A mix – safety to be yourself, acceptance, a feeling of peace and reliance, but also challenge, whether that’s intellectual or emotional.
What does love feel like?
Question
What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Question
When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
Change of mind
Question
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
Identity & self
Question
Which book changed the way you think, and what did it change?
Taste & recommendation
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's weekly The Q&A repeatedly uses this exact standing prompt.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Learning to give up on perfection may be just about the most romantic move any of us could make.
Matt Wordsworth, Lateline, ABC News, 11 July 2016 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 227 →
Mo Gilligan
British comedian
I always relate love to happiness.
Daryl McCormack
Irish actor
A sense of home.
Nicola Walker
British actress
Like you are standing with an army.
More from Alain de Botton
View profile →Be ambitious beyond merely dreaming of the first book being published. Already now try to imagine where you want this to go, where you want to be at 60.
Pulping books.
I believed that the real challenge in love was finding ‘the right one’. I now realise that it’s not a case of finding the right one, so much as learning to love rightly.
I'd grow more hair and try to be less mortal.
Roland Barthes' 'Camera Lucida'.
Some dodgy liver function tests in 2004.
More on relationships
Also answered this
Richard Ford, Jia Tolentino, Sandi Toksvig, Adam Kay, Alan Cumming, Mary McCartney
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