Tackling Your Dire Needs for Romantic Love

Cosponsored with Philosophy + Therapy

You've told friends not to make anyone their whole world. You meant it.
So why does it feel different when it's you?

Why do so many thoughtful, self-aware, well-read people still find themselves:

• becoming a smaller, more careful version of themselves around someone they want
• treating one person's attention as evidence about their own worth
• staying long past the point of knowing
• mistaking the fear of losing someone for the strength of loving them
• needing reassurance that never quite holds
• unable to say what they want, in case wanting it costs them

A Guide to Rational Living — the 1961 book that became the foundation of modern cognitive therapy — locates the whole problem in a single word. Wanting someone was never the trouble. Needing them is. A preference you can survive not getting; a requirement you cannot. Same feeling, same person, entirely different consequences when it doesn't go your way.

We'll get into:

• the difference between a preference and a demand, and why it decides everything
• why wanting love more doesn't make you love better
• what the Stoics said about loving mortal beings
• how a demand quietly rewrites what you'll accept
• what's left of desire once you stop requiring it

No reading required. We listen to the chapter together.
The plan for the night:

• Quick intro from me — who I am, and where these ideas came from
• We listen to Chapter 8 together (~20 min)
• Small-group discussion (~20 min)
• Q&A and open discussion

Not therapy. No diagnosis. Nothing you have to share. Just a good book and a more reasonable way to see the world.