On Love

by Alain de Botton

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.

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.

Whatever the pleasures of discovering mutual loves, nothing compares with the intimacy of landing on mutual hates.

a set of common experiences that bound us together. 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.

“A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character,” wrote Stendhal, suggesting that character has its genesis in the reactions of others to our words and actions. Our selves are fluid and require the contours provided by our neighbors. To feel whole, we need people in the vicinity who know us as well as, and sometimes better than, we know ourselves.

Without love, we lose the ability to possess a proper identity; within love, there is a constant confirmation of our selves. It is no wonder that the concept of a God who can see us has been central to many religions: to be seen is to be assured that we exist, and all the better if one is dealing with a God (or partner) who loves us.

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. Through

Happiness with other people seems bounded by two kinds of excess: suffocation and loneliness. Chloe had always felt the former to be the greater danger.

7. It was a long time before I was in any position to help Chloe to feel understood. Only slowly did I begin to unearth, from among the millions of words she spoke and actions she performed, the great themes of her life. In our knowledge of others, we are necessarily forced to interpret clues; we are like detectives or archaeologists who

how deep-seated and pervasive Chloe’s inclination to suffer in silence was.

Once I had located this strand in her nature, other aspects could be understood as related manifestations of it: her lack of acknowledged anger toward her parents (an anger that allowed itself expression only in savage irony), her self-deprecation, her harshness toward self-pitying people, her sense of duty, even her way of crying (muted sobs rather than hysterical wailing).

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.

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. 18.

recall a more complicated set of events pullulating beneath the surface

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. There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.

The unknown carries with it a mirror of all our deepest, most inexpressible wishes. The

Longing cannot indefinitely direct itself at those we know, for their qualities are charted and therefore lack the mystery longing demands.

We could define maturity as the ability to give everyone what they deserve when they deserve it, to separate the emotions that belong to, and should be restricted to, oneself from those that should at once be expressed to their initiators, rather than passed on to later and more innocent arrivals. We were often not mature.

From within a relationship, there is infinite cruelty in the idea of one’s indifference toward past loves.

anhedonia, a disease defined by the British Medical Association as a reaction remarkably close to mountain sickness resulting from the sudden terror brought on by the threat of happiness. It was a common disease among tourists in this region of Spain, faced in these idyllic surroundings with the sudden realization that earthly happiness might be within their grasp, and prey therefore to a violent physiological reaction designed to counteract such a daunting possibility.

Living in the future perfect tense involved holding up an ideal life to contrast with the present, one that would save us from the need to commit ourselves to our situation. It was a pattern akin to that found in certain religions, in which life on earth is only a prelude to an everlasting and far more pleasant heavenly existence. Our attitude toward holidays, parties, work, and perhaps love had something immortal to it,

as though we would be on the earth for long enough not to have to stoop so low as to think these occasions finite in number—and hence be forced to draw proper value from them.

12. 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.

All of man’s unhappiness comes from an inability to stay in his room alone,” said Pascal, advocating

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.

Weltschmerz’s