On Love

by Alain de Botton

that we had been destined for one another.

The calculation, far from convincing us of rational arguments, only backed up the mystical interpretation of our fall into love.

We invent a destiny to spare ourselves the anxiety that would arise from acknowledging that the little sense there is in our lives is merely created by ourselves,

My mistake was to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a given person. It was the error of thinking that Chloe, rather than love, was inevitable.

Seeing through people is so easy, and it gets you nowhere,” remarked Elias Canetti, suggesting how effortlessly and yet how uselessly we can find fault with others.

If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone?

do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone?

“I don’t know, I felt guilty: I have this tendency to confess to things I haven’t done.

realized (as if it had been the most self-evident of truths) that I loved her.

what mattered was not so much what she was saying as the fact she was saying it—and that I had decided to find perfection in everything she could utter.

Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. 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.

void that romantic intoxication could fill,

Could this really be love? To speak of love after we had barely spent a morning together was to encounter charges of romantic delusion and semantic folly. Yet we can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite whom we have fallen in love with. The initial convulsion is necessarily founded on ignorance. Love or simple obsession? Who, if not time (which lies in its own way), could possibly begin to tell?

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.

a

“But actually, I like looking at things and not knowing quite what they mean.”

Desire had turned me into a relentless hunter for clues, a romantic paranoiac, reading meaning into everything.

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.

Our hesitancy was a game,

Faced with ambiguous signals, what better explanation than shyness: the beloved desires, but is too shy to say so.

1. 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 wondered.

A silence with an unattractive person implies they are the boring one. A silence with an attractive one immediately renders it certain you are the tedious party.

Real desire lacks articulacy—

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.

She drew me back into the apartment, placed both arms around me, and, looking me firmly in the eye with a grin she had previously reserved for the idea of chocolate, whispered, “We’re not children, you know.” And with these words, she placed her lips on mine and we embarked on one of the longer and more beautiful kisses mankind has ever known.

“If s/he really is so wonderful, how could s/he love someone like me?”

but in falling in love with her, I had somehow entirely overlooked the possibility of reciprocation. I had counted more on loving than being loved.

If one is not wholly convinced of one’s own lovability, receiving affection can appear like being bestowed an honor for a feat one feels no connection with.

feeling like a fool for upsetting the woman I claimed to love.

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. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt to take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.

“If a man says he’ll call me at nine,” she once told me over a glass of orange squash that I bought for her at the school cafeteria, “and he does actually ring at nine, I’ll refuse to take the call. After all, what’s he so desperate for? The only guy I like is the one who’ll keep me waiting; by nine-thirty I’ll do anything for him.”

I would have thought you were so weak if you’d done what I told you.”

Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally “together,” when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused.

But if self-love gains the upper hand, both partners may accept that seeing their love reciprocated is not proof of how low the beloved is, but of how lovable they have themselves turned out to be.

A search for eyes that will reflect one’s thoughts and that ends up with a (tragicomic) divergence—

In the end, I’ve found that it doesn’t really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won’t like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there’s always the chance you’ll end up thinking they’re all right.”

Does beauty give birth to love or does love give birth to beauty?

Even more inexplicably, when I took Chloe’s hand and told her that I had something very important to tell her, that I marsh-mallowed her, she seemed to understand perfectly, answering that it was the sweetest thing anyone had ever told her.

7.

14.

18.

What in us really wants “truth”? . . . We ask the value of this. . . . Why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance? . . . The falseness of a judgement is not necessarily an objection to it. . . . The question is to what extent it is life-advancing; and our fundamental tendency is to assert that the falsest judgements . . . are the most indispensable to us . . . that to renounce false judgements would be to renounce life, would be to deny life.2

whose company I relied upon to make my life meaningful,

What is an experience? Something that breaks a polite routine and for a brief period allows us to witness things with the heightened sensitivity afforded to us by novelty, danger, or beauty—and it’s on the basis of shared experiences that intimacy is given an opportunity to grow.

Yet these leitmotifs were important, because they gave us the feeling that we were far from strangers to one another, that we had lived through things together, and remembered the meanings we had jointly derived from them.

The language of intimacy they helped to create was a reminder that (without clearing our way through jungles, slaying dragons, or even sharing apartments) Chloe and I had created something of a world together.

Sunday evenings had long saddened me—reminders of death, unfinished business, guilt and loss.

2. 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.

To love someone is to take a deep interest in them, and by such concern, to bring them to a richer sense of what they are doing and saying.