On Relationships: The Prudence of Venus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4R4M4b8Bmo

Audiobook version read aloud in the video. An Anti-Analytical Analysis

It was Michel de Montaigne who came up with the word “essay” (“essai”) for this sort of writing, which in French means “attempt.” He wasn’t trying to construct a system; he examined the texture of lived experience—habits, impulses, memories, fears. An essai wasn’t a declaration of truth but an experiment in thinking, a way to test an idea by exploring it, and admitting uncertainty. It was a genre built on intellectual humility: a mind in motion rather than rigidity. So, an essay is the most fitting word to write something on relationships.

It seems very common at the moment that we’re trying to dissect love and trying to diagnose relationships. Analysis has its place in love, but its place is limited. It exists to prevent us from being self-destructive, to help us recognise the old attachment wounds that drive our behaviour and understand our partner better, to give structure to patterns we once moved through blindly, and to understand what a healthy relationship looks like. It's a moment to step aside and reflect on the relationship rationally. But stay there too long and you'll sterilise love. Analysis is not the oxygen of love. It is not where love grows or breathes. Tell me, which will you experience love better: reading a book of love poems, or reading a psychology textbook on relationships? There is no hesitation in the answer. One teaches you mechanisms; the other teaches you mysticism. One teaches you patterns; the other teaches you feeling. Knowledge is useful to stay grounded, but analysis can make love feel studied, clinical, criticised, judged, even predictable. Love doesn't care; it’s defiant of Reason. The mind may diagnose, but the heart is where love is lived.

Scientificising love is killing it. Everyone begins to diagnose each other and relationships turn into a psychological experiment. On the surface it seems like reflection, but it's also projection. You listen to general broad characteristics and project them on your relationship. Maybe you're feeling hurt and it helps to feel better. But a quote or video that doesn't know you can't diagnose you, your partner, or your relationship. It should just help reflection in general but not in specifics. Much of modern dating invents its own defensive language—red flags, the talking stage, no contact, situationships, baddies, and the reductive mantra “if they wanted to, they would”—yet reflects not wisdom but a cultural exhaustion. These terms reveal a generation that has replaced romance with systems, turning connection into a conveyor belt of assessments and pre-emptive defences. A “situationship” is merely a dysfunctional trauma bond stripped of its shame. A “baddie” is just a deluded self-identity suffocating in the ego. And “if they wanted to, they would” is an oversimplification masquerading as enlightenment; people are far more complex, conflicted and ambivalent than this pop-psychology suggests. A lot of the time our actions are out of habit, or indifference, not from great desire. Life isn’t so simple that people just do what they want. What people call “no contact” is really just grieving the relationship. It may achieve emotional regulation, but it won’t repair anything. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, until eventually it makes the heart grow numb.

Gen-Z have developed so much corrosive vocabulary terminology to try to clinically diagnose and structure relationships out of anything playful or romantic about them. They’re such a triggered generation that they have a vocabulary that’s all about accommodating their defences. “Detachment” I think is the latest one. This is emotional resignation disguised as pragmatic wisdom. It’s the ego in defence of itself. "The talking stage" I don't even know what that is or want to know. They have been hand-held through every stage of institutional education and life, and now they expect romance to follow the same structured, sequential format, that can be repeated with each new partner. They only respond to a dopamine rush. So, they only do beginnings. I think there’s an expectation of them that relationships are going to be easy to find and easy to do. Good relationships are hard to find and hard to do. They've grown up on dopamine addiction, on their phones, and with maladaptive social skills. It's their own struggle. I really don’t advise listening to people under thirty talk about relationships. They have no values because they've always chased reward from trends and algorithms, rather than any consistency or evolution of their own values. They have no true sense of identity because they're the most conformist generation I've ever seen. As individuals they’re not real, they’re costumes of who they think they should be. Everyone is performing for the camera, creating portfolios of an identity that barely scratches the surface of who they are, and chasing an externally validating image. They have adapted themselves to the internet, not to the reality of the world. Their dating etiquette and attraction tactics are all to do with the phone. They are essentially dating their phones. No wonder there’s no magic in it. What's wrong with Gen-Z is their own mess. They have had a cultural period that minimised emotional maturity to protect them from their own emotional development. For everyone else who grew up with a normal level of emotional intimacy, healthy sentimentality, and actual values, they are witnessing the erosion of emotional availability.

Much of what's spoken online is about attraction rather than relationships. Most of it is nonsense. Attraction isn't a choice and what people say applies to those one is already attracted to. If you superimpose it onto someone one doesn't find attractive it wouldn't play out the same. Because attraction is not rational, it's not instinct or innate either, it's usually activating an attachment wound or stimulating a subconscious idea of ourselves we see in reflection. Some people, so vain, are attracted to someone who looks exactly like themselves. Others, deeper, are attracted to the recognition of their soul in reflection.

Social media keeps communicating toxic tactics because people often fall into toxic relationships. So, people are like "oh that seems to work, let's do that" but the tactics are as if out of a narcissistic handbook. It might have something to do with attraction but nothing to do with a healthy emotionally mature relationship. This is a culture that is stuck in the paralysis of validation and empowerment. Maturity happens when you accept criticism and take accountability. Accepting criticism is recognising you are not perfect and have room for improvement. Accountability is taking action to make those improvements. Once people recognise those improvements you get validation again. Instead, people circumnavigate accountability and jump to a new source of validation as soon as they feel the sting of criticism because it challenges the impression of them they are trying to sustain. So, they quickly find someone else to give them validation again. They think everything is working itself out for their benefit. "Oh well, it must mean life is setting me up for something better." Surely no one really believes that's how the world works. Look at the suffering and injustice in the world, how do you explain that with that philosophy? It's really just a way of avoiding accountability for the undesirable consequences that have happened in your life. You're not a special being in the universe waiting to give you a prize. You're just a sack of flesh and bones like everybody else. It's all about what you can do with it.

Stay off dating apps. Thousands of years of human history hasn't been overturned because someone created a dating app. Dating apps and social media have produced the illusion of choice. It is the Netflix problem: when you have so many options, you forget what you want. Sometimes it’s better choosing nothing than choosing badly. People are dating like it’s consumerism. Picking partners like they’re going shopping; buying, sampling, returning, exchanging. Life is about experiences. But it feels for people, life is not about experiences but about accumulation. Value is measured in metrics—followers, aesthetics, attention—rather than character, introspection, or emotional safety. If someone is frequently dating, constantly cycling through new faces and new dramas, it suggests they don't know what they want, why they want it, or who they are. It is not evidence of abundance but of absence; not love but loneliness. You're not supposed to date. You're supposed to get past the dating stage and have a meaningful long-term relationship.

To date well requires something modern culture barely remembers: discernment. Everyone carries a mix of red flags and green flags, but the essential work lies in recognising which ones are non-negotiables for you, and whether someone is willing to grow out of their red flags for the sake of the relationship. The entire point of partnership is not to arrive as a finished product, but to grow inside of a shared journey. And this growth does not emerge from performance; it emerges from honesty. To date well live your life and meet someone who seems to make it a little better by their presence in it. Simply for who they are, not for what they bring or provide. You recognise someone worth keeping by the simple fact that they make your life feel more alive by their presence alone, not by the benefits they offer or the image they project. Build a life that feels meaningful, and notice who naturally fits into your weird little world. Where your trueness feels safe and free, and valued. In a relationship, you should feel seen, heard, valued, and understood. Relationships challenge us to see ourselves and accept ourselves, they challenge us to grow and measure up for what we want because we want to show up as our best and not hurt our partner and because it draws out the best in us. It's not insecurities which kill love but the disrespect that springs from those insecurities. Disrespect that might have manifested due to insecurities or anxieties, but it's the act of disrespect that kills respect, kills gratitude, and kills compassion. Anyone who is disrespectful towards you does not respect you, and anyone who does not respect you does not love you. Love hinges on respect.

The deeper crisis is one of vulnerability and self-worth. Many people with low self-esteem are not afraid of giving love, they feel terrified of being seen, not for who they are, but for who they believe they are. They fear that their hidden shame, their private flaws, their unedited self, they believe they have a defectiveness that will repel the person they truly desire. People with low-esteem tend to get into bad relationships because they don’t believe they deserve good ones. To appease the trauma but not to expose it. They're usually relationships with surface level amusement but without real depth. You often see them becoming like somebody else, because, again, it prevents them from being seen for who they are. Real depths scare those unwilling to face their internal wounds. Low self-esteem has an ego of its own where if one doesn’t love themselves enough they want to be treated badly to agree with themselves. Low self-esteem is self-destructive. They’re more likely to believe they deserve a good life but not a good partner. But a good partner would love them thoroughly. High self-esteem is not a constant performance of confidence but an ongoing acceptance of one’s entire self—the bright parts and the bruised parts together. Vulnerability is essential to real intimacy, but it is dangerous if you're with an unhealthy partner. That is the beautiful thing about love. You can risk being vulnerable with someone who genuinely loves you.

Low self-esteem is running from something inside that they feel ashamed about, that they’re afraid of being seen for, that they believe will cause them to be rejected. They need to, not validate it, but have a conversation with themselves about it in such a way that they can understand it but not be defined by it. When you feel ready to be vulnerable and trust your partner is safe (and won't use your vulnerability against you or take advantage of it) you can open up and share with your partner. And if they are a good partner, they will receive it with compassion and not judgement.

It will be such a liberating feeling. When they say "you can't love until you love yourself" its because you have to accept yourself including the parts you've been afraid of being seen for. Willing to be seen for the things you don't want to be seen for. You cannot love yourself in the abstract. You must confront the parts you that fears will get you rejected, understand them without letting them define you, and learn to let another person witness them without collapsing. Learn self-acceptance and focus on what really defines you. Liberation comes not from perfection but from acceptance. Create a safe, comfortable, fun space, for another person to feel free to be themselves. Showing up with good energy goes a long way. "People will never forget how you made them feel" Maya Angelou.

Attachment theory can illuminate the landscape, but it is not the terrain itself. It can clarify why you choose certain partners. It can explain and rationalise but cannot justify mistreatment. You always have to have your standards of how you want someone to show up. Attachment styles are not identities; they are adaptive and transitional states. You might recognise you have an attachment style but it’s not permanent, everyone should work towards being securely attached. Secure attachment is a learned behaviour. Secure attachment isn't a permanent state, but a continuous conscious effort of behaviour. It's an overcoming of insecure attachment until it becomes a kind of prudence. A secure partner cultivates clarity, reciprocity, vulnerability, and emotional responsibility. They don’t eliminate conflict; they navigate conflict. They don’t perform security; they practice it. But it's only a model for a good and healthy relationship. It’s a band aid, it's a gravity, it’s a coming back to reality. But real love still contains madness. It still contains the irrational, the destabilising, the uncontrollable. The things that sweep your feet off the ground. To love deeply you have to have a little comfort in the chaos. Prudence protects the lovers. Passion animates them. Think of the amazing things people have done throughout history for love. That that doesn't come from a rationally centred sensibility of securely attached person. Analysis is useful to bring you back to reality, but love is when it gets carried away. Like dancing to music, there is freedom and structure. Healthy relationships have healthy temperaments, but it can't be tempered all the time. The madness is where the magic happens. Madness gets a bad reputation in love but it's the magic of it. If you're scared of madness and magic, you can never fall in love.

My own love language is time spent together, presence, and gifts. Not material gifts, but creative gifts. If James has made you something that’s a sign. You create as an act of affection, producing something that did not exist before the other person inspired it. Creativity is sublimated life-force; it is chaotic energy turned into meaning. For me, that procreative magic of creation is my most important sign of love. That someone else’s existence and a motivation to their well-being manifests things that wouldn’t otherwise have existed; that’s so beautiful. "Here, I made this for you, something that didn't exist, and only exists because you inspired it."

I really need to know their soul. Intelligence is an avenue to the soul, taste in the arts is another, communication is another. But it's all the things they don't know that they do. The accidental things, the little innate nuances, their automatic behaviour. The visibility of their vulnerability. The little glimpses into their raw soul. It's not the perfect performance. It's the simplicity of "that's how you do things." The signatures of their very unique identity. They're the things you really remember. They're the really revealing things. The honesty of the soul coming through the body, with the defences dropped, the performance suspended, just literally their existence. It's a language of its own. I was once told "James, I think that souls recognise each other ….and what we call vibration is nothing more than the soul giving signal to our material body... and you don't know why but certain people feel it. Thank you." That is an understanding beyond analysis. It is metaphysical recognition.

Screenwriters, novelists, poets, songwriters, and anything else in culture that relies on words, have romanticised either a love that doesn't exist or a dysfunctional love that's toxic, simply because healthy relationships are not dramatic material for a western idea that a story depends on conflict. It has led to the belief that a dysfunctional confusing toxic relationship is a sign of deep love. Or when it feels good, that it’s supposed to feel like the most magical thing on earth as if you're in a musical. But that’s a cultural idea of love that doesn't add up to reality. Really it's just being able to look into each other's eyes and allow yourself to be seen without being captured. For your history and soul to be laid bare and feel safe. To lay out the entire tapestry of who you are and be loved. Power has nothing to do with love. Even seduction is an invitation, not a conquest. A real love challenges you, sees, and accepts you deeper than you have before. We cannot underestimate the importance that women need to feel emotionally safe.

Love is not only what you feel; it is where you feel safe feeling it. People love at the distance where they can miss you. People grow when the space between them allows curiosity rather than fear. Love expands not through intensity alone but through consistency, through the steady choosing of each other. A healthy relationship requires reciprocity and mutual effort. It's about loving someone well. It's about the private worlds you create with each other that only you both understand. Magic happens when you choose each other. This is the alchemy that builds roads ahead. That makes visible the invisible and makes possible the impossible. Once you choose each other and make the effort to create memories together, roads are built embryonically ahead. It's what happens when you come together. Love grows where there is reciprocity, respect, compassion, gratitude, vulnerability, and effort. Magic happens when two people choose each other. And all the analysis in the world cannot manufacture that magic. Analysis is useful to clear the wound, but love grows only in the unmeasured, unreasonable realm of the heart. Analysis can help heal what prevents love, but it doesn't grow it.

I've heard it intellectualised "you can't build a relationship with someone who thinks love is just a feeling." I agree with that to an extent. Yes, your brain can be wired to past trauma, and you may only feel safe with a love that activates that trauma. To get out of that habit you'll have to do deep therapy work. But love certainly isn't an intellectual process. So, also love isn't NOT a feeling. Otherwise it's a rationalised sensible obligation. That's not love - that's a colleague.

Whoever takes away your best self isn't for you. Whoever, to your surprise, raises you to an even higher better self is good. But how you both contribute to the relationship is whether it’s good or bad. There is no One person for us. There are just two people who continue to choose each other, and refuse to give up on each other because they each found a feeling of home in the other's soul. Love is better when you're free to be weird. Being yourself in a way that isn't performing, it's not a lazy self, or eccentrically odd, but a self that is okay with itself. Who are you when no one is watching?

"A man who knows how to laugh at himself will never run out of things to laugh at" Epictetus

Nowadays people want the magic without the effort, they want to reward without the journey. They want to show up at the end of the race and collect the prize. But love without effort is ephemeral. Effort without magic is lifeless. “Lovers are never tired of each other” La Rochefoucauld. The lovers who endure are those who remain fascinated by each other’s souls, who discover layer after layer without tiring, who refuse to abandon the relationship when it becomes demanding.

Being attracted to someone, falling in love, and having a relationship are three different things. Attraction is not a choice. Attraction may arise out of activated attachment wounds, or arise from unconscious recognition, from a reflection of our soul in resonance with our inner landscape. Love is not calculated. And a relationship is not sustained by sentiment alone; it is sustained by willingness. Relationships requires reciprocity, patience, and vulnerability. Attachment styles may explain your reactions, but love requires more than understanding. Love requires emotional courage. Analysis just makes people up their guard up and become emotionally unavailable. Analysis can disengage you from trauma patterns—it is the clutch that releases the gears—but love is the engine that gives it motion. Love begins only when you release the clutch and move forward. [I’m into cars at the moment]. A love that brings out the best in you, that understands your soul, where love feels free, what reminds you of the best parts of yourself, that reveals the person you are deeply.

Intellectualising works to get you out of a trauma cycle, but it ruins your connections. It gets you out, it doesn't pull you in. All this intellectualising of love is killing it. If Reason is the sun, Love is the shade it cannot reach. Love is in the heart. Intellectualising love takes you out of the heart. It kills love. Love doesn't feel like you're in a classroom listening to a lecture. Love is in the magic. Love is something you experience, something you feel. The intelligence is the information to reflect and make a decision, but that's not love, that's prudence. And yet it needs prudence to protect it from self-destruction. To help it grow healthily, not self-sabotage with chaos. That is the paradox: analysis helps you heal enough to love, but it cannot make you love. It wakes you up to the same brutal reality you weren't aware of. It's useful to get you out of a relationship and heal and work on the thing you hadn't worked out and healed, but it won't create relationships. It won't grow love, it kills it. People are not in better relationships from psycho-analysing love, in fact, they're actively choosing not to date, or choosing to detach. We're in this overly rationalised world based on metrics where intellectualising our emotions has led us into a world where even feelings are diagnosed like clinical conditions. Passion has been suffocated by metrics, spontaneity by algorithms, tenderness by self-consciousness. This is a world without emotion, and passion, and courageous spontaneity. The outcome of this overly rationalised world is dysfunctional people, terrified and insecure, acting imprudently because it’s not how people should be. We have created a population terrified of being human.

At the start of this year, I began writing a book called “The Prudence of Venus.” The woman who inspired it is the only person who ever taught me what love is—not through theory, but through her raw presence. She knows this, I’ve told her. I have no insecurity around her. I’ve known her at her saddest, and her happiest, at her weirdest and her proudest, at her deepest and her silliest, and I've nothing but love for every version of her. There's so much landscape to her soul. Her soul is a garden that I know well, and she nurtures it and keeps creating more of it.

This entire essay is, in a way, an anti-analytical analysis—an attempt to restore love to the place analysis cannot reach. An autopsy never brought anyone back to life, and the same is true of relationships: dissecting love might teach you how it died, but never how to make it live. Analysis offers frameworks, not fireworks. It offers clarity but never chemistry. It shows the fault but doesn’t light the fire. Love is always more a mystic recognition than mechanical roleplay, more creative than clinical, more concerned with searching for feelings than hunting for flaws. Modern relationships suffer from this confusion. They are defined less by emotional enchantment than by emotional exhaustion, less by longing than by loneliness, less by maturity than by the illusion of enlightenment. To date well today requires something our culture has almost forgotten: discernment, and the courage to be emotionally available. It asks us to distinguish the subtle vibration of genuine connection from the louder signals of superficial attraction, the difference between someone who stirs your soul and someone who merely activates your wounds, and the bravery to open yourself to the former even when the latter feels easier. Love cannot be found by perfecting theory. It must be recognised through a kind of intuitive seeing, a quiet resonance between two people who are willing to be known. Analysis may clear the ground, but only the heart builds the home.

Before I wrote “The Prudence of Venus” in 2025, in 2014, I wrote an essay called “Love, Once And For All”  and I’ll quote from that essay:

“Love goes beyond rationality. Love is a condition rationality will never explain, it can only be explained in its own likeness; through art. Through images and emotions. Why are we never done speaking of it? because we're never done with creating new illusions of it. Love is an art that is never finished but, is continuously being added to and reinvented.”

And that's why this essay can only at best be an attempt. The fullness of it must be in the experience.

In the end, the work of analysis was never meant to replace love, only to prepare the ground for it. You study your patterns, not to sterilise your heart, but to make sure it no longer sabotages what it truly wants. Prudence is the architecture built from this clarity: the boundaries that protect your dignity, the discernment that filters chaos from possibility, the refusal to participate in a story that wounds you. Passion, on the other hand, is the living force that fills that architecture with warmth and soul — the irrational certainty, the spontaneous inspiration, the vulnerability that chooses to be seen even when it risks being hurt. These two forces are not opposites. They are partners in a duality. Passion without prudence collapses; prudence without passion is empty. But when the structure is strong enough to hold the madness, and the madness is brave enough to inhabit the structure, love is no longer self-destructive. It becomes profound. It is the moment where the wildness of love finally finds a home within the structure of reason. If you build the container through reflection, through discipline, through the slow work of healing your patterns. Now it stands — a secure space, a steady world, a place where love could return without destroying itself. And when passion re-enters that frame — not as a wound repeating itself, but as a free and willing offering — it arrives purified, deepened, made whole. This is the moment where clarity no longer smothers emotion, and emotion no longer overwhelms clarity. And when love and reason finally coincide this is, at last, the Prudence of Venus.