>> Thank you.

Thank you so much.

What a pleasure to be back in Australia

to be back at the Opera House.

Thank you so much for coming out tonight.

As Ann's just said, I've written a novel, but I don't want

to talk particularly specifically about the novel.

Please buy it after if you feel inclined.

But what I really want to do is talk about some

of the ideas behind the novel.

And some of these people say to me you know,

'why did you even bother to write a novel?

I thought you were supposed to be a nonfiction writer.

And the reason I wrote a novel is that I believe that many

of our ideas on love come from reading novels.

Also, songs, films, etcetera.

But essentially we are very shaped

by the love narratives that we read.

And this could seem a little cruel.

We tend to think that we love spontaneously

that we're not influenced by what we read and by what we see,

but I think that we are.

We love within a very historical social context.

It's that lovely biting aphorism from La Rochefoucauld he says

"There are some people who would never have fallen in love

if they hadn't heard there was such a thing."

That's a little extreme, but you get the idea that really

when we love we're taking a lot of our cues

from the outside world.

We honour certain feelings that we experience

because other people are telling us to honour them.

We suppress other feelings because people have told us not

to pay them particular attention.

Now we are nowadays firmly in a very distinctive era

in the history of love.

We are living in the era of Romanticism.

Romanticism is an intellectual movement

that began the swallows, studies,

garrets of European poets, novelists,

writers in the middle end of the 18th century and nowadays even

if you've never heard of a single romantic poet or novelist

from any garret in old Europe

and you're just having your love life here

in Sydney you are influenced.

Because we all are by romanticism.

So whether you don't necessarily know about it, or feel it,

or touch it, it is all around us.

In the ether.

We are living, ladies and gentleman

in the era of Romanticism.

Now what does Romanticism tell us about love.

It has a very distinctive set of arguments

about what love is like, what we should expect from love

and how relationships should go.

And let me run you through a few romantic assumptions.

I think first, and most central assumption is that for all of us

out there, there is most definitely a soul mate.

We may not have met them already, we may be swiping left,

right furiously in order to try and locate them.

They exist.

And eventually if we keep going hard enough we will find them.

And when we find them our soul will fuse with theirs.

All areas that have previously been confused

and lonely will be redeemed.

We will no longer feel ourselves worthless, agonising,

melancholic for the mysteries

of existence we have found a true friend

and loneliness will be banished.

This, ladies and gentleman, is the person waiting

for us somewhere out there.

The soul mate.

How are we going to find this person?

Well, big question.

The dominant answer of romanticism is by instinct.

You know for most of history the way that people were matched

up was by the elders of the community, by parents,

by other people than the couple themselves.

It was what was known as a marriage of reason.

And there were reasonable criteria.

So-called reasonable criteria, which is maybe

that you had a goat and they had a sheep.

Or you had a plot of land and they had an adjoining part

of land or whatever it was.

And it was on that basis

that the so-called domestic marriages were made.

And that was the way in which people married, have married

for thousands of years, really since the beginning of time.

But along comes Romanticism and says no, we're going to marry

in a different way, we're going to marry by instinct.

And the instinct is

that somewhere along the line you will feel a special feeling.

A very, very special feeling inside.

Kind of excitement.

And you don't know when it will strike you.

Maybe you're at the bar, maybe you're at the swimming pool.

Maybe you're just waiting in line for something,

you'll spot somebody and without necessarily knowing too much

about them de the romantics will quack in on it happening

without knowing anything about them other

than simply seeing their face.

You will know that's your soulmate.

And so, that special feeling has become venerated.

And whoever, first of all you don't question

that special feeling so, you know if you said

to your parents, and they go, all right tell me about your,

you just say I've had that special feeling

and everyone just, you know the waters part

and the couple moves forward

because there's been that special feeling.

So once the special feeling has been announced,

you raise the flag, the special feeling has happened

and that's terrific.

Of course if you don't feel

that special feeling it's a bit embarrassing.

Is there something wrong with me, etcetera, so you may start

to fake the special feeling, kind of like someone can fake

that you've had this romantic special feeling.

And so Romanticism is very into the notion of the crush,

and the immediate sensation of certainty

that you have met someone very special.

Romanticism goes hand and hand with the developments

of the railways in Europe in the 19th century.

And an awful lot of these meetings happened

on trains in fiction.

In Russian fiction alone,

fiction alone you could build a library of stories

in which the hero and heroine meet on a train

and without much knowledge, let's say just the sight maybe

of an ankle, an elbow, curvature of a cheek,

you will know that's a soulmate and that's how it begins.

So that's how you're going to find your life partner.

The romantics are very keen on the notion

of happily ever after.

That love is not just a passing phase, it is forever.

Until death do us part.

Strikingly many of the romantics die quite young [laughter].

And so often the story begins, couple falls madly in love

and then [coughing], somebody got a little cough

and then tuberculosis and [coughing]

and it's you know it's a beautiful love story

but it does end after a few months.

But nevertheless it's forever in a sense.

And Romanticism is also very keen on suicide,

ending things dramatically.

So death has a curious relationship with love

in the romantic point of view.

The other essential thing about the romantics is

that generally no one really has a job.

None of the romantics really have jobs.

So they can devote a lot of time to love.

And they're spending a lot of time just in each other's arms,

and also going for walks.

Nature is incredibly important for the romantics.

Going out into nature for long, long walks,

very particular places.

Waterfalls, very romantic place.

Also places where the ocean meets the land, dramatic cliffs,

pounding of seas,

very quintessentially romantic places.

Romantic times of day.

Dusk is a quintessentially romantic time.

Especially when you know there are a layer of clouds,

and the underside of the clouds are lit up by the shafts

of the dying sun turning the sky a purple-pink hew,

very romantic sort of moment.

A moment to enforce love through the help of nature.

The romantics have a very distinctive take on sex.

People have obviously been having sex for all

of human history and there's been some love.

But what the romantics do is a remarkable fusion

of love and sex.

They basically consecrate sex as the summit of love

and the ultimate expression of love.

So far from being merely a mechanical action,

it becomes this most sincere expression of your feelings

for another person, almost define expression

of tenderness for another person.

Very beautiful.

It has a slight drawback, which is that it turns adultery

into a tragedy, a catastrophe, because if you believe,

as the romantics do that sex is the crowning expression of love,

then any interest outside

of the couple will be catastrophic in nature.

And that's why almost every great novel of the 19th century

in Europe is about adultery, in one form or another.

Starting with Flaubert's "Madame Bovary", moving on to Tolstoy's

" Anna Karenina" and on, and on.

People have been having adultery for all of human history.

It's been happening all the time,

but what's new is the weight that's put on it.

And as I say it is a violation of everything

that the romantics believe that love is.

Now, I should say that many

of these romantic ideas are very beautiful.

They're very exciting and we all live through them

and it would be naive to someway dismiss them

as irrelevant to the way we live.

They are everywhere and they are the centre

of how we approach love.

But I also want to insist

that Romanticism has been a catastrophe for our capacity

to have good long-term relationships.

And if we want to have a chance of succeeding at love,

we will have to be disloyal to many of the romantic emotions

that got us into relationships in the first place.

Romanticism has spelt trouble for our capacity to endure

and thrive in long-term relationships.

Why do I say that?

Well let me run you through a few of the areas that I believe

that Romanticism has spelt difficulty

for us in relationships.

So Romanticism replaced an earlier vision of human nature,

which tended to stress how fragile,

broken and very sinful we all were.

An old Christian idea.

And Romanticism comes along and dismisses this attitude

as hopelessly pessimistic and insists instead on the purity

and good nature of every human being.

For the romantics, the romantics place an awful lot

of emphasis on children.

And children, for the romantics are always good,

they're always sweet.

It begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau

in the mid-18th century.

The child is the purest expression of human kind

and the only thing that makes a child bad is societies.

Only society corrupts children.

But basically it's a sign that we are born good.

And the older view, which was associated

with Christian theologians like St. Augustine,

which stressed the fundamental sinfulness.

You know, St. Augustine argued that all of us bear

within us the original sin of Adam and therefore all of us.

It's good to speak like this at a pulpit

to an audience, but [laughter].

But all of us, all of us are sinners, or potential sinners,

and therefore need to be at the mercy of others

and of the divine, in order, I'm a secular Jew, but the divine,

in order to endure life.

Now Romanticism does away with this and says to us that all

of us are angelic by nature.

The interesting thing is that Romanticism coincides