alain de botton essays in love türkçe

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Alain de Botton: the three ingredients for love

The philosopher and author writes about the meaning of love and why the lonely are the real experts

If ever there was a time to celebrate love it's in the darker periods when we most need our faith restored. It's why Laura Lambert, the founder of ethical jewellery brand Fenton, decided to call on her favourite writers to compile an anthology of expressions of love - what it means and how it manifests itself.

Notes on Love was curated during the first lockdown, and was self-published in October, featuring contributions from high-profile names such as Candice Brathwaite, Elizabeth Day and Alain de Botton. Here, we share an abridged version of de Botton's essay on the three components that characterise love - and why the lonely are the best placed to be experts on the subject.

Alain de Botton: What is love?

One way to get a sense of why love should matter so much, why it might be considered close to the meaning of life, is to look at the challenges of loneliness. Too often, we leave the topic of loneliness unmentioned: those without anyone to hold feel shame; those with someone (a background degree of) guilt. But the pains of loneliness are an unembarrassing and universal possibility. We shouldn’t – on top of it all – feel lonely about being lonely. Unwittingly, loneliness gives us the most eloquent insights into why love should matter so much. There are few greater experts on the importance of love than those who are bereft of anyone to love. It is hard to know quite what all the fuss around love might be about until and unless one has, somewhere along the way, spent some bitter unwanted passages in one’s own company.

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When we are alone, people may well strive to show us kindness; there may be invitations and touching gestures, but it will be hard to escape from a background sense of the conditionality of the interest and care on offer. We are liable to detect the limits of the availability of even the best disposed companions and sense the restrictions of the demands we can make upon them. It is often too late – or too early – to call. A radical editing of our true selves is the price we must pay for conviviality.

All these quietly soul- destroying aspects of single life, love promises to correct. In the company of a lover, there need be almost no limits to the depths of concern, care, attention and license we are granted. We will be accepted more or less as we are; we won’t be under pressure to keep proving our status. It will be possible to reveal our extreme, absurd vulnerabilities and compulsions and survive. It will be OK to have tantrums, to sing badly and to cry. We will be tolerated if we are less than charming or simply vile for a time. We will be able to wake them up at odd hours to share sorrows or excitements. Our smallest scratches will be of interest.

In the presence of the lover, evaluation will no longer be so swift and cynical. They will lavish time. As we tentatively allude to something, they will get eager and excited. They will say ‘go on’ when we stumble and hesitate. They will accept that it takes a lot of attention to slowly unravel the narrative of how we came to be the people we are. They won’t just say ‘poor you’ and turn away. And instead of regarding us as slightly freakish in the face of our confessions, they will kindly say ‘me too.’ The fragile parts of ourselves will be in safe hands with them. We will feel immense gratitude to this person who does something that we had maybe come to suspect would be impossible: know us really well and still like us. Surrounded on all sides by lesser or greater varieties of coldness, we will at last know that, in the arms of one extraordinary, patient and kindly being worthy of infinite gratitude, we truly matter.

2. Admiration

In Plato’s dialogue, The Symposium, the playwright Aristophanes suggests that the origins of love lie in a desire to complete ourselves by finding a long lost ‘other half’. At the beginning of time, he ventures in playful conjecture, all human beings were hermaphrodites with double backs and flanks, four hands and four legs and two faces turned in opposite directions on the same head. These hermaphrodites were so powerful and their pride so overweening that Zeus was forced to cut them in two, into a male and female half – and from that day, each one of us has nostalgically yearned to rejoin the part from which he or she was severed. We don’t need to buy into the literal story to recognise a symbolic truth: we fall in love with people who promise that they will in some way help to make us whole. At the centre of our ecstatic feelings in the early days of love, there is a gratitude at having found someone who seems so perfectly to complement our qualities and dispositions. We do not all fall in love with the same people because we are not all missing the same things.

Our personal inadequacies explain the direction of our tastes

The aspects we find desirable in our partners speak of what we admire but do not have secure possession of in ourselves. We may be powerfully drawn to the competent person because we know how our own lives are held up by a lack of confidence and tendencies to get into a panic around bureaucratic complications. Or our love may zero in on the comedic sides of a partner because we’re only too aware of our tendencies to sterile despair and cynicism. Our personal inadequacies explain the direction of our tastes. We hope to change a little in their presence, becoming – through their help – better versions of ourselves.

We shouldn’t expect to get there all by ourselves. We can, in certain areas, be the pupils and they the teachers. We usually think of education as something harsh imposed upon us against our will. Love promises to educate us in a very different way. Through our lovers, our development can start in a far more welcoming and energising way: with deep excitement and desire. Love gives us the energy to construct and hold on to the very best story about someone. We are returned to a primal gratitude. We thrill around apparently minor details: that they have called us, that they are wearing that particular pullover, that they lean their head on their hand in a certain way, that they have a tiny scar over their left index finger or a particular habit of slightly mispronouncing a word... It isn’t usual to take this kind of care over a fellow creature, to notice so many tiny touching, accomplished and poignant things in another. This is what parents, artists or a God might do. We can’t necessarily continue in this vein forever, the rapture is not necessarily always entirely sane, but it is one of our noblest and most redemptive pastimes – and a kind of art all of its own – to give ourselves over to appreciating properly for a time the real complexity, beauty and virtue of another human being.

One of the more surprising and at one level perplexing aspects of love is that we don’t merely wish to admire our partners; we are also powerfully drawn to want to possess them physically. The birth of love is normally signalled by what is in reality a hugely weird act; two organs otherwise used for eating and speaking are rubbed and pressed against one another with increasing force, accompanied by the secretion of saliva. We can only start to understand the role of sexuality in love if we can accept that it is not – from a purely physical point of view – necessarily a uniquely pleasant experience in and of itself, it is not always a remarkably more enjoyable tactile feeling than having a scalp massage or eating an oyster.

Through sexual love, we are accepted for who we really are

Yet nevertheless, sex with our lover can be one of the nicest things we ever do. The reason is that sex delivers a major psychological thrill. The pleasure we experience has its origin in an idea: that of being allowed to do a very private thing to and with another person. Another person’s body is a highly protected and private zone. We’re implicitly saying to another person through our unclothing that they have been placed in a tiny, intensely policed category of people: that we have granted them an extraordinary privilege. Sexual excitement is psychological. It’s not so much what our bodies happen to be doing that turns us on. It’s what’s happening in our brains: acceptance is at the centre of the kinds of experiences we collectively refer to as ‘getting turned on.’ It feels physical – the blood pumps faster, the metabolism shifts gear, the skin gets hot – but behind all this lies a very different kind of change: a sense of an end to our isolation.

In general, civilisation requires us to present stringently edited versions of ourselves to others. It asks us to be cleaner, purer, more polite versions of who we might otherwise be. The demand comes at quite a high internal cost. Important sides of our character are pushed into the shadows. The person who loves us sexually does something properly redemptive: they stop making a distinction between the different sides of who we are. They can see that we are the same person all the time; that our gentleness or dignity in some situations isn’t fake because of how we are in bed and vice versa. Through sexual love, we have the chance to solve one of the deepest, loneliest problems of human nature: how to be accepted for who we really are.

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Alain de Botton

Essays in love.

'De Botton is a national treasure.' - Susan Hill, author of The Woman in Black A unique love story and a classic work of philosophy, rooted in the mysterious workings of the human heart and mind. 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 who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved. A man and woman on a flight from Paris to London, and so begins their love story. From first kiss to first argument, infatuation to heartbreak, de Botton illuminates each stage of their relationship with a clarity both startling and tender. With the verve of a novelist and the insight of a philosopher, Essays in Love unveils the mysteries of the human heart. It is essential reading for anyone seeking instruction in the art of love.

The book's success has much to do with its beautifully modelled sentences, its wry humour and its unwavering deadpan respect for its reader's intelligence . . . full of keen observation and flashes of genuine lyricism, acuity and depth. Francine Prose, author of The Vixen and Lovers at the Chameleon Club

Witty, funny, sophisticated, neatly tied up, and full of wise and illuminating insights The Spectator

De Botton is a national treasure. Susan Hill, author of The Woman in Black

Books by Alain de Botton

How To Think More About Sex

How Proust Can Change Your Life

The Romantic Movement

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Essays in love

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Essays in Love

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Publisher's summary

Essays in Love is a stunningly original love story. Taking in Aristotle, Wittgenstein, history, religion and Groucho Marx, Alain de Botton charts the progress of a love affair from the first kiss to argument and reconciliation, from intimacy and tenderness to the onset of anxiety and heartbreak.

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Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson. Before they were household names, these budding legends called Sue’s Nashville apartment—lovingly dubbed the “Boar’s Nest”—home. Sue’s place was an intimate staging ground where a new breed of singer-songwriters—wounded souls, wayward upstarts—would spur each other on to tap into something bigger, realer.

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When the call came it seemed like the answer to my prayers. My career as a voice actor had been over for months and me and my little girl Scarlet were living back at my mum’s place. I felt like a failure professionally—and with Scarlet having problems at school, as a parent as well. So, when I was asked to narrate a new book by disappeared novelist Philippa Roberts I jumped at the chance, even if it meant leaving Scarlet with my ex, Hugo, for a few weeks. Hugo, with his perfect new home and his perfect new girlfriend Saskia. But this isn’t a dream come true. It’s a nightmare.

Love but it's a production issue!

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By: Amanda Wilkin

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Climate activist Shirley Watts has dedicated her entire life to protecting the planet for future generations. But constantly fighting for Mother Earth has taken its toll over time, leaving her in a precarious relationship with her adult daughter, Lela. When Shirley’s latest climate stunt lands her in serious legal jeopardy, Lela reluctantly lets Shirley stay with her and her boyfriend while awaiting her upcoming trial.

Great short story

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He Who Fights with Monsters 2

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But Jason Asano is settling into his new life. Now, a contest draws young elites to the city of Greenstone to compete for a grand prize. Jason must gather a band of companions if he is to stand a chance against the best the world has to offer. While the young adventurers are caught up in competition, the city leaders deal with revelations of betrayal as a vast and terrible enemy is revealed. Although Jason seems uninvolved, he has unknowingly crossed the enemy’s path before.

Contrary to common reviews

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Prepare to be captivated by acclaimed crime writer Candice Fox’s gripping audio thriller, Hunting Game . Featuring an all-star cast including Krysten Ritter, Anthony Mackie, and Tony Goldwyn, you’re about to enter a high-stakes game of cat and mouse. NYPD Detective Esme 'Es' Compran (Krysten Ritter) finds herself torn between her duty and her own desperate circumstances when a child is kidnapped. The victim's father, Jack Dengate (Tony Goldwyn), is a controversial big pharma CEO whose company's price hikes on life-saving drugs have dire consequences for Es' ailing daughter.

Man what a GREAT story….BUT……

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Ghost Stories: Stephen Fry's Definitive Collection

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As the days grow shorter and the temperature drops, Halloween approaches. Come, brave listener, pull up a chair, and spend some time with master storyteller Stephen Fry as he tells us some of his favourite ghost stories of all time, in truly terrifying spatial audio. From the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow to the tortured spirits of M.R. James, from Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying tale of a doppelganger to Charlotte Riddell’s Open Door that should definitely stay shut, join Stephen as he tells you some truly terrifying tales.

Wonderful narration. Mediocre stories.

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By: Stephen Fry , and others

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It’s Christmas Day at Wilder House, and three magical winter weddings are set to begin. But as the tables are arranged, and the food is prepared, a perfect storm hits, cutting every guest from the rest of the world. Most little girls dream of the perfect wedding. But this bride stumbles alone into the snow, her silk train dragging through dirt, her hands bloody from the murder she just committed. Now there is at least one killer roaming the unforgiving landscape surrounding Wilder House. Who else will die on Christmas Day?

a little bit of wicked fun

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My darling little boy Albie adores playing at our new neighbours’ house. And after the terrible year we’ve had, I feel so lucky that we can start over in this perfect place, with new friends who treat Albie like the son they never had. He can’t stop talking about the tree house they’re building him, and the cookies they bake together. But as time passes, something starts to feel wrong. Why don’t they ever open the front door more than a crack? They told me they had no children so who does the small pink tricycle I saw in their hall belong to?

Miss Lucy-price Lewis

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Many elegant words used for a simple topic.

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The second part of the book was really good perceived failure.

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What listeners say about Essays in Love

• 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.4 out of 5.0
• 5 Stars 180
• 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.5 out of 5.0
• 5 Stars 170
• 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.3 out of 5.0
• 5 Stars 152

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Audible.com reviews, amazon reviews.

• Overall 5 out of 5 stars
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars
• Story 5 out of 5 stars

• Maria L. Lantin

Every relationship you've ever analyzed

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I wouldn't recommend this book to all my friends but I know that some of them would enjoy it as much as I did. It's for romantics that think too much sometimes. It's for realists that love to fall in love nevertheless.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Essays in Love?

There are many memorable moments...but perhaps what stands out now after a couple weeks is the way intimacy in the couple is revealed and lost. The fight scenes are funny in a "oh yeah, I've been there" kinda way.

Have you listened to any of James Wilby’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

It was my first James Wilby book and I enjoyed his reading very much.

Who was the most memorable character of Essays in Love and why?

I guess it was the main male character because he's so introspective to the point of absurdity but also insightful.

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5 people found this helpful

• Performance 5 out of 5 stars

Brilliantly plucks and weaves love's nuances

What did you love best about Essays in Love?

The story is engaging. There are really good points made, great references, and de Botton analyzes the nuances of falling in and out of love with the perspective and depth of someone who's lived a thousand lives. The narrator's voice is very attractive.

What does James Wilby bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Great voice. Very warm and theatrical (not in an exaggerated way) at the same time.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes. It was so hard to even go to sleep. I had my Audible on sleep timer several times but didn't want to miss anything to grogginess. So I would relisten the same parts the next day. This book is so wise.

Any additional comments?

Definitely listen to this.

3 people found this helpful

• Andre Mendes

One day binge

Simply could not put this book down. There are so few stories, love stories fewer still, that capture real life so well. The book itself is a beautiful mix of philosophical topics with narrative that makes for such an enlightening and enjoyable listening experience. Very well performed, I'd highly recommend it to anyone looking for a realistic love story.

2 people found this helpful

• Overall 1 out of 5 stars
• Performance 1 out of 5 stars
• Story 1 out of 5 stars

• Blanche Matula

what a creep

the author is an egotistical jerk who spends the entire book bemoaning how he has fallen madly and passionately in love with a woman who has the nerve to exist as herself rather than his idealized intellectual equal.

1 person found this helpful

• Story 4 out of 5 stars

I love this story.

I like the life nugget sprinkled through out this love story. It’s so real. Need to listen to it again.

• Overall 4 out of 5 stars

Not really a novel

it was more of a reflection on human behaviour written partly in a story format. It was still a very moving book

If there was ever to be a road map on the topic of love and relationships, this would be it. This, second only to The Course of Love, another classic.

• Overall 2 out of 5 stars
• Story 2 out of 5 stars

• carla freeman

I have enjoyed many of de Botton's books but this one is tedious, disappointing. Not worth it.

• Reem Alsmaiel

Enjoyable read

I enjoyed this book thoroughly. I liked how it captured the man’s point of view throughout the relationship journey. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding love in all its stages.

• Ana Pliopas

Embracing ambiguity of love

Via an interesting and quite ordinary love story de Botton invites us to reflect on one of the most important aspect of life: romantic love.

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Essays in Love Paperback – International Edition, April 8, 2008

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 224 pages
• Language English
• Publisher McClelland & Stewart
• Publication date April 8, 2008
• Dimensions 5.51 x 0.55 x 8.5 inches
• ISBN-10 0771026064
• ISBN-13 978-0771026065
• See all details

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About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ McClelland & Stewart; First Edition (April 8, 2008)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0771026064
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0771026065
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.51 x 0.55 x 8.5 inches

About the author

Alain de botton.

Alain de Botton is the author of Essays in Love (1993), The Romantic Movement (1994), Kiss and Tell (1995), How Proust can Change your Life (1997), The Consolations of Philosophy (2000) The Art of Travel (2002), Status Anxiety (2004) and most recently, The Architecture of Happiness (2006).

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The Course of Love review – philosophy overload

Alain de Botton ’s first novel in 23 years – his quirky, autobiographical debut, Essays in Love , was written when he was just 23 – again takes love as its theme. Like its predecessor, it explores the myths and minutiae of courtship and relationships. It charts a couple’s marriage from the first flowering of attraction and the glow of the proposal to the everyday business of life as husband and wife. It maps the small shifts in their sex life and explores the way in which habits and behaviour which once endeared them to one another become sources of irritation and frustration.

Rabih and Kirsten’s story is an intentionally ordinary one. They meet, they fall in love, they marry, they encounter small obstacles in their personal and professional lives, they have children. One of them is unfaithful. The marriage strains but does not crack.

While the book is being promoted as a novel rather than a work of philosophy, De Botton’s interests as an essayist, in work, sex, happiness, in how we live and what we live for, are still very much to the fore. The narrative is intercut with a series of italicised interjections, unpicking the couple’s motivations and impulses, dissecting their decisions. For example: “Nature imbeds in us insistent dreams of success”; and “The accusations we direct at our lovers make no particular sense. We would utter such unfair things to no one else on earth.”

The contrast between these passages and the world of the characters makes for some appealing juxtapositions. Sometimes the observations are acute and telling – De Botton is good on the politics of laundry, the compromise of domesticity – but there’s an insistence on universality that borders on the smug.

He lays out his thesis, that society builds in us the expectation that our stories will play out in certain ways, that it’s healthy and necessary to document disappointment and disillusionment, that so much of the tension in a marriage is self-generated, a product of the gulf between the life people feel they should be living and the life they are living.

The Course of Love is at its strongest when De Botton steps back and allows the couple to breathe. There’s a lot of truth and humour in his account of the earliest days of their marriage as he highlights the intricate web of pressures, both self-imposed and external, that lead them to make certain choices. Rabih loves Kirsten, but he’s also tired of a life alone. They marry, in part, because they feel it is time to marry, that they are in the marrying stage of their lives, and in the beginning, for both of them, marriage is a kind of performance: they are both playing roles, the choices they make shaped as much by their own emotions as by their family histories, their upbringings, the city in which they live, and the paths their peers are going down.

While Rabih and Kirsten’s story is always engaging and there’s an ease and believability to them as a couple, the outside voice comes to feel grating and intrusive after a while, in its pronouncements and the narrowness of its outlook, in its continual desire to pin down the mess and complexity of the human experience, to bind it and box it.

The Course of Love is published by Hamish Hamilton (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £11.99

• Alain de Botton
• The Observer

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Book Review: Essays in Love // Alain de Botton

As soon as the final word on the final page of Essays in Love ended, I felt a strong impulse to write about how this book made me feel, so here goes.

This book is a rarity. Feeling so content and warm when reading a book happens only on occasion, and this book has been successful in doing so. Written by Alain de Botton as his first novel in such a beautifully poetic manner, Essays in Love documents a passionate and tender relationship between a man and a woman, which happened coincidentally and ends inevitably. Told from the man’s perspective, his philosophical stance on love for his other half Chloe paints an intricate picture of how intense love can be. He marks each part of the relationship in chronological order, each chapter as a mini philosophical essay, going into great depth about simple details of their relationship such as seducing her, saying ‘I love you’, silently arguing through ‘romantic terrorism’ and wanting to commit suicide when it’s over. This all may sound slightly obsessive – which it essentially is – but through de Botton’s flowing and softly-spoken writing style, it’s as if the novel is being whispered to you (in the least creepy way possible).

The novel begins with their meeting on a flight, which sounds clichéd but it captures the surprise and coincidence love can bring. The characterisation of the speaker depicts him as a clearly highly intelligent and profound man, whose analytical thinking allows us directly into his mind and how well he can breakdown and evaluate love. As the chapters progress, so too does the relationship, which starts off awkward but grows and grows into a strong adoration for one another. His observations of the little mannerisms and physical attributes of Chloe which he found to be beautiful were extremely poignant, as are the moral questions he asks about love such as “If she really is so wonderful, how could she love someone like me?” and “Is it not my right to be loved and her duty to love me?”

The relationship between the speaker and Chloe is one of normality; it’s nothing spectacular. What really makes it so special, however, is the way the story is told in such detail and depth. Each sentence is sculpted so flawlessly; the last couple of chapters are particularly stunning, as the book doesn’t simply describe being in love, but also being out of love, and these chapters deal with getting over a break-up in such a raw and realistic manner. Describing Chloe’s affair with the speaker’s work partner Will was heart-wrenching to read, particularly due to how deep his affections for her were, but the beauty of it is how realistic it is – it’s not all magic and fairy tales, it’s just an ordinary relationship (if such a thing exists).

The book often references philosophers and analogies from philosophy which may be slightly confusing if you don’t have prior philosophical knowledge; however this does not affect the book as a whole. It can, at times, be quite challenging to grasp due to the scope of language used, but this generally makes the book so much more sophisticated.

Whether you are falling in, have fallen or have fallen out of love, Essays in Love will explain all the complexities, unanswered questions, underlying feelings and strange sensations love seems to entail. This book is a treasure, one which is highly underrated, and I am left blown away by its beauty. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to recommend this novel to everyone and anyone who’s willing to listen.

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• 👍 Worth reading 6
• 💞 Loved Up 3
• 💡 Learnt A Lot 2

Essays in Love

• Impressions 8
• Readers 837

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Impressions

It is the kind of book which content you know already, but emphasised with philosophical thoughts behind why we love the way we do; why love often is associated with pain. Most of all, it's a book which sentences are strung together in the most wonderful way that sing to you. Witty, eloquent, poignant, all in the right way. Alain de Botton is a master in his own right.

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Interesting thoughts and a different view of love

Quotes from Essays in Love

Alain de Botton ·  211 pages

Rating: (14.7K votes)

“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.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“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 who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“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 find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“.. 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. The majority just never gets the chance.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“Must being in love always mean being in pain?” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“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 on-board sandwiches with a neighbour or blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“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 coyly lead us between the two extremes.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“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? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in 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 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.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“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.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images 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.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the opposite: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as "mushy.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“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.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“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.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and out 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 the the beloved now that they believe in us?” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“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.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“What is so frightening is the extent to which we may idealize others when we have such trouble tolerating ourselves” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“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. It is my absurdist side that an absurdist person will draw out of me, and my seriousness that a serious person will evoke. If someone thinks I am shy, I will probably end up shy, if someone thinks me funny, I am likely to keep cracking jokes.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“We had often read the same books at night in the same bed, and later realized that they had touched us in different places: that they had been different books for each of us. Might the same divergence not occur over a single love-line? I felt like a dandelion releasing hundreds of spores into the air - and not knowing if any of them would get through.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“Yet 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.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes accounts for this feeling of familiarity by claiming that the loved one was our long-lost 'other half to whose body our own had originally been joined. In the beginning, all human beings were hermaphrodites with double backs and flanks, four hands and four legs and two faces turned in opposite directions on the same head. These hermaphrodites were so powerful and their pride so overweening that Zeus was forced to cut them in two, into a male and female half – and from that day, every man and woman has yearned nostalgically but confusedly to rejoin the part from which he or she was severed.” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

“By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,’ wrote George Orwell,” ― Alain de Botton, quote from Essays in Love

About the author

Alain de Botton Born place: in Zurich, Switzerland See more on GoodReads

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Essays in Love: Reviews

Gabriele Annan in The Spectator, 30 October 1993

On a BA flight from Paris to London the narrator picks up Chloe who happens to be sitting in the next seat. He takes her out to dinner, they go bed together, fall in love and begin a serious affair. After a while Chloe loses interest. On the BA flight back from a weekend in Paris, she confesses that she has slept with the narrator’s American friend Will. The narrator is devastated. Chloe follows Will to California. The narrator botches a suicide attempt (vitamin C instead of sleeping pills) and falls into a long depression from which he emerges three pages from the end while sitting next to Rachel at a dinner party. The following week and in the last paragraph, Rachel accepts his invitation to dine.

That’s the whole plot and it holds one’s attention. The characters live: the narrator, introvert, analytical, fastidious, alarmingly well-read and indefinably old-fashioned; and Chloe, modern, extrovert, relaxed, relentlessly unsentimental. He loves the films of Eric Rohmer, she hates them. The author is very good at getting across what it is that attracts the hero (his alter ego?) to Chloe: her generosity, her self-deprecation, her throw-away charm, expressed through the way she talks. The dialogue is convincing and engaging.

But the plot is not the whole story by any means. The chapters have headings like ‘Romantic Fatalism’, ‘Romantic Terrorism’, ‘Intermittences of the Heart’. The book is a psycho-philosophical treatise on love, the paragraphs numbered and ironically illustrated with diagrams; the first one is a mathematical calculation of the chances of Chloe and the narrator being seated side by side on the plane, the last a graph of her orgasmic contractions. There are quotations from and references to Plato, Kant, John Stuart Mill, Groucho Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Stendhal, Goethe, Freud, Barthes, and finally Dr Peggy Nearly, a Californian psychoanalyst whose do-it-yourself manual, The Bleeding Heart, was published in 1987. Botton invents a consultation between Dr Nearly and Madame Bovary in which the good doctor urges Flaubert’s heroine to choose more suitable lovers and to make an effort to look after yourself, to go over your childhood, then perhaps you’ll learn that you don’t deserve all this pain. It’s only because you grew up in a dysfunctional family.

Emma isn’t interested: she just wants Rudolph back; and for the third week running she hasn’t got the money for Dr Nearly’s fee.

The narrator’s self-analysis throughout the book is a lot more subtle than Dr Nearly’s offerings, and he develops it in to magisterial generalisations. The result is something like La Rochefoucauld’s maxims crossed with Adolphe, with jokes and against a background of luggage reclaim areas and breakfast cereal packets. The narrator writes his suicide note at the kitchen table ‘with only the shivering of the fridge for company’. The desolation of it! Ingeniously pinpointed mundane details stop the novel from getting too abstract. It is witty, funny, sophisticated, neatly tied up, and full of wise and illuminating insights. With so many illustrious names dropped, it is difficult to tell whether the insights are original or not: but they are certainly organised into a very entertaining read. For people who mind about that kind of thing, Essays in Love is also quite unusually optimistic.

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