On Love

by Alain de Botton

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.