My 5 Favourite TED Talks on Relationships
Photo Credit: TED Talks
I thought I should write a piece on relationships for Valentines day so here it is! There are lots of talks on love and relationships on TED but these are my favourite ones. Some are scientific, some are more philosophical and some are plain practical. Hope you enjoy them if you get a chance to check them out!
“Go home to your wife — go ask her, what does she need? Go home to your husband — what does he need? Go home and ask those questions, and then help the people around you.”
“On the one hand, our need for security, for predictability, for safety, for dependability, for reliability, for permanence — all these anchoring, grounding experiences of our lives that we call home. But we also have an equally strong need — men and women — for adventure, for novelty, for mystery, for risk, for danger, for the unknown, for the unexpected, surprise — you get the gist — for journey, for travel.”
“Women tend to get intimacy differently than men do. Women get intimacy from face-to-face talking. We swivel towards each other, we do what we call the “anchoring gaze” and we talk. This is intimacy to women. I think it comes from millions of years of holding that baby in front of your face, cajoling it, reprimanding it, educating it with words. Men tend to get intimacy from side-by-side doing. As soon as one guy looks up, the other guy will look away.”
“But anyway, not only does this person take on special meaning, you focus your attention on them. You aggrandize them. But you have intense energy. As one Polynesian said, he said, “I felt like jumping in the sky.” You’re up all night. You’re walking till dawn. You feel intense elation when things are going well; mood swings into horrible despair when things are going poorly. Real dependence on this person. As one businessman in New York said to me, he said, “Anything she liked, I liked.” Simple. Romantic love is very simple.”
“What is love? It’s a hard term to define in so far as it has a very wide application. I can love jogging. I can love a book, a movie. I can love escalopes. I can love my wife. But there’s a great difference between an escalope and my wife, for instance. That is, if I value the escalope, the escalope, on the other hand, it doesn’t value me back. Whereas my wife, she calls me the star of her life. ”
