David Brooks On ‘How to Fall in Love with Someone’
David Brooks is on tour lecturing on “How to Fall in Love with Someone.” A someone like your much younger research assistant?
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If you’ve been wondering what the moralizing dick dribble David Brooks has been up lately, he was giving a lecture this week at Yale on “How to Fall in Love with Someone.”
Yes, it’s a bit of a departure for the conservative columnist from his usual vilifying of single mothers and class-conscious meditations on deli meat. But when you’ve known a love like David Brooks has known love (with his much younger research assistant), you must shout it from the roof tops of an Ivy League.
How too might I find a muse?
The pitch:
You’ve probably thought a lot about your professional life, and your intellectual life. But what about your romantic life? Let’s have a practical conversation about how people fall in love.”
Oh let’s! What are the practicalities of acquiring new snatch when you’re married to old snatch? Do you call a divorce lawyer or let your wife appliance sort that out for you?
Fortunately, we don’t have to wonder. A reporter from Vanity Fair was there to cover the event and… not ask a single hardball question.
No, from that feature article we learn David Brooks is just a softie. An older and wiser — and more humble — legacy media pundit in a crewneck sweater. He cares about your love life, young man. Much like an anxious parent. Why aren’t you dating? Why aren’t you getting married?
Ooh! Ooh! (raising my hand) Because available young women don’t want the patriarchal bullshit? They look at the first Mrs. Brooks with her decades of faithful wife-appliance-ing, religious conversion, and child-bearing, who got dumped for a much younger research assistant and conclude “Maybe I’ll live alone in my tastefully decorated apartment and discover my lesbian side”?
Ooh! Ooh! (raising my hand) Because young men have p**n, gaming, and situationships? Because the cost of living, let alone dating, marrying or raising children, is astronomical? (Not that men have to stick around to raise children or pay court-ordered child support, of course. See patriarchal bullshit above.)
Egghead to human
Monday’s lecture was a bit more heartfelt. “I’ve moved from being a very egghead-y, intellectual person to trying to be a little more human. That’s been the journey of my life, more or less,” Brooks told me after the event. “So it’s a thing I really care about. Especially at an intellectual place like this, we shouldn’t forget the heart.”
Remember the heart? Chastely working on your book. Caring deeply about Oxford commas. I wonder what your heart would look like undressed?
He used his most recent book, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, and context from his interactions with Yale students to compose the lecture. “On the one hand, it’s easy to make fun of me: ‘Here’s this old guy telling young people how to fall in love,’” he said. “But like I said, a lot of the students are smarter than me.”
Oh I love your faux humility, David. Yale students are smarter than you! Much the same way Applebee’s waitresses have common sense. Some people out there are not David Brooks! They have opinions and things. Which is a very useful quality for admiring audiences, especially during the Q&A sessions. Imagine having a Yale lecture and no one shows up to ask you anything.
Speaking of answering questions, a Vanity Fair reporter could ask questions like DIDN’T YOU APPEAR IN THE EPSTEIN FILES, DUDE? Or, more trenchantly:
WHY IS A GUY WHO (ALLEGEDLY) CHEATED ON HIS FIRST WIFE LECTURING US ABOUT MORALITY?
No, no, not those questions. Mustn’t disturb the gravitas of the world’s most pre-eminent scold of single parents.
“I taught a course on making the big commitments of life, but we had to give it a name that was consistent with Jackson’s mission. So when I taught a course on marriage, making commitments, finding your vocation, we called it Successful Global Leadership,” he said. “It didn’t matter what the official title of the course was called—the students called it Therapy With Brooks.”
Making commitments?
Fewer people have had relationships when they get out of high school, get out of college, and I think that’s a function of—you can all name the things—phones, a fear of sexual predators or being accused of it.”
That’s a curious afterthought for a guy with his picture in the Epstein files. Don’t date, young people. You might be accused of sitting next to Sergei Brin at a fabulous luncheon.
Being in synch
David Brooks tells his rapt audience about the stages of falling in love (with your much younger research assistant). After the initial attraction, ask her to edit your book on moral character. First discuss the more obscure forms of punctuation. Are your values in alignment? Does she know NOT to hyphenate adverbs? Then, remove your socks. Things could get heavy.
Then comes curiosity and growing together. “We synchronize — We synchronize our breathing, we synchronize our wording, we synchronize our vocabulary,” he said. “We achieve what you might call a limerence.” Then comes making promises and fantasizing about a future together.
Promises like, “I’ll leave my wife.” And then, like, not leaving your wife for several years. And then leaving your wife. The timeline is murky. Don’t ask further questions. David Brooks has obliquely eluded to his rare imperfections.
“A great marriage, they say, is when both [parts of the] couple are working on their own selfishness,” said Brooks. “I think that’s pretty impressive. And so preserving a marriage and keeping it—and I’ve had some marriages preserved, I’ve been through a divorce—so I know both sides.”
Oh, I think David Brooks has been perfecting his selfishness for some time. But let’s make following your dick a virtue.
As for “preserving your marriage” — Dude! You married your much younger research assistant!
You do have to wonder though, if publicly flaunting his Twu Wuv is the price a 64-year-old guy with 64-year-old parts has to pay for keeping a much younger wife. He may soon need a med-alert, but have you heard his lecture series about me?
Speaking of both sides, I’d love to hear the first Mrs. Brooks’ lecture series “How to Fall Out of Love with a Pompous Git.” But she probably signed an NDA.
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Choo-choo! And there he is! The train wreck that is David Brooks!! How timely! Is he hoovering us?!? What a moralizing, delusional dummkopf!
How can we miss him when he won’t go away?
I just lost any little respect I had for Yale. Garbage
I worked in an industry that was lousy with Ivy League and top ten alum and noticed an incredibly high rate of psychotic, predatory or violent behavior from that set. I have to guess this probably stems from the same kind of entitlement that drives these types to tell you where they went to school within two minutes of meeting them. Anyway, this is why I cringe and brace for crazy whenever anyone too quickly tries to grub academic status (with the slim exception of people who allow their certs to be used to boost some important embattled cause).
This whole thing has a kind of “Reverse-Streisand Effect” vibe to it.
Mr Brooks engages is some morally dubious sh*t and gets found out. But, rather than taking responsibility and making amends (he’s a FW so of course he won’t do that), he lectures people about his “personal growth journey” to try and convince them (or perhaps just convince himself) that everything he did was fine and dandy because it led to him being happy … and that perhaps other people should learn from that.
From where I’m sat (on my blue velvet Chesterfield sofa in my kitchen/diner), I think that he’s just drawing even more attention to the fact that he’s a cheating PoS.
David, just shut up already; the World needs to hear less from you, not more!
LFTT
“on my blue velvet Chesterfield sofa ”
That’s gain a life stuff right there! Sounds gorgeous!!
That’s exactly what he’s doing. On some level, he knows he’s a b*stard. He’s trying to convince himself as much as he is others.
Dang, Chump Lady. You are MEAN.
I opened this post with no warning and staring at me was a massive, fathead photo. I cannot unsee that punchable face. I can hear his pseudo-soothing voice ringing in my ear. Ewwwww.
Has anyone else noticed that, whenever someone goes into one of those flush-faced, starry-eyed poetic rhapsodies about their current twu wuv, their relationship tanks forthwith because one or the other party dies, betrays or bails?
I’m not talking about, say, when former chumps talk about how much better things are with non-FW partners than with ex-FWs which is usually done in a grounded tone. I mean the more gaga type of transported bragging that, while perfectly normal in tweens, starts to come off as precarious and gullible or even dysregulated by the end of high school and is downright Cluster B in middle aged adults. Anyway, in my experience, the behavior always presages disaster.
You’re reminding me about a recent article in the New York Times about Lauren Sanchez Bezos where she kept talking about how HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY they are! I give that marriage one more year.
“bragging that, while perfectly normal in tweens, starts to come off as precarious and gullible or even dysregulated by the end of high school and is downright Cluster B in middle aged adults.” Yes. This perfectly describes my FW and his AP. In fact, when they finally “came out” about their relationship (3 1/2 years into their affair, and while we were definitely not yet divorced), they put up a photo on their Facebook pages with “We’re Dating!” scrawled across the front. That is not what two healthy middle aged adults do. It was, frankly, embarrassing.
“hey put up a photo on their Facebook pages with “We’re Dating!” scrawled across the front. That is not what two healthy middle aged adults do.”
Omg…I guess I am close to Tuesday bc that made me laugh out loud. And you are SO right. That is high school stuff. And hell, I know plenty of highschoolers that wouldn’t even do that. A loved up photo is one thing, but “we’re dating!” beyond 16 is cringey as hell.
Shudder. Did they start talking in some gooey-eyed Polyanna way about their relationship sort of like recent cult draftees sent out on recruitment missions to “spread the good news”?
Come to think of it, I wonder if there’s some overlap between this and people who are particularly susceptible to cults. For instance, they say that people who are prone to “dissociation” are easy marks for cults. While that might sound sort of harmless and wimpy, it isn’t always since rapists and stalkers on the prowl are said to experience dissociative (“deindividuated”) states as do people participating in violent mobs. Maybe FWitty “wuv” is somewhere on the same creepy spectrum.
If my FW found a lady in a cult, I have no doubt he would be easily persuaded as long as she kept the kibbles coming.
As you may remember, he started believing in some very very out there “woo woo” ideas because his AP was very woo woo, to the extent that I thought he had a brain tumor because it was so out of character for him. Some cults probably have rhetoric that is less wild than the stuff she had him believing.
She’s his Sasquatch lol.
I can relate to that. When my FW joined AA he became like a cult member, mindlessly repeating their slogans robotically. It creeped me out. His alleged wuv for schmoopie was like worshipping a cult leader as well. Anybody who doesn’t have a stable, authentic sense of their own identity is an easy mark for a cult or a con, and I do believe FWs lack that, which is why they require so much external validation.
“Cultiness” and psycho limerence in adults both freak me out equally. It reminds me of that hilarious camper scene in Captain Fantastic where the (agnostic anarcho-socialist) kids pretend to be glassy-eyed, enraptured evangelicals to scare away a traffic cop so he doesn’t report them for “extrajudicial” homeschooling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iuv1FQ9hEA4
Agree. That’s a principle similar to what I always say about weddings; that the more ostentatious the wedding is, the more likely it is that the relationship is going to suck. If you’re performative about love, you don’t actually do love.
is the converse also true — that the more modest the wedding, the longer the marriage will work?
No, not at all. Often it’s just because they can’t afford an elaborate wedding and not all people who are unsuitable for marriage care about having a fancy wedding anyway. My FW certainly didn’t.
I would also say that not everyone who has an ostentatious wedding is an a**hole or in a lame relationship either, they’re just more likely to be IMO. Some people have just dreamed of being married all their lives and want the day to be perfect. Then they get caught up in the whirl of wedding planning and go overboard. So it’s not a hard and fast rule, just a general tendency.
I think it depends since a lot of Cluster B types will engage in “spoilerism” and either demand that special occasions (like weddings, anniversaries, etc.) be as unspecial as possible or will outright sabotage them. So some might insist on seeing a justice of the peace with a hangover, visible dandruff and wearing dirty flipflops. But if they’re using a wedding as a performative display of wealth and status, everything on the surface might look perfect while they’re horrible behind the scenes in order to ruin it for their partner.
Then again, I think if a FW is in one of those fleeting gonzo idealization stages, they might be truly into over-the-top nuptials. But, according to some psychologists, this is usually only when there’s something inappropriate about the relationship that dooms it to failure and therefore represents an “escape hatch” for commitmentphobics like a huge age gap, massive class or education difference or marriage to a co-cheating AP.
I guess it strongly depends on the reason why the wedding is so modest. If it’s because of a stingy or uncaring FW, probably not.
In my mind, I’m always translating this to: “I’ve found someone who is willing to put up with my BS, isn’t that incredible?” However, it’s probably true that in many cases, reality is even bleaker.
My armchair theory is that it’s related to personality disorder because this kind of wobbly, gonzo rhapsodizing about relationships in adults smacks of someone who is normally so emotionally dead that they depend on limerence or some similar state of giddy idealization in order to feel something/anything.
But I don’t think this giddy idealization should be mistaken for “reverence” in the sense that philosophy professor Paul Woodruff talks about in his book Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue which journalist Chris Hedges discusses in an Substack article on how certain violent authoritarians and corporate sociopaths tend to lack this reverence. Hedges does a better job differentiating between these states of being than I ever could:
The soulless, enslaved by narcissism, greed, a lust for power and hedonism, cannot make moral choices. Moral choices for them do not exist. Truth and falsehoods are identical. Life is transactional. Is it good for me? Does it make me feel omnipotent? Does it give me pleasure? This stunted existence banishes them from the moral universe.
Human beings, including children, are commodities to the soulless, objects to exploit for pleasure or profit or both. We saw this soullessness displayed in the Epstein Files. And it was not only Epstein. Huge sections of our ruling class including billionaires, Wall Street financiers, university presidents, philanthropists, celebrities, Republicans, Democrats and media personalities, consider us worthless.
Thucydides understood. Reverence is not a religious virtue but a moral virtue. Woodruff went so far as to define it as a political virtue. Reverence for shared ideals, Woodruff writes, is the only thing that can bind us together. It is the only attribute that ensures mutual trust. Reverence allows us to remember what it means to be human. It reminds us that there are forces we cannot control, forces that we will never understand, forces of life that we did not create and must honor and protect — including the natural world — and forces that allow us moments of transcendence, or what in religious terms, we call grace.
“If you desire peace in the world, do not pray that everyone share your beliefs,” Woodruff writes. “Pray instead that all may be reverent.”
I guess my point is that the altered state of selfish ego tripping or limerent idealization are radically different than consistent reverence over art, nature, the value of life, etc. I also think the gonzo idealization state has an “aura of mortality” around it because the first time I got that precarious cringe feeling was listening to a former class bully– a girl who was so jaded and sarcastic that she seemed like a forty year old at age eleven– going giddily on and on about her first boyfriend in high school. A short time later they skidded off a mountain pass during a ski trip and died. I thought it was interesting that she chose me to natter to since she’d previously mocked me as a little kid for being “reverent” about art, nature, etc. (like that dance recital I did to Rites of Spring in an old nylon nightgown lol).
Another time, I encountered a has-been celebrity through work who was in this loopy, rhapsodic state which unnerved me, especially because we’d been given specific instructions not to get in his way due to the fact he was typically cold and irritable. Less than a year later he was indicted for murdering his wife.
In both situations, I got the feeling that giddy emotions hits the systems of these sharky types like GBH, as if they believe some new crush or acquisition will be the answer to everything that’s flat and empty in them. It makes sense since psychologists claim that so-called “blunted affect” (emotional deadness or numbness) is a painful state based partly on the observation that the main reason that a lot of people with bipolarity and schizophrenia periodically stop taking antipsychotic meds is because of the reportedly horrible deadening effects. It’s also apparently why people on these drugs chain smoke because nicotine produces a stimulant effect that “relieves” the torturous monotony.
Anyway, can you tell I’ve given it a lot of thought? Encounters with soulless cyborgs will do that.
His sanctimonious drivel will put his kids through college. It’s sad to see the academic establishment lap it up. What a putz.
Perhaps the first “Mrs. Brooks” should be invited on stage to join in the discussion,
Oh yes! That would be great!!! I’d pay money to see that.
Imagine getting divorced after 26-27 years, being remarried for only 9 years, and then lecturing others on “preserving a marriage.”
Oh wait, I guess we don’t have to imagine because . . . *gestures vaguely at David Brooks*
Imagine getting divorced after 27 years and your ex-husband goes on his “I Never Knew What Twu Wuv Was Until I Met My Much Younger Research Assistant” tour. Way to write the mother of his children out of the narrative. The poor woman changed her name and religion for Brooks to Judaism only to have him marry an evangelical “Christian”. I guess she just wasn’t selfish enough. #missedaspot
I don’t have to imagine this. It’s essentially what my cheater ex has done, repeatedly and publicly, with his “Twu Wuv” 🙄
Well, if Christianity is true, he’s in for a shock when he gets to the, “Away from me, ye evildoers! I never knew ye” part.
As the Daughter of a Chump who *did* convert to Judaism to marry a Weak FW {thank goodness she didn’t have to change her name}, who then insisted that we all go to Hebrew School 3x a week for 5 years, I simply cannot get beyond the name changing/ religion/ 3 children thing for a FW who not only threw her over for his much younger research assistant, but who himself *then converted to Christianity*. The hypocrisy is simply staggering. Cringe, cringe, cringe.
“New York Times columnist David Brooks converted to Christianity, specifically around 2013–2014, shifting from a secular Jewish background to a faith in Jesus. He has described this journey as a, “a wandering Jew and a very confused Christian,” noting it felt like a deepening of faith rather than entirely abandoning his roots.” “The Catalyst: As detailed in The Second Mountain, Brooks experienced a “midlife crisis” and a period of feeling “very blocked,” which led to an increased openness to faith and a, “shimmering awareness that all the people [in a subway car] had souls”.”
Lines up with when he met his muse. Excuse me, midlife crisis.
He’s just disgusting. He taught a course (at Yale I think) on ethics. And there’s the book, The Road to Character. I dunno asswipe, I think you took a detour to the exit for “young research assistant” trying to follow that road. He’s not just gross and disingenuous, he pretends to be some kind of social scientist when he’s just another creep with a random idea (spoken here by me, an actual certified social scientist, PhD and everything.) grumble.
My FW also taught ethics. Innnterestingg!
Ah, mine loved talking about building character. He acted like it was a revelation. In retrospect because, unlike a normal human, it is a revelation to FW’s. They need instructions to feign character, ethics, etc. and when they do fool people, who better to teach the next round of fake moral FW’s?
What an aggshole.
🩷 aggshole!
Is that a mashup of aggravating + *ss*ole? If so, yes, what an aggshole! What a load of word salad. Pretentious word salad.
Today’s post is laugh out loud hilarious even if you don’t hate Brooks as much as I do, which is a sh**ton.
As always, Brooks prove the truth of the old adage that says those who can’t do, teach. He has never truly loved anybody, he’s about as deep as an Arizona mud puddle and he has the morals of a sewer rat. He can keep that mask on for all eternity and blather platitudes until his tongue swells up in protest, but wise people are always going to see through it. Which, of course, is why he does it, other than just to make money. His life is dedicated to trying to yammer his way past the reality of his failings as a person.
Why do people give him venues? His detractors seem to be legion, but are there actual David Brooks *fans* out there?
Oh, he undoubtedly has fans. There are a lot of gullible people in the world, plus crappy people who vicariously enjoy other crappy people being successful. They dream of being wealthy con artists themselves, but since the closest they can get is stanning for creeps like Brooks, they make do with that.
For an example of a person both gullible and a vicarious enjoyer of cons, my FW is a fan of the quack YouTuber Dr. Eric Berg. Berg’s videos are both laughable and cruel in that he’s selling fake solutions for people’s suffering, but FW is a weird combination of incredibly naive and morally vacant.
Not with this crowd! My husband used to be a Brooks fan. Since I have converted him to the snark of CL, he cringes at David Brooks even more than I do!
The prevarications and games just go on. I don’t know why people listen to David Brooks anymore. To me, his Ivy League employment means very little. He is morally bankrupt, not worth listening to at all.
I view some people whom I pushed to the outskirts the same way. It takes time and energy to sift through what they say because their foundational beliefs are off, so I really don’t. If I’m in a social situation with them, I keep it very surface. Thankfully, I can do that.
I work remotely, so even work-wise, I can keep it surface with certain people. The company is privately held, and some of the admin people are truly iffy, but it’s rare that we go beyond email.
This guy (never heard of him before) is just pretending everything. Making it up as he goes along, faking knowledge, faking convictions, faking sincerity, faking religious belief, faking commitment (to his wife/ wives), faking relationship to academia, faking wisdom, faking that he gives a sheiteeee. He’s just another selfish, fake, pretentious, dick-following bloke who managed to have connections to the media career world (?) when he was young. He’s no different from all of our FW’s, he just happens to have a TV related career. Otherwise, we’d never know about him. Hopefully Mrs. First Wife will find our community for empathy, understanding and support.
Faking giving a damn sheitteeee about “love”…………
“What are the practicalities of acquiring new snatch when you’re married to old snatch? Do you call a divorce lawyer or let your wife appliance sort that out for you?” Good one, Chump Lady!
How does he have the GALL to give speeches on this topic???
No one needs to be taught how to fall in love, they need to be taught how to stay in love, how to treat your partner with respect and kindness; instead of using every waking moment trying to scam them.
How to treat others as you would like to be treated. That is what a successful marriage is; the golden rule. If both don’t do it, it is destined to explode at some point.