On Love

by Alain de Botton

the labeling of others is usually a silent process.

Overcoming childhood could be understood as an attempt to correct the false stories of others. But the struggle against distortion continues beyond childhood. Most people get us wrong, either out of neglect or prejudice.

Even being loved implies a gross bias—a pleasant distortion, but a distortion nevertheless.

“Well, you know, you give me space. I feel more complicated than in the office. You’re interested in me and you understand me better, so that’s why I made it wiggly, so that it’s sort of natural.”

The straight line is all the sides of me you don’t understand or don’t have time for and stuff.” “Oh.”

What did Chloe mean by her amoebic straight line? Just that I could not wholly understand her, an unsurprising but still sobering reminder of the limits of empathy.

My knowledge of her was necessarily filtered through my own past. Like a European who orients himself in a Rocky Mountain landscape by saying, “This looks just like Switzerland,”

Though I felt myself attentive to the complexities of Chloe’s nature, I must have been guilty of great abbreviations, of passing lightly over areas I simply did not have the empathy or maturity to understand.

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.

We have a morbid resistance to classification by others, to others placing labels on us (the man, the woman, the rich one, the poor one, the Jew, the Catholic, etc.). To ourselves, after all, we are always unlabelable.

in Chloe’s eyes, I was necessarily a simplified version of myself.

the person we end up loving is the good enough barbecue skewerer, the person who loves us for more or less the things we deem ourselves to be lovable for, who understands us for more or less the things we need to be understood for.

for the moment at least, we had been given enough room to expand in the ways our complexities demanded.

The stories we tell are always too simple.

Was there room in it for all the infidelity, boredom, irritation, and indifference that was often knitted together with this love? Could any simple account accurately reflect the degree of ambivalence to which all relationships seem fated?

Chloe called me “no longer endearingly insane.”

stories which thereby introduce order into events that are in fact made up of tissues of troubling and ambivalent feelings. Yet perhaps we also owe it to ourselves occasionally to face the flux beneath the abbreviations.

5. However happy we may be with our partner, our love for them necessarily hinders us from pursuing alternatives.

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.

Though I loved Chloe, the sight of these women occasionally filled me with such regret, it seemed like the only solution might be to tell them how I felt and thus alleviate the burden of sadness (I resisted the impulse).

Alice’s face evoked a void inside of me with no clear dimensions or intentions and that my love for Chloe had somehow not resolved.

I may have loved Chloe but because I knew Chloe, I did not long for her.

there is no inconsistency between a betrayal and a declaration of love if time is taken into the equation. “I love you” can only ever be taken to mean “for now.”

my words were time-bound promises, a truth too disturbing for most relationships to fully take on board,

one can get used to anything. For periods, I entirely ceased to notice the miracle that was Chloe’s love for me.

She became a normal and hence invisible feature of my life.

The disruption of habit had made Chloe unknown and exotic again, desirable like a woman I had never touched,

If philosophers have traditionally advocated a life lived according to reason, condemning in its name a life led by desire, it is because reason is a bedrock of continuity.

I stereotyped my possibilities, I returned to the role assigned to me by my status as a boyfriend, I bowed to the tremendous authority of what already exists.

when we were unsure of who we were, we could hide beneath the comforting analysis of those who stood on the outside, aware only of the continuities, unaware that there was nothing inviolable about our plot line.

Because there was a threat that love might end as suddenly as it had begun, we tried to reinforce the present through an appeal to a common destiny.

If my love for Chloe constituted the essence of my self at that moment, then the definitive end of my love for her would mean nothing less than the death of a part of me.

Yet we always remained aware that what we had chosen to call love might be an abbreviation for a far more complex, and ultimately less palatable, reality.

travel being (like love) an attempt to follow a dream into reality.

Because happiness is so terrifying and anxiety-inducing to accept, somewhat unconsciously Chloe and I had always tended to locate hedonia either in memory or in anticipation.

to enjoy ourselves in the present would have meant engaging ourselves in an imperfect or dangerously ephemeral reality, rather than hiding behind a comfortable belief in an afterlife.

holding up an ideal life to contrast with the present, one that would save us from the need to commit ourselves to our situation.

hence be forced to draw proper value from them.

was it not perhaps because the present was catching up with her dissatisfaction? The present had, for a brief moment, ceased to lack anything the future might hold.

The future has some of the satisfactions and safety of the past.

I recalled that as a child every holiday grew perfect only when I was home again, for then the anxiety of the present would make way for stable memories.

And so the skiing holiday (and much of my life generally) proceeded: anticipation in the morning, anxiety in the actuality, and pleasant memories in the evening.

But that evening in Chelsea, there was simply nothing I could fault the moment on and hence had to realize that the problem lay within me:

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.

The reasons behind such arguments were never the surface ones:

what was at stake were far deeper anxieties.

we argued not because we hated one another, but because we loved one another too much—or, to risk confusing things, because we hated loving one another to the extent we did.

I hate having no choice but to risk loving you like this.

nothing but a necessary release of tension that came from realizing that we both had placed all our eggs in the other’s basket—and