On Love

by Alain de Botton

Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge.

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.

Yet we can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite whom we have fallen in love with.

For those in love with certainty, seduction is no territory in which to stray. Every smile and word leads to a dozen if not twelve thousand possibilities.

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.

Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never get the chance.”

Chloe and I were politely sparing each other the need to pay the full price for a candid declaration of love.

The seducer who wishes to call his victim shy will never be disappointed.

It is one of the ironies of love that it is easiest confidently to seduce those we are least attracted to.

Love forced me to look at myself through Chloe’s imagined eyes. “Who could I become to please her?”

I had to find out more about Chloe, for how could I abandon my true self unless I knew what false self to adopt?

clumsy questions (with every one I asked, I seemed to get further from knowing her)

Because it involves the risk of alienating those who don’t agree with what one is saying, originality proved wholly beyond me.

We charm by coincidence rather than design.

The steps I had on occasion seen women take to seduce me were rarely the ones I had responded to. I was more likely to be attracted by tangential details that the seducer had not even been sufficiently aware of to push to the fore.

Few things are as antithetical to sex as thought. Sex is instinctive, unreflective, and spontaneous, while thought is careful, uninvolved, and judgmental.

After all the ambiguity, the kiss had come so suddenly that my mind now refused to cede control of events to the body.

Because thought implies judgment, and because we are all paranoid enough to take judgment to be negative, it is constitutionally suspect in the bedroom.

Hence the sighing that drowns the sounds of lovers’ thoughts, sighing that confirms: I am too passionate to be thinking.

When we look at someone (an angel) from a position of unrequited love and imagine the pleasures that being in heaven with them might bring us, we are prone to overlook a significant danger: how soon their attractions might pale if they began to love us back.

We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as ideal as we are corrupt.

How could they be as divine as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to app...

in falling in love with her, I had somehow entirely overlooked the possibility of reciprocation.

being loved is always the more complicated of the two emotions, Cupid’s arrow greatly easier to send than receive.

something about the attention and affection they symbolized disturbed me.

Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bittersweet as it is self-induced.

What had turned me into such a monster?

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.

Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.

Theorists of love have tended to be rightly suspicious of fusion, their skepticism stemming from the sense that it is easier to impute similarity than to investigate difference.

supplement our ignorance with desire.

Living day to day with her was like acclimatizing myself to a foreign country, and therefore feeling prey to occasional xenophobia at departures from my own traditions and expectations.

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.

However much Chloe had run away from all of this—to the big city, to her own values and friends—the family still represented a genetic and historical tradition to which she was indebted.

While the stories and settings of her past had enchanted me, they had also proved terrifying and bizarre, all these years and habits before I had known her that were as much a part of who she was as the shape of her nose or the color of her eyes.

“Why do you have to spoil everything?” “Because I care for you. Someone has to let you know the truth.”

“Your girlfriends don’t love you. Not in the proper way. Not in the way that means you have to break bad news to someone even if it pains you terribly.”

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.

Christian love is not prone to survive a move into the bedroom. Its message seems more suited to the universal than the particular,

There were a thousand things about me that drove Chloe to distraction:

Chloe and I would never have been as brutal to our friends as we were to one another. But we equated intimacy with a form of ownership and license.

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).

We seem to be thrown back on a choice between love and liberalism. The sandals of the newsagent didn’t annoy me because I didn’t care for him.

revolutionaries share with lovers a tendency toward terrifying earnestness.

With the inability to laugh comes an inability to acknowledge the contradictions inherent in every society and relationship,

Humor meant there was no need for a direct confrontation, we could glide over an irritant, winking at it obliquely, making a criticism without needing to spell it out.

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.

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 p...

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.