Alain de Botton’s Animated Field Guide to Surviving Heartbreak and Embracing Need as a Central Dignity of Relationships

A resaning antidote to one of the most dangerous and damaging romantic myths in our culture.

All love is asymmetry. Since love is not a state but a skill to be mastered, not a noun but a verb, all loving is the skillful harmonizing of asymmetries across the scales of personhood and preference between those involved. Asymmetries — of taste and temperament, of habit and sensibility — are not evidence of incompatibility but a natural function of two separate consciousnesses, each with an incomple...