Greatest thoughts: Plato on Loving more wisely

 Plato is one of the great theorists of relationships. His book, The Symposium, is an attempt to explain what love really is. It tells the story of a dinner party given by Agathon, a hand - some poet, who invites a group of his friends around to eat, drink and talk about love. The guests all have different views about what love is. Plato gives his old friend Socrates – one of the main characters in this and all his books – the most useful and interesting theory.

It goes like this: when you fall in love, what’s really going on is that you have seen in another person some good quality that you haven’t got. Perhaps they are calm

when you get agitated; or they are self-disciplined, while you’re all over the place; or they are eloquent when you are tongue-tied. The underlying fantasy of love is that by getting close to this person, you can become a little like they are.

They can help you to grow to your full potential.

In Plato’s eyes, love is, in essence, a kind of education: you couldn’t really love someone if you didn’t want to be improved by them. Love should be two people trying to grow together – and helping each other to do so. Which means you need to get together with the person who contains a key missing bit of your evolution: the virtues you don’t have. This sounds entirely odd nowadays when we tend to interpret love as finding someone perfect just as they are.In the heat of arguments, lovers sometimes say to one another: ‘If you loved me, you wouldn’t try to change me.’

 Plato thinks the diametric opposite. He wants us to enter relationships in a far less combative and proud way. We should accept that we are not complete and allow our lovers to teach us things. A good relationship has to mean we won’t love the other person exactly as they are.It means committing to helping them become a better version of themselves – and to endure the stormy passages this inevitably involves – while also not resisting their attempts to improve us.

The School of Life: Great Thinkers - A collection of some of the most important ideas of Eastern and Western culture – drawn from the works of those philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, artists and novelists whom we believe have the most to offer to us today.