Event description
Making Relationships Work
We expect love to be the source of our greatest joys. But it is also, of course, one of the most reliable routes to misery. Few forms of suffering are as intense as those we experience in relationships. Viewed from the outside, love could be mistaken for a practice focused almost entirely on the generation of despair.
The problems begin because, despite all the statistics, we continue to think of love as an enthusiasm, rather than a skill that can be learnt. One of the gravest errors we make around relationships is to imagine that they aren’t things we can get wiser or better at.
In fact, as in all areas, we can improve how good we are at loving another person, which is what this one-day workshop will help us to do. It will teach us to understand why we are all, in our different ways, tricky to be around and prone to sabotage love.
When difficulties strike in relationships, we often fall prey to the idea that it is the other person’s fault. The sadness must be someone’s fault: and, naturally enough, we conclude that the blame has to lie with our partner. We avoid the far truer, darker yet gentler possibility that this one-day workshop will help us to perceive: that we are trying to do something very difficult, which we need to learn to get better at.
Together, we bury the Romantic intuition-based view of relationships and learn to practice and rehearse our skills at love.
In Making Relationships Work we will learn:
- That it is normal for love and sex to have a complex connection, and that they may not always belong together
- That we are all rather flawed, and accepting this can increase the amount of tolerance and generosity in circulation
- That we will never find everything we need in another person, nor they in us - not because of these flaws, but because human nature makes this impossible
- That we need to make immense efforts to understand one another
- That intuition alone can’t get us to where we need to go
In most relationships, we are trying to do something enormously difficult without the bare minimum of support necessary. It is not surprising that – very often – we have troubles. In this intensive day of study, we learn how to acquire skills and attitudes that can lead to a new, more hopeful future for love.
This one day workshop brings together the best of The School of Life’s Love curriculum into a single high intensity session. You can explore our full curriculum here. Please be aware, Making Relationships Work contains material from the following individual classes: How to Find Love, How to Make Love Last and Stay or Leave.
TIMETABLE
9.40am Tea & welcome
10.00am Morning Session
1.00pm Lunch Break (times vary)
2.00pm Afternoon Session
5.00pm Workshop Ends
About Practice Classes
Practice Classes are an opportunity to experience The School of Life experiences and content without paying our standard public fees. We run practice classes for newly starting facilitators and/or newly developed content. We invite you to sit in on one of our practice classes in exchange for thorough feedback, which you fill our at the end of the session.