Alain de Botton, Essays In Love

Introduction

• John Armstrong: “It lies in the power of art to honor the elusive but real value of ordinary life. It can teach us to be more just towards ourselves as we endeavor to make the best of our circumstances ... Art can do the opposite of glamorizing the unattainable; it can reawaken us to the genuine merit of life as we’re forced to live it.”

Idealization

• I feel prey to a moment of unrestrained idealization.

• Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge.

• Love reinvents our needs with unique speed.

• We can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite who we have fallen in love with. The initial convulsion is necessarily founded on ignorance.

The Subtext of Seduction

• 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 to administer varied doses of hope and despair.

• If you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily what they truly think. It’s just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don’t until they’re allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. They majority just never get the chance.

• Our hesitancy was a game, but a serious and useful one, which minimized offending an unwilling partner and eased a willing one more slowly into the prospect of mutual desire.

• Faced with ambiguous signals, what better explanation than shyness: the beloved desires, but is too shy to say so. The seducer who wishes to call his victim shy will never be disappointed.

Authenticity

• It is one of the ironies of love that is easiest confidently to seduce those to whom we are least attracted.

• My sense of inferiority bred a need to take on a personality that was not my own, a seducing self that would respond to every demand and suggestion made by my exalted companion.

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

• Not to find the right words is paradoxically often the best proof that they right words are meant.

• Real desire lacks articulacy.

• Her self-deprecation was all the more attractive for it seemed to be free of the veiled appeals of self-pitying people.

• We charm by coincidence rather than design.

• The steps I had on occasion seen women take to seduce me were rarely the ones I had responded to. 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.

Mind and Body

• Few things are as antithetical to sex as thought. Sex is instinctive, unreflective and spontaneous, while thought is careful, uninvolved, and judgmental. To think during sex is to violate a fundamental law of intercourse.

• The philosopher in the bedroom is as ludicrous a figure as the philosopher in the nightclub. In both arenas, because the body is predominant and vulnerable, the mind becomes an instrument of silent, uninvolved assessment.

Marxism

• When we look at someone (an angel) from a position of unrequited love and imagine the pleasures that being in heaven with them might bring us, we are prone to overlook a significant danger: how soon their attractions might pale if they began to love us back. We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as ideal as we are corrupt ... How could they be divine as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us? If in order to love, we must believe that the beloved surpasses us in some way, does not a cruel paradox emerge when we witness this love returned?

• 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.

• Unrequited loved 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 bitter-sweet 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. 

• Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and our weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believe in the beloved now that they believe in us?

• Though from a position of unrequited love they long to see their love returned, Marxists unconsciously prefer that their dreams remain in the realm of fantasy.

• To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. 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. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to finding the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.

• A long, gloomy tradition in Western thought argues that love is in its essence an unreciprocated, Marxist emotion and that desire can only thrive on the impossibility of mutuality. According to this view, love is simply a direction, nor a place, and burns itself out with the attainment of its goal, the possession (in bed or otherwise) of the loved one.

• There is usually a Marxist moment in every relationship, the moment when it becomes clear that love is reciprocated. The way it becomes clear that love is reciprocated. The way it is resolved depends on the balance between self-love and self-hatred. If self-hatred gains the upper hand, then the one who has received love will declare that the beloved (on some excuse or other) is not good enough for them (not good enough by virtue of associating with no-goods). But if self-love gains the upper hand, bother 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.

False Notes

• Shoes are supreme symbols of aesthetic, and hence by extension psychological, compatibility.

• Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing.

• The dismay that greater acquaintance with the beloved can bring is comparable to composing a symphony in one’s head and then hearing it played in a concert hall by a full orchestra. Though we are impressed to find so many of our ideas confirmed in performance, we cannot help but notice details that are not quite as we had intended them to be.

• Anthropologists tell us that the group always comes before the individual, that to understand the latter one must pass through the former, be it nation, tribe, clan, or family.

Love or Liberalism

• I care about you, therefore I will upset you, I have honored you with a vision of how you should be, therefore I will hurt you.

• The beginning of revolutions is psychologically strikingly akin to that of certain relationships: the stress on unity, the sets of omnipotence, the desire to eliminate secrets.

• John Stuart Mill: “The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of their, or impede their efforts to obtain it ... The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized society against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.”

• If my relationship with Chole never reached the levels of the Terror, it was perhaps because she and I were able to temper the choice between love and liberalism with an ingredient that too few relationships and even fewer amorous politicians (Lenin, Pol Pot, Robespierre) have never possessed, an ingredient that might just (were there enough of it to go around) save both states and couples from intolerance: a sense of humor. 

• If Chole and I overcame certain of our difference, it was because we had the will to make jokes of the impasses we found in each other’s characters.

• It may be a sign that two people have stopped loving one another (or at least stopped wishing to make the effort that constitutes ninety per cent of love) when they are no longer able to spin differences into jokes. Humor lined the walls of irritation between our ideals and the reality: behind every joke, there was a warning of difference, of disappointment even, but it was a difference that had been defused - and could therefore be passed over without the need for a pogrom.

Beauty

• Discussions of physical beauty have some of the futility of debates between art historians attempting to justify the relative merits of different artists ... The language of the eye stubbornly resists translation into the language of words.

• Beauty is the promise of happiness.

• The most interesting faces generally oscillate between charm and crookedness. There is a tyranny about perfection, a certain tedium even, something that asserts itself with all the dogmatism of a scientific formula. The more tempting kind of beauty has only a few angles from which it may be seen, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not side comfortably with mathematical rules of proportion, it draws its appeal from precisely those details that also lend themselves to ugliness. As proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.

• The danger with the kind fo beauty that does not look like a Greek statue is that its precariousness places much emphasis on the viewer ... A subjective theory of beauty makes the observer wonderfully indispensable.

Speaking Love

• A declaration would perhaps not have been unexpected, yet the fact that it had never been made was significant. Pullovers may be a sign of love between a man and a woman, but we had yet to translate our feelings into language. It was as though the core of our relationship, configured around the word love, was somehow unmentionable, either too evident or too significant to be uttered.

• Certainly travelers had returned for the heart and tried to represent what they had seen, but love was in the end like a species of rare colored butterfly, often sighted, but never conclusively identified.

• The whole language of love had been corrupted by overuse.

• Some people would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love.

• L. K. Hsu: whereas Western cultures are “individual-centered” and place great emphasis on emotions, in contrast, Chinese culture is “situation-centered” and concentrates on groups rather than couples and their love ... Love is never a given, it is constructed and defined by different societies. 

What Do You See in Her?

• Love reveals its insanity by its refusal to acknowledge the inherent normality of the loved one. Hence the boredom of lovers for those standing on the sidelines ... Love was a lonely pursuit.

• A person is never good or bad per se, which means that loving or hating them necessarily has at its basis a subjective, and perhaps illusionistic, element. 

• Because only the body is open to the eye, the hope of the infatuated lover is that the soul is faithful to its casing, that the body owns an appropriate soul, that what the skin represents turns out to be what it is. I did not love Cholesterols for her body, I loved her body for the promise of who she was. It was a most inspiring promise.

• In the oasis complex, the thirsty man imagines he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.

Skepticism and Faith

• Doubt is easy when it is not a matter of survival: we are as skeptical as we can afford to be, and it is easiest to be skeptical about things that do not fundamentally sustain us. It is easy to doubt the existence of a table, it is hell to doubt the legitimacy of love.

• Men are born unable to perceive reality, Plato tells us, much like cave dwellers who mistake shadows of objects thrown up on the walls for the objects themselves. Only with much effort may illusions be thrown off, and the journey made from the shadowy world into bright sunlight, where things can at last be seen for what they truly are. As with all allegories, this is a tale with a moral: that truth is always superior to illusion.

• Friedrich Nietzsche: “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.”

• Lovers cannot remain philosophers for long, they should give away to the religious impulse, which is to believe and have faith, as opposed to the philosophic implies, which is to doubt and enquire. They should prefer the risk of being wrong and in love to being in doubt and without love.

• Delusions are not harmful in themselves, they only hurt when one is alone in believing in them, when one cannot create an environment in which they can be sustained.

Intimacy

• Whatever the pleasures of discovering mutual loves, nothing compares with the intimacy of landing on mutual hates ... Love nourished itself through perpetual criticism of outsiders. 

• Love seems indispensably connected to stories ... Powering most love stories are obstacles.

• 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 use by novelty, danger, or beauty - and it’s on the basis of shared experiences that intimacy is given an opportunity to grow. Friendships nourished solely by occasional dinners will never have the depth of those forged on a trek or at a university. Two people who are surprised by a lion in a jungle clearing will - unless one of them is eaten - be effectively bonded by what they have seen.

• But the essence of leitmotifs is that they refer back to incidents others cannot understand because they were absent from the founding scene. No wonder if such self-referential, egotistical behavior drives those standing not he sidelines to distraction.

• 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 joint meanings we had derived from them. However slight these leitmotifs were, they acted like cement. The language of intimacy they helped to create was a reminder that. (Without clearing out way through jungles, slaying dragons, or even sharing apartments) Cholesterols and I had created something of a world together.

“I” - Confirmation

• Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone there who can understand what we are saying, in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.

• “A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character,” wrote Stendhal, suggesting that character has its genesis in the reactions of others to our words and actions. Our selves are fluid and require the contours provided by our neighbors. To feel whole, we need people in the vicinity who know us as well, sometimes better, than we know ourselves.

• Without love, we lose the ability to possess a proper identity, within love, there is a constant confirmation of our selves.

• 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.

• It takes the intimacy of a lover to point out facts of character that others simply don’t bother with.

• Happiness with other people seems bounded by two kinds of excess: suffocation and loneliness.

• The problem with needing others to legitimate our existence is that we are very much at their mercy to have a correct identity ascribed to us. If, as Stendhal says, we lack a character without others, then the other with whom we share our bed must be a skilled intermediary or we will end up feeling deformed and misrepresented.

• Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are. Our selves could be compared to an amoeba, whose outer walls are elastic, and therefore adapt to the environment. It is not that the amoeba has no dimensions, simply that it has no self-defined shape.

• Most people do not openly force us into roles, they merely suggest that we adopt them through their reactions to us, and hence surreptitiously prevent us from moving beyond whatever mould they have assigned us.

• Children are always desired from a third-person perspective before they gain the ability to influence their own definitions. 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. Like Narcissus, we are doomed to disappointment in gazing at our reflection in the watery eyes of another. No eye can wholly contain our “I”. We will always be chopped off in some area or other, fatally or not.

• We long for a love in which we are never reduced or misunderstood. 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, we are after all always unlabelable. When alone, we are always simply “me”, and shift between sides of ourselves effortlessly and without the constraints imposed by the preconceptions of others. 

• But as we must be labelled, characterized, and defined by others, 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 fore, who understands us for more or less the things we need to be understood for.

Intermittences of the Heart

• However happy we may be with our partner, our love for them necessarily hinders us from pursuing alternatives. Why should this constrain us if we love them? Why should we feel this as a loss unless our love for them has already begun to wane? Because 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. There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.

• Longing cannot indefinitely direct itself at those we know, for their qualities are charted and therefore lack the mystery longing demands. A face seen for a few moments or hours only then to disappear for ever is the necessary catalyst for dreams that cannot be formulated, a desire that seems as indefinable as it is unquenchable.

• 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”.

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

• We tend to remain attached to a fixed view of emotions, as though a line existed between loving and not loving that could only be crossed twice, at the beginning and end of a relationship, rather than commuted across from minute to minute.

• We might define maturity as the ability to give everyone what they deserve when they deserve it, to separate the emotions that belong and should be restricted to oneself from those that should at once be expressed to their initiators rather than passed on to later and more innocent arrivals. We were often not mature.

• Tempests within the couple were also kept in check by the more stable assumptions that other around us held about our relationship.

• We also found comfort in planning the future. 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.

• Ex-lovers were reminders that situations I had at one point thought to be merman ent had proved not to be so. From within a relationship, there is infinite cruelty in the idea of one’s indifference towards past lovers.

The Fear of Happiness

• 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.

• 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.

• “All of man’s unhappiness comes from an inability to stay in his room alone,” said Pascal, advocating a need for man to build up his own resources over and against a debilitating dependence on the social sphere. 

• We were sometimes seized by an urge (manifested in our arguments about nothing) to kill our love affair before it had reached its natural end, a murder committed not out of hatred, but out of an excess of love - or rather, out of the fear that an excess of love may bring. Lover may kill their own love story only because they are unable to tolerate the uncertainty, the sheer risk, that their experiment in happiness has delivered.

• Hanging over every love story is the thought, as horrible as it is unknowable, of how it will end. It is as when, in full health and vigor, we try to imagine our own death, the only difference between the end of love and the end of life being that at least in the latter, we are granted the comforting thought that we will not feel anything after death. No such comfort for the lover, who knows that the end of the relationship will not necessarily be the end of love, and almost certainly not the end of life.

Contractions

• It is part of good manners not to question the criteria responsible for eliciting another’s love. The dream is that one has not been loved for criteria at all, but rather for who one is, an ontological status beyond properties or attributes. From within love, as within wealth, a taboo surrounds the means of acquiring and sustaining affection or property. Only poverty, either of love or money, leads one to question the system — perhaps the reason why lovers do not make great revolutionaries.

• “I will love you not just for your wit and talent and beauty, but simply because you are you, with no strings attached. I love you for who you are deep in your soul, not for the color of your eyes or the length of your legs or size of your chequebook.”

• “Do you love 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 for ever?”

• The freedom to think involved the courage to stumble upon our demons.

Beyond Good and Evil

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

• The essence of Kant’s theory is that morality is to be found exclusively in the motive from which an act is performed. 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.

• We make moral judgements on the basis of preference, not transcendental values. 

• Nietzsche: First of all, one calls individual actions good or bad quite irrespective of their motives but solely on account of their useful or harmful consequences. Soon, however, one forgets the origin of these designations and believes that the quality good and evil is inherent in the actions themselves, irrespective of their consequences...

The Jesus Complex

• Feelings of virtue breed spontaneously in the fertile soil of suffering.

Love Lessons

• Wisdom teaches us that our first impulses may not always be true, and that our appetites will lead us astray if we do not train reason to separate vain from genuine needs. It tells us to control our imagination or it will distort reality and turn mountains into molehills and frogs into princesses. It tells us to hold our fears in check, so that we can be afraid of what will harm us, but not waste our energies fleeing shadows on the wall. It tells us we should not fear death, and that all we have to fear is fear itself. 

• Preferable in almost every way, 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 (and perhaps explains why most people who have known the wilder shores of desire would refuse its painlessness the title of love). Immature love on the other hand (though it has little to do with age) is a story of chaotic lurching between idealization and disappointment, an unstable state where feelings of ecstasy and beatitude combine with impressions of drowning and fatal nausea, where the sense that one has finally found the answer comes together with the feeling that one has never been so lost. The logical climax of immature (because absolute) love comes in marriage, and the attempt to avoid death via routine (the Sunday papers, trouser presses, remote-controlled appliances). For immature love accepts no compromise, and once we refuse compromise, we are on the road to some kind of cataclysm. 

• 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 certain humility, the lesson that however hard it struggled to reach immobile certainties (numbering its conclusions and embedding them in neat series), analysis could never be anything but flawed — and therefore never stray far from the ironic.

Afterword

• Art is there to help us make us feel less lonely, to make us understand our pains and to help us precisely when love has failed us.