for a time. And when the torch is put to it, that which is within you must burst into blaze.” And so even George Washington was like a marly stiff figure. He understood. John Odani was a writer and essaist. He writes, “When you find yourself deeply attracted to someone, you gradually begin till you lose your grip on the frames in which you order your life. Indeed, much of your life becomes blurred as the countenance comes into clearer focus. A relentless magnet draws all your thoughts toward it. Wherever you are, you find yourself thinking about the one who has become the horizon of your longing. When we are together, time becomes unmercifully swift. It always ends too soon. No sooner have you parted than you are already imagining your next meeting, counting the hours. The magnetic draw of the presence renders you delightfully helpless.

A stranger you never knew until recently has invaded your mind. Every fiber of your of your being longs to be closer.”

Think it’s a nice we need poets to describe what love feels like.

Many essaists have including Augustine have noticed that love eliminates the distinction between giving and receiving. When you give a gift to your beloved, it feels like you’re receiving because you’re giving to a piece of yourself and that you have actually merged together.

Uh that kind of friendship Montaigne had with a guy named Etien Laboi. I think I’m pronouncing that correctly. And he he writes an essay on friendship, a beautiful essay. And he writes, “Such a friendship had no model in itself can only be compared to itself.

It was a mysterious quintessence of all the mixture of the process, his process of his will into my will, would led me to put my will into his will.” And he said it was because we became friends because I was I and he was he. And one of the nice things I like about Montaigne’s uh friendship with Laboi, Laboti died young, very young. In the very end, he called his family and friends around him to his deathbed and he gave little speeches to each person thanking them for who they were and describing what their that relationship had meant. And later Montaigne wrote, “Laboti’s speeches were very beautiful, but they could have been a little shorter.”

Well, that that’s true friendship when you say unto death, but you know, you meandered there.

Sometimes love is painful. There’s a pros poem by a woman who was a Native American in southern Alaska that was she wrote in 1896.

Fire runs through my body the pain of loving you. Pain through runs my body with the fires of my love for you. Sickness wanders my body with my love for you. Pain like a boil about to burst with my love for you. Consumed by fire with my love for you. I remember what you said to me. I’m thinking of your love for me. I’m torn by your love for me. Pain and more pain. Where are you going with my love? If I I’m told you will go from home, I’m told you will leave me. My body is numb with grief.

And so you’re when you fall in love, you’re signing up for that potentially. Uh so then you are in love.

And at this point, it’s important to have a fight.

There’s going to be a crisis in every love relationship. And you’re going to have a fight. and it’s probably going to fight over your central disagreement. In every relationships, there’s some things that two people just don’t agree upon, and it will never go away.

And sometimes these are kind of trivial, but I I think that a lot of things that test relationships are one person likes to be on time, the other person doesn’t mind being late. One person likes being neat, the other person doesn’t mind being messy.

Uh, one person doesn’t care about money, the other person intensely cares about money. These are subjects. These disequalities are just hard to deal with. But so there’s going to be a crisis and there’s going to be a fight and people are going to say things that they shouldn’t say. One of the things I’ve learned about having fights is that your motivations deteriorate.

When you start the argument, you’re arguing about something in principle, but as the argument goes on, you’re not arguing about something some principle. You’re arguing about who’s smarter, who’s more powerful, who’s better.

And once you detect that your your motivations are deteriorating, you should shut up because everything you say after that will be hurtful. And I had a guy tell me uh that he got a divorce because he and his ex-wife did not stop talking when the motivations deteriorated and they said things that can never be said, left unsaid.

And so the fight is important because it gives a chance of forgiveness.

Martin Luther King was to me the world’s leading expert on forgiveness for obvious reasons. He said forgiveness is not an act. It’s an attitude.

It’s the attitude that says people are sinful, people are weak, people are going to screw up. Expect it. And so your attitude should be that they’re going to wrong me and I will forgive them. And he says, he who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. So the person who’s been wronged creates an atmosphere in which forgiveness can be asked for. And once that atmosphere, then the wronger, that’s not a word, uh, says begins to show penitence, begins to ask for forgiveness, begins to offer reparation, goes through all the steps you have to go through to obviously be forgiven. And the person doing the forgiving is strong enough to show they’re angry over what just happened but strong enough to say my anger will not be interfere with our relationship. So the sin is not forgotten but it does not come in the way of relationship. And if anybody’s had a friendship, had a marriage, whatever, you know that these things are built on rupture and repair.

That rupture and repair is the process of building a relationship. And as I argued a couple weeks ago, it’s the process of recovering a nation. We as individuals and as nations, we grow through a process of rupture and repair.

So then you’ve gotten over that, you’re stronger. And then couples do the thing that really begins to lead to marriage. And that’s the process of creating a mutual future together.

It’s saying, “Oh yeah, I’d like to have a house kind of like that.

I’d like to have a paint a kitchen with blue walls. And wouldn’t it be great if we took a vacation to Hawaii?” And that process of creating a mutual future together is the process of creating a marriage because you putting in your mind, oh, the the story I tell in my life includes this other person. And you may not even be thinking about marriage yet, but you’re creating it. Because once you create a future together, if you’re going to break the relationship, you have to dismantle the future you’ve created. And that is a big barrier to breaking a relationship. And so that unconscious process of thinking, okay, we’re going to have a future together. And that future, this is Simone V, a French mystic who died around World War II. It has to be a future where each person is completely committed to each other and each person has space to be themselves.

It’s that idea. Genuine love, she wrote, is the act of attending to the beautiful thing or beautiful person without consuming them. It is the capacity to let the other be other, to perceive their reality without enexing it to your own needs. To admire without possessing, to be nourished by their existence without devouring it. She writes, “To love purely is to consent to distance. It is to adore the distance between ourselves and the other and that which we love.” It is the otherness of the beloved. It is the belief that the other will grow away from you and the ability to celebrate that belief because each person gets their own trajectory of growth.

So, so far I’ve been talking about affairs of the heart, the emotions, the passions, the unconscious processes, even the smelling. We people forget we’re we’re mammals. And when we smell, when we’re uh with the other person, the pherommones are in there and we’re that smell is powerful. I read somewhere when I wrote the book se the second m or no the social animal that when people kiss and exchange saliva, they are unconsciously appraising the other person’s immune system.

I don’t know if that’s true, but um it’s an impressive act of the unconscious mind. But the but before you actually marry someone, you can’t totally go with your heart because people a lot of people who totally go with their heart wind up divorced. So there must be some rational appraisal you have to do. Uh and so you have to step back and give the prefrontal cortex its moment to think this through carefully. And the first questions the experts suggest asking our tendency is to ask questions about the other person. But it’s really best to ask questions about yourself first.

Are you in a place where you’re ready to do this? Are you ready for marriage?

Uh, do I like the person I am when I’m around him?

What’s my core issue? And does this person fill my core issue?

How high is my bar? There are debates and down through history about whether it’s prudent to settle when you marry. Some people say, “Hey, it’s life is, you know, you’re an imperfect person. Settle. You’re never going to find your one true love. Settle. Find somebody who’s good enough.” Jane Austin um said, “Never settle.”

And as usual, I’m with Jane Austin. She said, “You shouldn’t settle first because you’re going to need a lot of raw passion to hold you two together when the tough times come. You really have better fused yourself together with raw passion.” Second, are you going to tell the other person that you’re settling?

Are you going to say to them, “Well, you were my fourth choice, but probably not the best basis for a marriage.” Or if you don’t tell them, you’re going into a marriage with dishonesty. Probably also not the best basis for a marriage. So, I’m persuaded by Jane Austin, never settle.

But you need to have some analytic method to evaluate whether marriage is a prudent thing to do. And so to me there are three lenses to apply.

The first is the psychological lens. What’s your personality and what’s the other person’s personality? And there’s a guy named Tai Tashiro who writes books about this. What kind of personality types go together? And his main finding is if you’re going to marry someone who scores high on the personality trait of neuroticism, think really carefully about that because neurotics stay neurotic. And neurotics are people who are extremely sensitive to negative emotion and they tend to create drama. They create instability. And I mentioned this to a buddy of mine in New York who was serious about a woman and he said, “What do you do if you’re neurotic?”

I said, “Marry another neurotic. you’ll make two people miserable and not four. So not really an ideal answer but what’s what came to mind. So that’s the psychological lens. The second lens is the emotional lens. The Greeks made these taxonomies of love and they for example they said there’s filia which is friendship, there’s aeros which is passion and there’s agape which is selfless giving. And if you’re going to marry someone, you should have all three. If you just have aeros, you have a hookup but not a marriage. If you have Philly, you have friendship and but not a marriage. You should have all three. And so you think about which emotions are really aroused in your heart. And the third lens is the moral lens.

Love comes and goes, but admiration stays.

And so marry someone you admire. the the John Gottman who I’m going to quote in a minute says the ultimate killer of relationship is not pain, it’s not fighting, it’s contempt.

Once you cease to respect the other person, it’s really hard to get it back. And so ask, do I deeply admire this person? Is this the person who keeps his or her promises? Does this person possess qualities I’d like to pass down to my children?

Do they brag about things they shouldn’t be bragging about? And these are all signs of you’re looking for someone with high character who you could admire. And that’s the key to a marriage.

Now, once uh you fall in love and you have crossed the rational threshold, then you want to make promises to that person.

Um and that commitment to the other person uh is powerful. I had a friend um who got married. Uh they struggled to have kids for a while and they eventually uh got pregnant and the his wife went into the hospital to deliver their baby and for some reason she lost a ton of blood. It went terrible and the doctors told him that about 85% of the people the women who go through this die and so he should be prepared for that and those who remain have serious blood damage because their brain they’ve shut down. And so he’s sitting there in the hospital room having been told this news. And the thought crosses his mind. Now I get to test my marriage spouse cuz this is the you realize how powerful a commitment I have made to this person. I will be there for them no matter how what shape she comes out in.

And she actually miraculously came out fine. They had a kid. I had dinner with him many times. And and so but Joseph Campbell for for examples like that called marriage a heroic quest uh a quest in which the egro is sacrificed to make way for the sake of the relationship. A marriage he wrote is a moral microcosm of life in which each person freely chooses to take on responsibilities for others becomes dependent on others in order to do something larger and historic.

Marriage involves a lot of big jobs. to separate from emotionally from your family of origin, to build intimacy, to embrace uh the little baby if they come along, to confront the inevitable crises of life, to have a rich sexual life, to create a safe haven for the expression of differences. These are big jobs and they’re hard to do unless you really have wisdom and passion.

And it’s filled with a lot of little jobs. Marriage is knowing that she likes to get to the airport really early for a flight.

Marriage is taking the time to make the bed even though you know if you didn’t she probably would.

Marriage is a little glass of water in the night. There’s a book by a guy name Sheldon Van Hoken called a a severe mercy and they had a the phrase in his relationship with his wife a little glass water in the night and it was when you should when somebody when your wife or husband asks you can you go down and get me some water at 2 a.m. it’s a great privilege to be asked and it’s a great gift to do the asking. It was just like a little glass of water in the night doing nice things.

And then words are um not only the key to falling in love, words are the key to marriage. And this is where John Gottman, who is the leading marriage expert in America probably comes in. He says a conversation, especially with a spouse, but with any friend, any relationship, is a pattern of bids and volleys.

You make a bid. Say, uh, you’re sitting there at a table and some friend or spouse of yours says, “Look out the window. There’s a beautiful blue jay.” That’s a bid. You have three options. You can look out the window and say, “Oh, that’s a tremendous, beautiful bird. Thank you for pointing it out.” They call that a tor bid. I’m moving toward you. Or there’s a neutral bid, which is I’m reading the paper here. or there’s a turning away bid which is stop bothering me, you’re always bothering me. And the Gottmans have found that a healthy marriage there are five toward bids for every turn away or neutral bid. And so they say relationship geniuses are actively looking for ways to express gratitude to the other person.

And they say the marriage ends not when because there’s a fight, not because of pain, not because of disagreement, it’s when they get the ratio wrong.

Uh it is also marriage as Lord Shaffbury who was a I guess a 19th century English guy. Um he says it’s like a a gem tumbler. It takes two people, any relationship, and it puts you in a little container and it stirs you up so you’re bouncing off each other all the time. One of the best marriage books is called The Meaning of Marriage by a couple named Tim and Kathy Keller. Uh, and they say in a marriage, the following is going to happen. About 6 months in, you’re going to realize that the wonderful person you married is actually kind of selfish.

And as you’re making this decision about the other person, they are making this decision about you.

And so the Kellers say that you have two choices. One is to have a truce marriage, which is when both sides decide not to talk about the other person’s selfishness.

Or you can have a real marriage, which is when you realize that your own selfishness is the only selfishness you can take care of. And a great marriage, they say, is when both couples are working on their own selfishness.

And I think that’s pretty impressive. Um, and so preserving a marriage and keeping it, and I’ve had some marriages preserved. I’ve been through a divorce. I I know both sides. Uh, takes not only that those kind of commitments, but just some practical um practical advice I got from the internet. again, source of great wisdom, a woman named Lydia Netzer, who I don’t know anything about, wrote a blog post called 15 ways to stay married for 15 years. And she had some good advice, which I’m going to pass along. One of it was, “Go to bed mad.” You know how they say you shouldn’t go to bed sometimes. Just go to bed. Get some sleep, wake up, make blueberry pancakes, just go to bed mad.

Second, be proud and brag. Brag about your spouse and have them overhear you bragging about them.

Third, to his mother, not to yours.

If you complain about him to his mother, she’ll forgive him. If you complain about him to your own mother, she never will.

Trust the person you married.

Be loyal.

You and your partner are a team of two. Nobody else is allowed on the team.

So be loyal to each other. I thought that was good advice. If you do all this, you get to achieve uh what I hope some people in this room have, which is second love. The first love is the stuff they make the movies and write the songs about. It’s the hot passion.

But then there’s a second love that comes years or sometimes decades later. And I love reading people in these marriages talk about them. There was a foster named Andrew Gors who wrote a letter to his wife. You’re 82 years old. You’ve shrunk 6 cm.

You only weigh 45 kilos and you’re still beautiful, graceful, and desirable.

We’ve lived together now for 58 years. And I love you more than ever. I once more feel annoying emptiness in the hollow of my chest that is only filled when your body is pressed against mine.

It’s nice after 58 years.

It can last even after death. Victor Frankl tells the story, the the guy who wrote Man’s Church for Meaning of an old guy who came into his office one day. He’s a therapist and his wife had died two years before and he was he’s still the grief is raw.

He’s in intense pain. And he goes to Frankle for some help. And Frankle asks him, “Uh, suppose it had been you who died first. would your wife have experienced the same kind of pain you’re experiencing?” And she said, “Oh, for her this would have been terrible. She would have suffered.” You see, Frankle replied, “Such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who spared her that suffering.”

And the guy shook Frankle’s hand, said, “Thank you. I’m done. We can leave now.” Left the office. My favorite expression of second love is a novel called Carelli’s Mandolin which I hope some of you have read by Louis de Bernier and in that he is has an old guy talking to his daughter about his love for his wife who has now passed on and he writes love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it. We had roots that grew towards each other underground. And when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches, we found out that we’re one tree and not two.

That to me is if you can do all the stuff that the experts and the poets and the writers I’ve just quoted, you can get to that if you’re lucky.

And that’s a good life. Thanks very much.

[Q&A follows — see vault note for selected highlights.]

Q: Of the three orientations to a talk like this — pre-love, in-love, post-love — which is most gratifying?

A: I’ll go for the first week of marriage. But honestly I don’t have an answer. The classes I’ve taught here have all been called something else — the official Jackson School name was “Successful Global Leadership” but the students called it “Therapy with Brooks.” What I’ve learned is the problems people bring you are universal — gay, straight, arranged marriage. There are commonalities. The thing I fear is a culture so busy and pressured that the time to have these relationships starts to seem inefficient, the mind starts to feel it has to be calculating and prosaic. I tell college presidents the most important decision your students will make is who to fall in love with and who to marry — every course should be about the marriage question. Nobody takes me up on it. The things that matter most we barely talk about.

Q: How do you reconcile the insecurity of loving someone with the admiration that’s supposed to outlast love?

A: People say “I love you” not because they enjoy expressing it but because they need to be reminded. “I love you back.” It’s the definition of vulnerability — saying I love you means you could crush me if you wanted to. The only answer I have is constant restatement of the obvious. Attachment theory: secure babies fuss when mom leaves and settle, then greet her when she returns. Disorganized babies never settle and don’t know how to greet her — there was no predictable pattern. Avoidant babies — my personal specialty — are like sailboats tacking into the wind: they want to get close but don’t know how, so they go sideways. When their partner criticizes them, they withdraw. The partner criticizes the withdrawal, they withdraw further. We all have complexes that lurk. Roger Penrose, the Nobel physicist — his dad treated him as an interruption to his work. One day at six, his dad lifted him up to see a sundial on a column and spent twenty minutes explaining how it worked. The first time Penrose ever saw his father smile at him. That enchanted moment is probably why he became a physicist. But it also left him with what we’d now call a disorganized attachment system. We all walk through relationships bringing this baggage. The work is to name it. How are you crazy? Here’s how I’m crazy. Everybody’s crazy about something.

Q: Specific advice for being a student but receptive to falling in love?

A: This sounds idiotic to say so please don’t quote me. I went to a normal big public high school. Over four years I had eight girlfriends. That was the norm. There was a social click of forty or fifty kids and we all dated each other in different orders. We hadn’t yet invented situationships. You had to ask somebody out, you’d date for three months, one of you broke up. It took time. Senior year I really fell in love. Sitting around a campfire with friends, this woman I’d known for years slipped her hand into mine. One of the most blissful moments of my life. I went to Chicago, she went elsewhere, my phone bill was huge, I cleaned popcorn at a movie theater that summer to be near her. She transferred to Chicago. There were three or four guys for every woman at Chicago in those days, so it was happy hunting grounds for her. Within three weeks she dumped me. I was crushed. More pain than I’d ever experienced. Because I was a sophomore I was sort of proud of feeling that much pain — I was a deep guy after all. I went to a fancy newsstand and bought French cigarettes because if I was going to suffer I wanted to suffer like Camus. I look back on that as one of the most important parts of my education. It taught me how to be in a relationship and how to suffer and get over it. Invest time. Ask people out. Get dumped. You’ll remember it more than the courses. A student told me “marriage is a box that comes in the mail when I’m 35.” Wrong. Get reps in.

Q: People falling in love with AI, technology shifting capacity for relational work, and — as a woman — how do you see marriage when historically it was a means to financial freedom?

A: People in your generation love it when people my age make generalizations about you. So I try not to. I have a disease called maturity interruptus — I listen to whatever music 15-year-olds listen to. ABBA, Stones, Michael Jackson, then Snoop and NWA while writing conservative editorials at the Wall Street Journal. Then minivans and “I Kissed a Girl.” Then I crossed what I think of as the Billie Eilish line where I just couldn’t quite get her. So I’m humble about understanding current romantic mores. The one thing the statistics show is there’s less of it. Fewer people going on dates, fewer relationships out of high school and college. Phones, fear of being a sexual predator or being accused of it, time pressure. Then something nasty has happened in our culture: a feeling of lesser-than gets transmitted into resentment. Resentment is feeling you can’t get the highest things you desire, so you decide those highest things aren’t worth wanting. Generosity gets perceived as a sham. Kindness as being a sucker. To get a little political: when Trump in his first term heard about the men buried at Normandy, he called them suckers. That’s someone so consumed by resentment he can’t understand why anyone would sacrifice. Same with John McCain. Resentment constricts your value system — whatever is lower is more real, whatever is lofty is fake. I worry. But historically what follows eras of resentment is eras of romanticism. If resentment is the devaluation of higher values, romanticism is the ardor for higher values — through art, poetry, music. After the late Greek period: Neoplatonism. After the dark ages: chivalry, Lancelot. After industrialization: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Ruskin — we will not be turned into machines. After WWI: Eliot, Weil, Buber’s I-Thou. Culture goes through cycles. Rupture and repair. People are eventually going to say: I want Mr. Rogers. There are wisps in the wind — Ted Lasso, The Good Place. People wanting radical goodness. It would not shock me if we’re in for a period of high romanticization. In which case I’ll give a talk on “Don’t Get Carried Away with Romance.”

Q: At its core, is love physics or chemistry? Opposites attract or like-attracts-like?

A: The evidence is very clear: likes attract. The more similarities — same instinctive reactions, same tastes, same paintings (in marriage, what you hang on the wall is a contentious issue) — the better your shot. Whenever you quote social science you’re quoting averages across populations — it doesn’t apply to you, you might be the exception. But the great marriages I know: the people start finishing each other’s sentences. They begin to look alike. There’s a word I love — limerence — when you almost can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. And when you talk to them when they’re old, they say: “We must have had fights, but I don’t really remember them.”