Support for on-being with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute, helping build the

spiritual foundation for a loving world. Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding

principle and animating force for our lives. A powerful love that helps us live in sacred

relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world. Learn more by visiting Fetzer.org.

Alanda Botan's essay, Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

is one of the most red articles in the New York Times of recent years, and this is one of the most

popular episodes we've ever created. As people and as a culture, he says, we would be much

saner and happier if we re-examined our very view of love. I'm glad to offer up the anchoring

truths he tells amidst a pandemic that has stretched all of our sanity and tested the metal of love

in every home and relationship. Love is something we have to learn and we can make progress with and

that it's not just an enthusiasm, it's a skill and it requires forbearance generosity,

imagination, and a million things besides the course of true love is rocky and bumpy at the best

of times and the more generous we can be towards that flawed humanity, the better chance we'll have

of doing the true hard work of love. I'm Krista Tippett and this is on being.

Alanda Botan is the founder and chairman of the School of Life, a gathering of courses,

workshops, and talks on meaning and wisdom for modern lives with branches around the world.

He first became known for his book, How Proust Can Change Your Life. I spoke with him in 2017.

So we did speak a few years ago but on a very different topic and I'm really

excited to be speaking with you about this subject which is so close to every life and

you know as I've prepared for this, I realized that you've actually, I mean I knew that you'd

written the novel On Love a long time ago but you've really been consistently attending to this

subject and building your thoughts on it and your body of work on it. It was really interesting to

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