On Love

by Alain de Botton

The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once (we soon feel ungrateful) or those who never allow us to kiss them (we soon forget them), but those who know how to carefully administer varied doses of hope and despair.

I behaved like a reductive social psychologist, eager to press my companion into simple categories, unwilling to apply the care of a novelist to capturing the subtleties of human nature.

The philosopher in the bedroom is as ludicrous a figure as the philosopher in the nightclub.

😩😂

we may ask why countries that have no language of community or citizenship usually leave their members isolated but unmolested and yet why countries that talk most of love, kinship, and brotherhood routinely end up slaughtering great swaths of their populations.

In our more passionate moments, we imagine romantic love to be akin to Christian love, an uncritical, expansive emotion that declares I will love you for everything that you are, a love that has no conditions, that draws no boundaries, that adores every last shoe, that is the embodiment of acceptance. But the arguments that hound lovers are a reminder that Christian love is not prone to survive a move into the bedroom. Its message seems more suited to the universal than the particular, to the love of all men for all women, to the love of two neighbors who will not hear each other snoring.

The most interesting faces generally oscillate between charm and crookedness. There is a tyranny about perfection, a certain tedium even, something that asserts itself with all the dogmatism of a scientific formula.

A subjective theory of beauty makes the observer wonderfully indispensable.

This differentiates clinical and universal love from personal and particular love for me. The viewer should not matter in the former but is unique in the latter.

Doubt is easy when it is not a matter of survival: we are as skeptical as we can afford to be, and it is easiest to be skeptical about things that do not fundamentally sustain us. It is easy to doubt the existence of a table; it is hell to doubt the legitimacy of love.

Lovers cannot remain philosophers for long; they should give way to the religious impulse, which is to believe and have faith, as opposed to the philosophic impulse, which is to doubt and inquire.

Diffusion brought with it intimacy. The borders between us ceased to be strictly patrolled. Our bodies no longer felt watched or judged.

It is no coincidence if, semantically speaking, love and interest are almost interchangeable, “I love butterflies” meaning much the same as “I am interested in butterflies.” To love someone is to take a deep interest in them, and by such concern, to bring them to a richer sense of what they are doing and saying.

The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.

I would prefer you to compliment me on my brain than on my face, but if you must, then I would rather you comment on my smile (motor and muscle–controlled) than on my nose (static and tissue-based).

We spend our time loving like utilitarians; in the bedroom we are followers of Hobbes and Bentham, not Plato and Kant.