On Love

by Alain de Botton

Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the opposite: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as “mushy.”

old joke made by the Marx who laughed about not deigning to belong to a club that would accept someone like him as a member, a truth as appropriate in love as it is in club membership.

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.

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.”

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.

In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes accounts for this feeling of familiarity by claiming that the loved one was our long-lost “other half ” to whose body our own had originally been joined. In the beginning, all human beings were hermaphrodites with double backs and flanks, four hands and four legs, and two faces turned in opposite directions on the same head. These hermaphrodites were so powerful and their pride so overweening that Zeus was forced to cut them in two, into a male and female half—and from that day, every man and woman has yearned nostalgically but confusedly to rejoin the part from which he or she was severed.

Does not every love story have these moments? A search for eyes that will reflect one’s thoughts and that ends up with a (tragicomic) divergence—be it over the class struggle or a pair of shoes.

The dismay that greater acquaintance with the beloved can bring is comparable to composing a symphony in one’s head and then hearing it played in a concert hall by a full orchestra.

People we love at first sight are as free from conflicting tastes in shoes or literature as the unrehearsed symphony is free from off-key violins or late flutes.

Anthropologists tell us that the group always comes before the individual, that to understand the latter, one must pass through the former, be it nation, tribe, clan, or family.

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.”

I felt a primitive nostalgia for familiar surroundings, recognizing the disruption that every relationship entails—a whole new person to learn about, to suggest myself to, to acclimatize myself to.

a choice as radical in the personal sphere as in the political: a choice between love and liberalism.

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.

But we equated intimacy with a form of ownership and license. We may have been kind, but we were no longer polite.

The beginning of revolution is strikingly akin psychologically to that of certain relationships: the stress on unity, the sense of omnipotence, the desire to eliminate secrets (with the fear of the opposite soon leading to lover’s paranoia and the creation of a secret police).

The wish to replace the butcher-butchered relationship with a newsagent one has long dominated political thinking.

Liberal politics finds its greatest apologist in John Stuart Mill, who in 1859 published a classic defense of loveless liberalism, On Liberty, a ringing plea that citizens should be left alone by governments, however well-meaning they were, and not be told how to lead their personal lives, what gods to worship or books to read. Mill argued that though a kingdom and tyranny felt itself entitled to hold “a deep interest in the whole bodily and mental discipline of every one of its citizens,” the modern state should as far as possible stand back and let people govern themselves.

It evokes certain marriages where love has evaporated long ago, where couples sleep in separate bedrooms, exchanging the occasional word when they meet in the kitchen before work,where both partners have long ago given up hope of mutual understanding, settling instead for a tepid friendship based on controlled misunderstanding, politeness while they get through the evening’s shepherd’s pie, and 3 A.M. bitterness at the emotional failure that surrounds them.

choice between love and liberalism. The sandals of the newsagent didn’t annoy me because I didn’t care for him. I merely wished to get my paper and milk and leave. I didn’t wish to cry on his shoulder or bare my soul, so his footwear remained unobtrusive.

she and I were able to temper the choice between love and liberalism with an ingredient that too few relationships and even fewer amorous politicians (Lenin, Pol Pot, Robespierre) have ever possessed, an ingredient that might just (were there enough of it to go around) save both states and couples from intolerance: a sense of humor.

It is as hard to imagine cracking a joke with Stalin as with Young Werther. Both of them seem desperately, though differently, intense. 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.

By threatening to “defenestrate” ourselves whenever arguments became heated, we were always sure to draw a laugh and neutralize a frustration.

19. 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.

Does beauty give birth to love or does love give birth to beauty? Did I love Chloe because she was beautiful or was she beautiful because I loved her? Surrounded by an infinite number of people, we may ask (staring at our lover while s/he talks on the phone or lies opposite us in the bath) why our desire has chosen to settle on this particular face, this particular mouth or nose or ear, why this curve of the neck or dimple in the cheek has come to answer so precisely to our criteria of perfection? Every one of our lovers offers different solutions to the problem of beauty, and yet succeeds in redefining our notions of attractiveness in a way that is as original and as idiosyncratic as the landscape of their face.

However, clearly Plato and Leon Battista Alberti had neglected something in their aesthetic theories, for I found Chloe excessively beautiful.

The way I looked at Chloe could have been compared with the famous Müller–Lyer illusion, where two lines of identical length will appear to be of different sizes according to the nature of the arrows attached at their ends. The loving way that I gazed at Chloe functioned like a pair of outward arrows, which give an ordinary line a semblance of length it might not objectively deserve.

8. A definition of beauty that more accurately summed up my feelings for Chloe was delivered by Stendhal. “Beauty is the promise of happiness,”

took pride in finding Chloe more beautiful than a Platonist would have. 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. The more tempting kind of beauty has only a few angles from which it may be glimpsed, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not side comfortably with mathematical rules of proportion, it draws its appeal from precisely those details that also lend themselves to ugliness. As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.

The editor of Vogue might have had difficulty including photos of Chloe in an issue, but this was only a confirmation of the uniqueness that I had managed to find in my girlfriend. I had animated her face with her soul. Wittgenstein’s Duck-Rabbit

She was suspicious of words. “One can talk problems into existence,” she had once said, and just as problems could come from words, so could good things be destroyed by them.

She had experienced a betrayal at the hands of language, discovered the way intimate words may be converted to a common currency, and had since hidden behind a veil of practicality and irony.

With her customary resistance to the rose-tinted, Chloe would therefore probably have shrugged a declaration off with a joke, not because she did not want to hear it, but because any formulation would have seemed dangerously close both to complete cliché and total nakedness. It was not that Chloe was unsentimental, she was just too discreet with her emotions to speak about them in the worn, social language of the romantic. Though her feelings may have been directed toward me, in a curious sense, they were not for me to know.

The difficulty of a declaration of love opens up quasi-philosophical concerns about language. If I told Chloe that I had a stomachache or a garden full of daffodils, I could count on her to understand. Naturally, my image of a bedaffodiled garden might slightly differ from hers, but there would be reasonable parity between the two images; words would operate as reliable messengers of meaning. But the card I was now trying to write had no such guarantees attached to it. The words were the most ambiguous in the language, because the things they referred to so sorely lacked stable meaning. Certainly

According to the psychological anthropologist L. K. Hsu, whereas Western cultures are “individual-centered” and place great emphasis on emotions, in contrast, Chinese culture is “situation-centered” and concentrates on groups rather than couples and their love (though the manager of the Lao Tzu was nevertheless

Love is never a given; it is constructed and defined by different societies.

In at least one society, the Manu of New Guinea, there is not even a word for love. In other cultures, love exists, but is given distinctive forms. Ancient Egyptian love poetry had no interest in the emotions of shame, guilt, or ambivalence. The Greeks thought nothing of homosexuality, Christianity proscribed the body, the Trou...

But how could I tell her so in a way that would suggest the distinctive nature of my attraction? Words like “love” or “devotion” or “infatuation” were exhausted by the weight of successive love stories, by the layers imposed on them through the uses of others. At the moment when I most wanted language to be original, personal, and completely private, I came up against the irrevocably public nature of emotional language.

Yet solipsism has its limits. Were my views of Chloe anywhere near reality, or had I completely lost judgment?

Yet what if her face was only a trompe l’oeil? “By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,” wrote George Orwell, but Chloe was just twenty-four—and even if she had been older, we are in truth, despite Orwell’s optimistic belief in natural justice, as unlikely to be given the face we deserve as the money or the opportunities.

In using her face as a guide to her soul, was I not perhaps guilty of mistaken metonymy, whereby an attribute of an entity is substituted for the entity itself (the crown for the monarchy, the wheel for the car, the White House for the U.S. government, Chloe’s angelic expression for Chloe . . .)?

Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess.

The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.

Philosophers tend to limit epistemological doubt to the existence of tables, chairs, the courtyards of Cambridge colleges, and the occasional unwanted wife. But to extend these questions to things that matter to us—to love, for instance—is to raise the frightening possibility that the loved one is but an inner fantasy, with little connection to any objective reality.

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.

At the start of Western philosophical thinking, the progress from ignorance to knowledge finds itself likened by Plato to a glorious journey from a dark cave into bright sunlight. Men are born unable to perceive reality, Plato tells us, much like cave dwellers who mistake shadows of objects thrown up on the walls for the objects themselves. Only with much effort may illusions be thrown off and the journey be made from the shadowy world into bright sunlight, where things can at last be seen for what they truly are.

Everyone from Aristotle to Kant had criticized Plato on the way to reach the truth, but no one had seriously questioned the value of the undertaking. But in his Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Friedrich Nietzsche finally took the bull by the horns and asked: What in us really wants “truth”? . . . We ask the value of this. . . . Why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance? . . . The falseness of a judgement is not necessarily an objection to it. . . . The question is to what extent it is life-advancing; and

the falsest judgements . . . are the most indispensable to us . . . that to renounce false judgements would be to renounce life, would be to deny life.2