During the talk, Brooks joked about the seeming incongruity of teaching courses in emotional realism under the shingle of a public policy school. “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.”

The talk was less an instruction manual than an anthropological description of the various stages of love. First comes the glance, said Brooks, a moment of electrically charged connection. He illustrated the principle with the story of a hairdresser in Houston who married a client soon after their first meeting. “That’s love at first sight. That’s not typical—usually it takes a little longer,” Brooks said. “I myself have never experienced love at first sight. People I’ve been in love with, I was friends with for years.”

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.

Brooks encouraged students to apply three rational lenses when deciding whether to get married, considering their psychological, emotional, and moral compatibility. “I mentioned this to a buddy of mine in New York who was serious about a woman, and he said, ‘What do you do if you’re neurotic?’ I said, ‘Marry another neurotic. You’ll make two people miserable and not four.’”

Since 2017, Brooks himself has been married to his former assistant; she is his second wife. There was enough bashful self-exposure in his lecture— “I once taught a class here on humility, and I thought it was hilarious to have a New York Times columnist teaching Humility at Yale University,” he said at one point—that I was a little surprised to find that he didn’t speak much about unhappy marriages, and his experience in particular. Instead, he went for range, quoting everyone from the late comedian Garry Shandling to Montaigne to St. Augustine to conservative Presbyterian minister Tim Keller, who co-wrote a book about marriage with his wife, Kathy Keller. “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.”

As I was getting ready to leave the lecture hall, I turned and started talking to Hunter, a kindly freshman from West Texas in sweats and a ball cap. During the talk, he’d asked Brooks for advice “about going through your life as a student, but also being receptive to falling in love.”

In reply, Brooks reminisced about his first heartbreak as a student at the University of Chicago. “In those days, we had yet not invented ‘situationships.’ You would ask somebody out, and you’d go out with them for three months, and then one of you would break up with the other,” he said. “I would say, invest time in relationships, and ask people out, and get broken up with. Get dumped. I guarantee you’ll remember that, and it will make you a better relationship person.”