On Love

by Alain de Botton

“It’s nice being able to feel I can hate you like this,” Chloe once said to me. “It reassures me that you can take it, that I can tell you to fuck off and you’ll throw something at me but stay put.”

We wanted to test each other’s capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.

It is easiest to accept happiness when it is brought about through things that one can control, that one has achieved after much effort and reason.

Such happiness was dangerous precisely because it was so lacking in self-sufficient permanence.

The difficulty of accepting the happiness Chloe represented came from my absence in the causal process leading to it,

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,

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.

It is part of good manners not to question the criteria responsible for eliciting another’s love.

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but Do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test. Do you love me stripped of everything that might be lost, for only the things I will have forever?

Hate is the hidden script in the letter of love; its foundations are shared with its opposite.

It is as if the end of love is already contained in its beginning, the ingredients of love’s collapse eerily foreshadowed by those of its creation.

The signs of death were everywhere waiting to be read—had I not been struck by the illiteracy pain had induced.

At precisely the time when things might still have been rescued with ingenuity, fearful and hence unoriginal, I became nostalgic.

The in-house language unraveled, it grew unfamiliar to Chloe—or rather, she feigned forgetting, so as not to admit denial.

I became a desperate conformist to a past self that had been the object of love.

Why don’t you love me? is as impossible a question (though a far less pleasant one) to ask as Why do you love me?

love has been brought to us as a gift for reasons we never wholly determine or deserve.

What have I done to be denied love? protests the betrayed one, arrogantly claiming possession of a gift that is never one’s due.

Love may be born at first sight, but it does not die with corresponding rapidity.

When every decision is difficult, no decision is taken.

We entered the era of romantic terrorism. “Is there anything wrong?” “No, why, should there be?”

Honest dialogue seems to produce only irritation and smothers love in the attempt to revive it.

the futility of something is not always (in love or in politics) a sufficient argument against it. Certain things are said not because they will be heard, but because it is important to speak.

success in inducing jealousy is dependent on a significant factor: the inclination of the targeted audience to give a damn.

At the basis of all sulks lies a wrong that might have been addressed and have disappeared at once, but that instead is taken by the injured partner and stored for later and more painful detonation.

To display anger shortly after an offense occurs is the most generous thing one may do,

Why had it become so hard for me to say what I meant? Because of the danger of communicating my real grievance: that Chloe had ceased to love me.

My anger was hence forced underground.

I resorted to symbolizing meaning, half hoping, half dreading that the symbol would be decoded.

the romantic terrorist must complain, If I have only forced you to love me, then I cannot accept this love, for it was not spontaneously given. Romantic terrorism is a demand that negates itself in the process of its resolution, and brings the terrorist up against an uncomfortable reality—that love’s death cannot be arrested.

I had lost the will to force love on its unwilling recipient.

To suffer a blow and feel nothing—it means the blow must have been hard indeed.

When you’ve been in love, it is not the length of time that matters, it’s everything you’ve felt and done coming out intensified. To me, it’s one of the few times when life isn’t elsewhere.

He was only a symptom, not the cause of what’s happened.

At the end of a relationship, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.

I was overwhelmed by a sense of betrayal, betrayal because a union in which I had invested so much had been declared bankrupt without my feeling it to be so.

It is surprising how often rejection in love is framed in moral language, the language of right and wrong,

Was my love for Chloe moral, and her rejection of me immoral?

Viewed from such a perspective, the end of love appeared to be a clash between two fundamentally selfish impulses, rather than between altruism and egoism, morality and immorality.

According to Immanuel Kant, a moral action is to be distinguished from an immoral one by the fact that it is performed out of duty and regardless of the pain or pleasure involved.

To love someone is moral only when that love is given free of any expected return, if that love is given simply for the sake of giving love.

What gave me pleasure and pain determined the moral labels I chose to affix to Chloe. I was an egocentric moralizer,

Morality must have its boundaries.

I had only ever loved selfishly, spontaneously, like a utilitarian.

One finds it easier not to blame the donkey for not singing because it never sang, but the lover loved, perhaps only a short while ago, which makes the reality of the claim I cannot love you anymore all the harder to digest.

why we have been singled out to receive such terrible, intolerable punishment.

I was forced to abandon the optimism of everyday life.

I felt the transience of everything, the illusions upon which civilizations are built. I saw in happiness a violent denial of reality.

Chloe’s departure had rocked my confidence in just about everything.

I repented for the arrogance of my previous faith in free will.