On Love

by Alain de Botton

From within love, we conceal the haphazard nature of our lives behind a purposive veil.

My mistake was to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a given person. It was the error of thinking that Chloe, rather than love, was inevitable. But

If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is

in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?

Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.

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.

if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily what they truly think. It’s just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don’t until they’re allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never get the chance.”

one is not wholly convinced of one’s own lovability, receiving affection can appear like being bestowed an honor for a feat one feels no connection with.

22. 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Alberti defined beauty as “a Harmony of all the Parts, in whatsoever Subject it appears, fitted together with such proportion and connection, that nothing could be added, diminished or altered, but for the worse.”

What is the point of this story? It merely shows that though one may be living under a delusion (love; the belief that one is an egg), if one finds the complementary part of it (a lover like Chloe under a similar delusion; a piece of toast) then all may be well. Delusions are not harmful in themselves; they only hurt when one is alone in believing in them, when one cannot create an environment in which they can be sustained. So long as both Chloe and I could preserve the yolk of love intact, what did it matter quite what the truth was?

What is an experience? Something that breaks a polite routine and for a brief period allows us to witness things with the heightened sensitivity afforded to us by novelty, danger, or beauty—and it’s on the basis of shared experiences that intimacy is given an opportunity to grow.

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 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.

My dislike of talking about ex-lovers with Chloe stemmed from a fear of inconstancy. Ex-lovers were reminders that situations I had at one point thought to be permanent had proved not to be so.

One of love’s greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us seriously happy.

All of man’s unhappiness comes from an inability to stay in his room alone,” said Pascal, advocating a need for man to build up his own resources over and against a debilitating dependence on the social sphere. But how could this possibly be achieved in love? Proust tells the story of Mohammed II, who, sensing that he was falling in love with one of the wives in his harem, at once had her killed because he did not wish to live in spiritual bondage to another. Short of this approach, I had long ago given up hope of achieving self-sufficiency. I had gone out of my room, and begun to love another—thereby taking on the risk inseparable from basing one’s life around another human being.

The anxiety of loving Chloe was in part the anxiety of being in a position where the cause of my happiness might so easily vanish, where she might suddenly lose interest, die, or marry another. At

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.

Hanging over every love story is the thought, as horrible as it is unknowable, of how it will end. It is as when, in full health and vigor, we try to imagine our own death, the only difference between the end of love and the end of life being that at least in the latter, we are granted the comforting thought that we will not feel anything after death. No such comfort for the lover, who knows that the end of the relationship will not necessarily be the end of love, and almost certainly not the end of life.

one cannot blame a lover for loving or not loving, for it is a matter beyond their choice and hence responsibility—though what makes rejection in love harder to bear than donkeys who can never sing is that one did once see the lover loving.

It showed that in the delicate internal balance between self-hatred and self-love, self-love was now winning.