Alain De Botton

Charting the progress of an affair, from first kiss to argument and reconciliation, from intimacy and tenderness to anxiety, this is a wholly modern attempt to define the age-old dilemmas of the heart by detailing the highs and lows of contemporary romance.

Essays in Love

"Essays in Love will appeal to anyone who has ever been in a relationship or confused about love. The book 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. The work's genius lies in the way it minutely analyses emotions we've all felt before but have perhaps never understood so well: it includes a chapter on the anxieties of when and how to say 'I love you' and another on the challenges of disagreeing with someone else's taste in shoes. While gripping the reader with the talent of a great novelist, de Botton brings a philosopher's sensibility to his analyses of the emotions of love, resulting in a genre-breaking book that is at once touching and thought-provoking."--Publisher's website.

Aistė

Passing an unfortunate woman in the street one day, Chloe had asked me, 'Would you have loved me if I'd had an enormous birthmark on my face like she does?'. The yearning is that the answer be 'yes' place love above the mundane surfaces of the body, an answer that would or more particularly, its cruel unchangeable ones. 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 colour of your eyes or the length of your legs or size of your chequebook. The longing is that the lover admire us stripped of our external assets, appreciating the essence of our being without accomplishments, ready to repeat the unconditional love said to exist in some parts between parent and child. The real self is what one can freely choose to be, and if a birthmark arises on our forehead or age withers us or recession bankrupts us, then we must be excused for accidents that have damaged what is only our surface. And even if we are beautiful and rich, then we do not wish to be loved on account of these things, for they may fail us, and with them, love. I would prefer you to compliment me on my brain than on my face, but if you must, then I would rather you comment on my smile (motor- and muscle-controlled) than on my nose (static and tissue-based). The desire is that I be loved even if I lose everything: leaving nothing but 'me', this mysterious 'me' taken to be the self at its weakest, most vulnerable point. Do you love me 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?

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 (...)

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 vigour, 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.

Our arguments sometimes had an almost theatrical quality to them, a joy and exuberance would manifest itself as we set about destroying the bookshelf, smashing the crockery, or slamming doors: 'It's nice being able to feel I can hate you like this,' Chloe once said to me. 'It reassures me that you can take it, that I can tell you to fuck off and you'll throw something at me but stay put.' We needed to shout at one another partly to see whether or not we could tolerate each other's shouting. 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.

15. 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. But the happiness I had reached with Chloe had not come as a result of any personal achievement or effort. It was simply the outcome of having, by a miracle of divine intervention, found a person whose company was more valuable to me than that of anyone else in the world. Such happiness was dangerous precisely because it was so lacking in self-sufficient permanence. Had I after months of steady labour produced a scientific formula that had rocked the world of molecular biology, I would have had no qualms about accepting the happiness that ensued from such a discovery. The difficulty of accepting the happiness Chloe represented came from my absence in the causal process leading to it, and hence my lack of control over the happiness-inducing element in my life. It seemed to have been arranged by the gods, and was consequently accompa-nied by all the primitive fear of divine retribution.

Many of our arguments had an unfairness to them: I might get furious with Chloe not for the surface reason that she was emptying the dishwasher very noisily when I was trying to watch the news, but because I was feeling guilty about not having answered a difficult business call earlier in the day. Chloe might in turn deliberately make lots of noise in an effort to symbolize an anger she had not communicated to me that morning. 

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 an anger she had not communicated to me that from those that should at once be expressed to their initiators rather than passed on to later and more innocent arrivals. 

10. 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.

11. When Chloe had lunch with my parents, she was silent throughout the meal. I later asked her what was wrong, but she herself couldn't understand. She had tried to be lively and yet the suspicions of the two strangers facing her across the table had stopped her from expanding into her usual self.

My parents had not been overtly nasty, yet their stiffness had prevented Chloe from rising above monosyllabicity. It was a reminder that the labelling of others is usually a silent process. 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.

12. A few years before, Chloe had for a time gone out with an academic at London University. The analytical philosopher, who had written five books and contributed to many scholarly journals, had left her with a sense of total mental inadequacy. How had he done this? Chloe couldn't tell. Without ever expressly saying anything critical, he had succeeded in shaping the amoeba according to his preconceptions, namely, that Chloe was a beautiful young student who should leave matters of the mind to him. And so, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, Chloe had begun unconsciously acting on the verdict of her character, handed out like a covert end-of-term report by the wise philosopher who had written five books and contributed to many scholarly journals. She had ended up feeling exactly as stupid as she was believed to be.

13. Children are always described from a third-person perspective ('Isn't Chloe a cute/ugly/intelligent/stupid kid?') before they gain the ability to influence their own defini-tions. 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.

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

(...) We cannot come to a proper sense of ourselves if there aren't others around to show us what we're like. '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 neighbours. To feel whole, we need people in the vicinity who know us as well, sometimes better, than we know ourselves

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. Friendships nourished solely by occasional dinners will never have the depth of those forged on a trek or at a university.

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 Chloe for her body, I loved her body for the promise of who she was. 

Jessica Hsu

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.

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.

A subjective theory of beauty makes the observer wonderfully indispensable.

a really great book that will redefine your view about love. do you love someone because they are beautiful or they are beautiful because you love then?

maxlilies

Jaden Nelson

The best way I can describe it is a hyper-examination of love and what it means, the process of meeting someone and falling in love and possibly falling out of love. It was beautifully written, had great and artistic metaphors, and beautiful insights on the art of loving someone. Some notes from the audiobook: 
- The word love can not describe that which we feel sometimes, which is why we may have doubts as to what exactly it is we are feeling. 
- In the wrong hands, intimate words and moments given to someone with the promise of secrecy can be converted to a common currency, a rumor to be spread.
- I loved her body for the promise of who she was
- We may be under the illusion we call love, but if we can find someone that is under the same illusion, we create a happy symbiosis.
- Lovers depart from the regular language and nature of conversation in their discourse, instead basing it on the story that they are weaving together
- we call ourselves the same names although we are like trees and change with the seasons. We couldn't have a new name for a tree for every season and in the same way we do not change our names even though the person we are now may be unrecognizable from who we were just a few weeks ago. 
- Chloe and I acknowledge that love's light doesn't always burn with the same furiosity. It is ok to not like your lover so much today and like them a little more later. Most of our issues with our lovers are just merely us projecting what has happened at the office.
Great little book

as a seventeen year old girl who is just now experiencing romantic love for the first time ever, this book really helped me understand the way relationships work and my psyche and the psyche of the boy i like and it was just a really educative and informative book which somehow still managed to keep from being plotless and boring while teaching important lessons… i especially loved the concept of mixing the novelistic elements with those of essays and theory :)

jana 

"Because in resolving our need to love, we do not always succeed in resolving our need to long." 

"However brave, the stoic was in the end a coward at the point of perhaps the highest reality, at the moment of love." 

Jacqueline Kim

Timeless romance 

"Because in resolving our need to love, we do not always succeed in resolving our need to long." 

"However brave, the stoic was in the end a coward at the point of perhaps the highest reality, at the moment of 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.A man and a woman meet over casual conversation on a flight from Paris to London, and so begins a love story - from first kiss to first argument, elation to heartbreak, and everything in between. Each stage of the relationship is illuminated with startling clarity, as de Botton explores emotions often felt but rarely understood.With the verve of a novelist and the insight of a philosopher, Alain de Botton uncovers the mysteries of the human heart. Essays In Love is an iconic book - one that should be read by anyone who has ever fallen in love.PRAISE FOR ALAIN DE BOTTON'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, New Republic 'Witty, funny, sophisticated, neatly tied up, and full of wise and illuminating insights.' P. J. Kavanagh, Spectator 'De Botton is a national treasure.' Susan Hill 'I doubt if de Botton has written a dull sentence in his life.' Jan Morris, New Statesman 'Single-handedly, de Botton has taken philosophy back to its simplest and most important purpose: helping us to live our lives.' Independent

Georgia Carr

This was such an interesting book. Alain de Botton is an absolute dream of an author, I am certain. The mix between philosophical essay and fictional prose was such a great way to tell the tale of Chloe and the narrator's relationship. As always, de Botton makes me think about relationships and about love in a whole new light.

ame 

Mahtab Sabet

Xiang

Nika Khoshdel

Richard Palmer

anjali

Alain de Botton

The bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and How Proust Can Change Your Life revisits his utterly charming debut book, Essays in Love. The narrator is smitten by Chloe on a Paris-to-London flight, and by the time they’ve reached the luggage carousel he knows he is in love. He loves her chestnut hair, watery green eyes, the gap that makes her teeth Kantian and not Platonic, and her views on Heidegger’s Being and Time — but he hates her taste in shoes. What makes this book extraordinary is the depth with which the emotions involved in the relationship are analysed. Love comes under the philosophical microscope. Plotting the course of their affair from the initial delirium of infatuation to the depths of suicidal despair, through a fit of anhedonia — defined in medical texts as a disease resulting from the terror brought on by the threat of utter happiness — and finally through the terrorist tactics employed when the beloved begins, inexplicably, to drift away, Essays in Love is filled with profound and witty observations on the pain and exhilaration of love. An entire chapter is devoted to the nuances and subtexts of an initial date, while another chapter mulls over the question of how and when to say “I love you.” With allusions to Aristotle, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Groucho Marx, de Botton has plotted an imaginative and microscopically detailed romance.

Emma Bose

Ned Summers 

Farah Aisha Shabrina

chess

Katarina

Stan D

Ioana Kardos

Félix

'De Botton is a national treasure.' - Susan Hill, author of The Woman in Black With an introduction by Sheila Heti 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 a woman meet over casual conversation on a flight from Paris to London, and so begins a love story - from first kiss to first argument, elation to heartbreak, and everything in between. Each stage of the relationship is illuminated with startling clarity, as de Botton explores emotions often felt but rarely understood. With the verve of a novelist and the insight of a philosopher, Alain de Botton uncovers the mysteries of the human heart. Essays In Love is an iconic book - one that should be read by anyone who has ever fallen in love.

Essays in Love

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