On Love

by Alain de Botton

What arguments are about is never as important as the discomfort for which they are an excuse.

Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and our weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe—but how can we continue to believe in the beloved now that they believe in us?

To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally “together,” when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.

A long, gloomy tradition in Western thought argues that love is in its essence an unreciprocated, Marxist emotion and that desire can only thrive on the impossibility of mutuality. According to this view, love is simply a direction, not a place, and burns itself out with the attainment of its goal, the possession (in bed or otherwise) of the loved one. The whole of Troubadour poetry of twelfth-century Provence was based on coital delay, the poet repeating his plaints to a woman who repeatedly declined a desperate gentleman’s offers. Centuries later, Montaigne declared, “In love, there is nothing but a frantic desire for what flees from us”—an idea echoed by Anatole France’s maxim “It is not customary to love what one has.” Stendhal believed that love could be brought about only on the basis of a fear of losing the loved one, and Denis de Rougemont confirmed, “The most serious obstruction is the one preferred above all. It is the one most suited to intensifying passion.” To listen to this view, lovers cannot do anything save oscillate between the twin poles of yearning for someone and longing to be rid of them.

There is usually a Marxist moment in every relationship, the moment when it becomes clear that love is reciprocated. The way it is resolved depends on the balance between self-love and self-hatred. If self-hatred gains the upper hand, then the one who has received love will declare that the beloved (on some excuse or other) is not good enough for them (not good enough by virtue of associating with no-goods). But if self-love gains the upper hand, both partners may accept that seeing their love reciprocated is not proof of how low the beloved is, but of how lovable they have themselves turned out to be.

Only after they have undertaken a thorough exchange of opinions on parenting, politics, art, science, and appropriate snacks for the kitchen should two people ever decide they are ready to love each other.

Later in the afternoon, I took a walk in the garden with her father, a donnish man to whom thirty years of marriage had imparted some distinctive views on the subject. “I know my daughter and you are fond of one another. I’m no expert on love, but I’ll tell you something. In the end, I’ve found that it doesn’t really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won’t like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there’s always the chance you’ll end up thinking they’re all right.”

Our argument was peppered with the paradoxes of love and liberalism. What did it really matter what Chloe’s shoes were like? There were so many other wonderful sides to her, was it not spoiling the game to arrest my gaze on this detail? Why could I not have politely lied to her as I might have done to a friend? My only excuse lay in the claim that I loved her, that she was my ideal—save for the shoes—and that I therefore had to point out this blemish, something I would never have done with a friend, whose departures from my ideal would have been too numerous to begin with, and about whom the concept of an ideal would never even have entered into my thinking. Because I loved her, I told her—therein lay my sole defense.

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.

And what excuse was there for this? Nothing but the old line that parents and politicians will use before taking out their scalpels: I care about you, therefore I will upset you; I have honored you with a vision of how you should be, therefore I will hurt you.

With the inability to laugh comes an inability to acknowledge the contradictions inherent in every society and relationship, the multiplicity and clash of desires, the need to accept that one’s partner will never learn how to park a car or wash out a bath or give up a taste for Joni Mitchell—but that one cares for them rather a lot nevertheless.

It may be a sign that two people have stopped loving one another (or at least stopped wishing to make the effort that constitutes 90 percent of love) when they are no longer able to spin differences into jokes. Humor lined the walls of irritation between our ideals and the reality: behind each joke there was a warning of difference, of disappointment even, but it was a difference that had been defused—and could therefore be passed over without the need for a pogrom.

A definition of beauty that more accurately summed up my feelings for Chloe was delivered by Stendhal. “Beauty is the promise of happiness,” he wrote, pointing to the way Chloe’s face alluded to qualities I identified with a good life: there was humor in her nose, her freckles spoke of innocence, and her teeth suggested a casual, cheeky disregard for convention. I did not see the gap between her two front teeth as an offensive deviation from an ideal arrangement, but as an indicator of psychological virtue.

Then I noticed a small plate of complimentary marshmallows near Chloe’s elbow and it suddenly seemed clear that I didn’t love Chloe so much as marshmallow her. What it was about a marshmallow that should suddenly have accorded so perfectly with my feelings toward her, I will never know, but the word seemed to capture the essence of my amorous state with an accuracy that the word “love,” weary with overuse, simply could not aspire to. Even more inexplicably, when I took Chloe’s hand and told her that I had something very important to tell her, that I marsh-mallowed her, she seemed to understand perfectly, answering that it was the sweetest thing anyone had ever told her.

Because only the body is open to the eye, the hope of the infatuated lover is that the soul is faithful to its casing, that the body owns an appropriate soul, that what the skin represents turns out to be what it is. I did not love Chloe for her body, I loved her body for the promise of who she was. It was a most inspiring promise.

From a religious point of view, the value of truth had of course been placed into question many centuries before. The philosopher Pascal (1623–62; hunchback Jansenist author of the Pensées) had talked of a choice facing every Christian in a world unevenly divided between the horror of a universe without God and the blissful—but infinitely more remote—alternative that God did exist. Even though the odds were in favor of God’s not existing, Pascal argued that religious faith could still be justified because the joys of the slimmer probability so far outweighed the abomination of the larger one. And so it should perhaps be with 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. They should prefer the risk of being wrong and in love to being in doubt and without love.

Interest did not naturally accrue to such anecdotes. For the most part, only Chloe and I appreciated them, because of the subsidiary associations we attached to them. Yet these leitmotifs were important, because they gave us the feeling that we were far from strangers to one another, that we had lived through things together, and remembered the meanings we had jointly derived from them. However slight these leitmotifs were, they acted like cement. The language of intimacy they helped to create was a reminder that (without clearing our way through jungles, slaying dragons, or even sharing apartments) Chloe and I had created something of a world together.

Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing; that we cannot properly speak until there is someone there who can understand what we are saying; that, in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.

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 problem with needing others to legitimize our existence is that we are very much at their mercy to have a correct identity ascribed to us. If, as Stendhal says, we lack a character without others, then the other with whom we share our bed must be a skilled intermediary or we will end up feeling deformed and misrepresented. But do not others by definition always distort us—whether for better or worse?

Most people do not openly force us into roles, they merely suggest that we adopt them through their reactions to us, and hence surreptitiously prevent us from moving beyond whatever mold they have assigned us.

Though I felt myself attentive to the complexities of Chloe’s nature, I must have been guilty of great abbreviations, of passing lightly over areas I simply did not have the empathy or maturity to understand. I was responsible for the greatest but most unavoidable abbreviation of all, that of being able to participate in Chloe’s life only as an outsider; she was someone whose inner world I could imagine, but never directly experience. However close we might be, Chloe was in the end another human being, with all the mystery and distance this implied, the inevitable distance embodied in the thought that we must die alone.

But as we must be labeled, characterized, and defined by others, the person we end up loving is the good enough barbecue skewerer, the person who loves us for more or less the things we deem ourselves to be lovable for, who understands us for more or less the things we need to be understood for.

Perhaps we can forgive ourselves for telling simple stories which sum up weekends with the word “pleasant,” stories which thereby introduce order into events that are in fact made up of tissues of troubling and ambivalent feelings. Yet perhaps we also owe it to ourselves occasionally to face the flux beneath the abbreviations.

However happy we may be with our partner, our love for them necessarily hinders us from pursuing alternatives. But why should this constrain us if we love them? Why should we feel this as a loss unless our love for them has already begun to wane? Because in resolving our need to love, we do not always succeed in resolving our need to long.

The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives, and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into sadness.

The unknown carries with it a mirror of all our deepest, most inexpressible wishes. The unknown is the fatal proposition that a face seen across the room will always hold out to the known. I may have loved Chloe but because I knew Chloe, I did not long for her. Longing cannot indefinitely direct itself at those we know, for their qualities are charted and therefore lack the mystery longing demands. A face seen for a few moments or hours, only to then disappear forever, is the necessary catalyst for dreams that cannot be formulated, a desire that seems as undefinable as it is unquenchable.

In the typical scenario of betrayal, one partner asks the other, “How could you have betrayed me with x when you said you loved me?” But there is no inconsistency between a betrayal and a declaration of love if time is taken into the equation. “I love you” can only ever be taken to mean “for now.” I was not lying to Chloe, but my words were time-bound promises, a truth too disturbing for most relationships to fully take on board, or else couples would have little to talk about other than their fluctuating feelings.

I was not only imaginatively unfaithful, I was also often bored. As inhabitants of luxury hotels and palaces attest, one can get used to anything. For periods, I entirely ceased to notice the miracle that was Chloe’s love for me. She became a normal and hence invisible feature of my life.

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. If commitment is seen as a group of eggs, then to commit oneself to the present is to risk putting all one’s eggs in the present basket, rather than distributing them between the baskets of past and future. And to shift the analogy to love, to finally accept that I was happy with Chloe would have meant accepting that, despite the danger, all of my eggs were firmly in her basket.

Lovers may kill their own love story for no other reason than that they are unable to tolerate the uncertainty, the sheer risk, that their experiment in happiness has delivered.

I could not understand why things I was saying and that in the past had proved so attractive were now suddenly so irritating. I could not understand why, having not changed myself, I should now be accused of being offensive in a hundred different ways. Panicking, I embarked on an attempt to return to the golden age, asking myself, “What did I do then that I perhaps am not doing now?” I became a desperate conformist to a past self that had been the object of love. What I failed to realize was that the past self was the one now proving so annoying, and that I was therefore doing nothing but accelerating the process toward dissolution.

Once a partner has begun to lose interest, there is apparently little the other can do to arrest the process. Like seduction, withdrawal suffers under a blanket of reticence. The very breakdown of communication is hard to discuss, unless both parties have a desire to see it restored. This leaves the lover in a desperate situation. Honest dialogue seems to produce only irritation and smothers love in the attempt to revive it. Desperate to woo the partner back at any cost, the lover might at this point be tempted to turn to romantic terrorism, the product of irredeemable situations, a gamut of tricks (sulking, jealousy, guilt) that attempt to force the partner to return love, by blowing up (in fits of tears, rage, or otherwise) in front of the loved one. The terroristic partner knows he cannot realistically hope to see his love reciprocated, but the futility of something is not always (in love or in politics) a sufficient argument against it. Certain things are said not because they will be heard, but because it is important to speak.

At the end of a relationship, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches. I was overwhelmed by a sense of betrayal, betrayal because a union in which I had invested so much had been declared bankrupt without my feeling it to be so. Chloe had not given it a chance, I argued with myself, knowing the hopelessness of these inner courts announcing hollow verdicts at four-thirty in the morning. Though there had been no contract, only the contract of the heart, I felt stung by Chloe’s disloyalty, by her heresy, by her night with another man. How was it morally possible this should have been allowed to happen?

It is surprising how often rejection in love is framed in moral language, the language of right and wrong, good and evil, as though to reject or not reject, to love or not to love, was something that naturally belonged to a branch of ethics. It is surprising how often the one who rejects is labeled evil, and the one who is rejected comes to embody the good. There was something of this moral attitude in both Chloe and my behavior. Framing her rejection, she had equated her inability to love with evil, and my love for her as evidence of goodness—hence the conclusion, made on the basis of nothing more than that I still desired her, that I was “too good” for her. Assuming that she largely meant what she said and was not simply being polite, she had made the ethical point that she was not good enough for me, by virtue of nothing more than having ceased to love me—something she had deemed made her a less worthy person than I, a man who, in all the goodness of his heart, still felt able to love her. 9. But however unfortunate rejection may be, can we really equate loving with selflessness, and rejection with cruelty; can we really equate love with goodness and indifference with evil? Was my love for Chloe moral, and her rejection of me immoral? The guilt owed to Chloe for rejecting me depended primarily on the extent to which love could be seen as something that I had given selflessly—for if selfish motives entered into my gift, then Chloe was surely justified in equally selfishl...

In so far as it avoids self-hatred, one must have sympathy for the alchemy by which a weakness is turned into virtue—and the evolution of my pain toward a Jesus Complex certainly implied a degree of mental good health. It showed that in the delicate internal balance between self-hatred and self-love, self-love was now winning. My initial response to Chloe’s rejection had been a self-hating one, where I had continued to love Chloe while hating myself for failing to make the relationship work. But my Jesus Complex had turned the equation on its head, now interpreting rejection as a sign that Chloe was worthy of contempt or at best pity (that paragon of Christian virtues). The Jesus Complex was nothing more than a self-defense mechanism—I had not wanted Chloe to leave me, I had loved her more than I had ever loved a woman, but now that she had flown to California, my way of accepting the unbearable loss was to reassess how valuable she had been in the first place. It was clearly a lie, but honesty is sometimes more than we have strength for when, abandoned and desperate, we spend Christmas alone in a hotel room listening to the sound of orgasmic beatitude from next door.

The difference could be grouped into categories of mature and immature love. Preferable in almost every way, the philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated (and perhaps explains why most people who have known the wilder shores of desire would refuse its painlessness the title of “love”). Immature love (which has little to do with age), on the other hand, is a story of chaotic lurching between idealization and disappointment, an unstable state where feelings of ecstasy and beatitude combine with impressions of drowning and fatal nausea, where the sense that one has finally found the answer comes together with the feeling that one has never been so lost. The logical climax of immature (because absolute) love comes in death, symbolic or real. The climax of mature love comes in marriage, and the attempt to avoid death via routine (the Sunday papers, trouser presses, remote-controlled appliances). For immature love accepts no compromise, and once we refuse compromise, we are on the road to some kind of cataclysm.