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’s 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 scolding 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 ruffle 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!
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
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.
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.
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,
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*
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!
What an aggshole.
Is that a mashup of aggravating + *ss*ole? If so, yes, what an aggshole! What a load of word salad. Pretentious word salad.