On Love

by Alain de Botton

Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is gazing out of the window—a perfect love story interrupted only when the beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation about the excessive price of the onboard sandwiches with a neighbor or blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.

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.

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.