Plato says: "True love is admiration." 

• The person you get together with should have very good qualities that you yourself lack.  
• By getting close to this person, you can become a little like they are. 
• The right person for us helps us grow to our full potential. 
• In a relationship, a couple shouldn't love exactly as they are right now. They should be committed to educating each other- and enduring the stormy passages this inevitably involves. 

"Why do we like beautiful things?", Plato asked. 

• We find things beautiful when we unconsciously sense in them the qualities we need but are missing in our lives. Gentleness. Harmony. Peace. Balance. 
• Thus, they have a very important function. They help to educate our souls. 
• Ugliness does the opposite. It parades dangerous and damaged characteristics in front of us. It makes it harder to attain good values. 
• Plato sees art as therapeutic. It is the duty of artists to help us live a good life.

Plato wanted to know: how a society could get better at producing not military power but fulfilled people? 

• Athenian society was very focused on the rich and sports celebrities. Plato wasn't impressed: It really matters who we admire, because that influences our outlook, ideas, and conduct.
• Plato wanted to replace celebrities with "Guardians" who were ideally wise and good people and could be the model for everyone's development.

• Plato wanted to end democracy in Athens. He observed how few people think properly before they vote and therefor we get very substandard rulers. 
• He didn't want to replace democracy with dictatorship; but he wanted to prevent people from voting until they had started to think rationally. That is, until they became philosophers. 
• His ultimate goal was that politicians should become philosophers.