On Love

by Alain de Botton

Unbearably punished, I sought out my guilt. Unsure of quite what I had done, I confessed to everything.

every act of ordinary cruelty and thoughtlessness—none of these had been missed by the gods, who had now chosen to wreak their terrible revenge on me.

I did not simply love Chloe and then she left me. I loved Chloe in order that she would leave me.

It was because the unconscious, the perverse casting director of my life, had recognized in her a suitable character to leave the stage after inflicting the requisite amount of suffering.

Watching everything slip out of my grasp, I concluded that the only way to regain at least a measure of control was to kill myself.

Only by my death could I assert the importance and immortality of my love, only through self-destruction could I remind a world grown weary of tragedy that love was a deadly serious matter.

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

Man is the symbolic, metaphorical creature: unable to communicate my anger, I would symbolize it in my own death.

What was the point of making such a scene if I could not be there to witness others witnessing it?

I had grown intoxicated with my own sadness, I had reached the stratosphere of suffering, the moment where pain gives rise to the Jesus Complex.

it was not I, but the people who had made me suffer, who were blind. I was elated, at the pinnacle where suffering brings one over into the valley of joy, the joy of the martyr, the joy of the Jesus Complex.

Grown infinitely wise through suffering, I could forgive, pity, and patronize her for her lack of judgment—and to do so gave me infinite relief.

The pathos of the New Testament, as much as of my own love story, arose out of the sad tale of a virtuous but misrepresented man, who preached the love of everyone for their neighbor, only to see the generosity of his message thrown back in his face.

hence protected myself from experiencing my grief as the outcome of what was at best a mundane romantic breakup.

There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. While most of our self is led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory.

we can expect the soul to slow according to the significance of love’s burden.

The present held nothing for me; the past had become the only inhabitable tense.

The difficulty of forgetting her was compounded by the survival of so much of the external world that we had shared together, and in which she was still entwined.

The physical world refused to let me forget.

This refusal of change was a reminder that the world was an entity that would spin on regardless of whether I was in love or out of it, happy or unhappy, alive or dead.

Then, inevitably, I began to forget. A few months after breaking up with her, I found myself in the area of London in which she had lived and noticed that the thought of her had lost much of the agony it had once held.

Chloe’s memory had neutralized itself and become a part of history.

Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.

My identity had for so long been forged around “us” that to return to the “I” involved an almost complete reinvention of myself.

I had to revisit almost every physical location, rewrite over every topic of conversation, replay every song and every activity that she and I had shared in order to reconquer them for the present, in order to defuse their associations. But gradually I forgot.

one day, in a small oasis that called itself the present, the exhausted creature finally caught up with the rest of me.

We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, that living one’s life is a skill that has to be acquired, like learning to ride a bicycle or play the piano.

Wisdom teaches us that our first impulses may not always be trustworthy, and that our appetites will lead us astray if we do not train reason to separate vain from genuine needs.

what does wisdom say about love?

They distinguish the rash love of a Romeo and Juliet from Socrates’ contemplative worship of the Good; they contrast the excesses of a Werther with the brotherly love suggested by Jesus.

the philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated

Immature love (which has little to do with age),

where the sense that one has finally found the answer comes together with the feeling that one has never been so lost.

The climax of mature love comes in marriage, and the attempt to avoid death via routine

For immature love accepts no compromise, and once we refuse compromise, we are on the road...

their desire to change unsuitable partners was only the relic of a more infantile fantasy to convert their parents into proper caregivers.

Who was Emma Bovary? She was a young woman living in the French provinces, married to an adoring husband whom she loathed because she had come to associate love with suffering.

there is a great difference between identifying a problem and solving it, between wisdom and the wise life.

We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

The confrontation between Madame Bovary and Peggy Nearly is the confrontation between romantic tragedy and romantic positivism.

It is the confrontation between wisdom and wisdom’s opposite, which is not the ignorance of wisdom (that is easier to put right), but the inability to act on the knowledge of what one knows is right.

Though love might never be painless and was certainly not wise, neither could it be forgotten. It was as inevitable as it was unreasonable—and its unreason was unfortunately no argument against it.

for all the sacrifices demanded by the stoic life, was there not something cowardly within it?

At the heart of stoicism lay the desire to disappoint oneself before someone else had the chance to do so.

stoicism was simply trying to deny the legitimacy of certain potentially painful yet fundamental human needs.

We can always blind ourselves to the complexities of a problem by suggesting solutions that reduce the issue to a lowest common denominator.

collapsed the question rather than juggle with its contradictions.

I realized that a more complex lesson needed to be drawn, one that could play with the incompatibilities of love, juggling the need for wisdom with its likely impotence, juggling the idiocy of infatuation with its inevitability.

Love had to be appreciated without flight into dogmatic optimism or pessimism, without constructing a philosophy of one’s fears, or a morality of one’s disappointments.

Love taught the analytic mind a cert...