The Art of Being a Couple: Theodore Zeldin (Full Transcript)

Full text of Oxford scholar Theodore Zeldin’s talk titled “The Art of Being a Couple” at TEDxOxford conference. In this talk, Theodore discussses how some couples can have long loving relationships.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Theodore Zeldin – Oxford scholar and thinker

I am talking about the subject which neither this university nor any other teaches: The Art of Being A Couple. Because it is one of those subjects which, to which there’s no easy answer, and no formula. And therefore, I am not going to tell you a quick solution to the problems in your life.

But I want to take this, because it is one of the biggest problems of all, and it’s going to get a bigger… becoming a bigger problem, because we are going to live for 90 years or 100 years now. And women are becoming educated and no longer willing to shut up and do what they’re told.

And we’re faced by people from many different countries and civilizations, and everything is changing. And so, I would like to just suggest, what I am trying to do, which is not to provide an answer, but to explore.

And if you ask me who I am, I would say I have become… I have… being an academic and so on, an explorer… an explorer of what we can do, which we have not yet done. And let me give you a way of starting this.

I had a conversation once with one of the senior ayatollahs of Iran. And for an hour, he was furious with me, and he shouted and said, how angry he was with the Americans and with the British and with the West, and how they didn’t… were insulting him and so on.