Essays In Love

by Alain De Botton

  8. Like a telephone engineer sitting on the edge of a manhole with a jumble of cables in his lap, I slowly learnt to identify some key threads in Chloe’s personality. I began to recognize her hatred of stinginess every time we were in a group in a restaurant. I began sensing her desire not to be trapped, the desert-escapist side of her nature. I admired her constant visual creativity, which showed itself not just in her work, but in the way she would lay the table or arrange a bowl of flowers. I began detecting her awkwardness with other women and her greater ease with men. I recognized her fierce loyalty to those she considered her friends, an instinctive sense of clan and community. With such characteristics, Chloe slowly assumed a complex coherence in my mind, someone with consistency and a degree of predictability, someone whose tastes in a film or a person I could now begin to guess without asking.

  9. 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. But do not others by definition always distort us – whether for better or worse?

  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 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.

  14. When I told Chloe my idea that people’s personalities in relationships were a bit like amoebas, she laughed and told me she’d loved drawing amoebas at school.

  ‘Here, give me the newspaper,’ she said, reaching in her bag for a pencil. ‘I’ll draw you the difference between what shape my amoeba-self has at the office and what shape it has with you.’

  Then she drew the following:

  ‘What are all the wiggly bits?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, that’s because I feel wiggly around you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, you know, you give me space. I feel more complicated than in the office. You’re interested in me and you understand me better, so that’s why I made it wiggly, so that it’s sort of natural.’

  ‘OK, I see, so what’s this straight side?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Up in the north-west of the amoeba.’

  ‘You know I never did much geography. But yeah, I think I see it. Well, you don’t understand everything about me, do you? So I thought I’d better make it more realistic. The straight line is all the sides of me you don’t understand or don’t have time for and stuff.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Christ, don’t make that long face, you wouldn’t want to know what could happen if that line went squiggly! And don’t worry, if it was that serious, I wouldn’t be squidged here with you being such a happy amoeba.’

  15. What did Chloe mean by her amoebic straight line? Just that I could not wholly understand her, an unsurprising but still sobering reminder of the limits of empathy. What was frustrating my efforts? Perhaps that I was constrained to fathoming her through my existing conceptions of human nature. My knowledge of her was necessarily filtered through my own past. Like a European who orients himself in a Rocky Mountain landscape by saying, ‘This looks just like Switzerland,’ I might only have grasped the source of one of Chloe’s depressed moods by thinking, ‘It’s because she’s feeling x . . . like my sister when . . .’ To comprehend her, I had to rely on an understanding of human nature that had been shaped by my biology, class, and psychological biography.

  16. To illustrate how we can only ever pick up on certain elements in our beloveds’ characters, we might compare the way we look at them to a barbecue skewer. For instance, I was able to skewer (or appreciate or relate) to Chloe’s:

  — irony — colour of eyes — gap between two front teeth — intellect — talent for baking bread — relationship with her mother — social anxiety — love of Beethoven — hatred of laziness — taste for camomile tea — objection to snobbery — love of woollen clothes — claustrophobia — desire for honesty →

  Yet this was far from comprising everything about her. Had I been a different barbecue skewer, I might have had more time for her:

  — interest in healthy eating — ankles — love of outdoor markets — mathematical talent — relationship with her brother — love of nightclubs — thoughts on God— enthusiasm for rice — Degas — skating — long country walks — objection to music in the car — taste for Victorian architecture →

  17. Though I felt myself attentive to the complexities of Chloe’s nature, I must have been guilty of great abbreviations, of passing lightly over areas I simply did not have the empathy or maturity to understand. I was responsible for the greatest but most unavoidable abbreviation of all, that of only being able to participate in Chloe’s life as an outsider, someone whose inner world I could imagine, but never directly experience. However close we might be, Chloe was in the end another human being, with all the mystery and distance this implied, the inevitable distance embodied in the thought that we must die alone.

  18. 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 un-labelable. 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 hearing Chloe one day talk of ‘this guy I was seeing a while back’, I was saddened to imagine myself in a few years’ time (another man facing her across the tu
na salad) being described merely as ‘this architect guy I was once seeing . . .’ Her casual reference to a past lover provided the necessary objectification for me to realize that, however special I was to her, I still existed within certain definitions (‘a guy’, ‘my boyfriend’) – and that in Chloe’s eyes, I was necessarily a simplified version of myself.

  19. 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 for, who understands us for more or less the things we need to be understood for. That Chloeba and I were together implied that, for the moment at least, we had been given enough room to expand in the ways our complexities demanded.

  15

  Intermittences of the Heart

  1. The stories we tell are always too simple. I was a man in love with a woman, but how much of the mobility and inconstancy of my emotions could such a sentence hope to carry? Was there room in it for all the infidelity, boredom, irritation, and indifference that was often knitted together with this love? Could any simple account accurately reflect the degree of ambivalence to which all relationships seem fated? Chloe and I lived a love story stretching over an expanse of time during which our feelings gyrated so much that to talk of being simply in love was, though reassuring, a desperately crude foreshortening of events.

  2. One weekend, we went to Bath. At work the day after, when someone asked what I’d been up to, I replied, ‘We had a great couple of days in Bath. ’ Even in my own mind, the story of what had occurred grew elementary and facile. I remembered a beautiful sandy-coloured town and a blue sky. I remembered being happy, I remembered Chloe saying that I was a better, different sort of person on holiday. And yet if I now force myself to think back, to tell more than a one-line story, then I start to recall a more complicated set of events pullulating beneath the surface of the trip, events which it might take four hundred pages to describe properly. To make a stab, I remember that shortly after our arrival, Chloe and I had an argument about what room we’d take in the hotel. I suggested we make a fuss about the one we were initially offered because I didn’t like the curtains and there was a strange dripping sound in the bathroom. Chloe called me ‘no longer endearingly insane’. On a walk around the abbey, I became preoccupied with my professional life and wished that I’d chosen a different career that paid more. When Chloe asked me what was wrong, I told her I was jealous of Will for all the attention he was getting among our peers. In the evening, Chloe declined to have sex, saying it was her period, though I suspected this had ended a bit earlier. The next day, in a restaurant called John Wood the Elder, I was drawn to a beautiful girl with glasses sitting near us and irrationally engineered an argument with Chloe about wildlife reserves to punish her for her inadvertent role in preventing me from kissing the stranger (who didn’t seem sad about what she was missing out on), while on the way to the station, Chloe mysteriously flirted with a cross-eyed taxi driver, telling him that she loved showing off her belly-button in summer, which resulted in a sulk on my part that didn’t end till we reached Paddington Station three hours later.

  3. Perhaps we can forgive ourselves for telling simple stories which sum up weekends with the word pleasant, stories which thereby introduce order into events which are in fact made up of tissues of troubling and ambivalent feelings. Yet perhaps we also owe it to ourselves occasionally to face the flux beneath the abbreviations. I loved Chloe – and yet how much more variegated the reality was.

  4. When her friend Alice invited us to dinner one Friday night, Chloe accepted and predicted that I would fall in love with her. There were eight of us around Alice’s dining table, everyone jogging elbows as they tried to bring the food to their mouths over a table built for four. Alice lived alone in the top floor of a house in Balham, worked as a secretary at the Arts Council, and I had to admit, I did fall a little in love with her.

  5. 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.

  6. Watching Alice talk, light a candle that had blown out, rush into the kitchen with the plates and brush a strand of blonde hair from her face, I found myself falling victim to romantic nostalgia, which descends whenever we are faced with those who might have been our lovers, but whom chance has decreed we will never properly know. 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.

  7. In city streets, I would often be made aware of hundreds (and by implication even millions) of women whose lives were running concurrently with mine, but who were fated to remain a mystery to me. Though I loved Chloe, the sight of these women occasionally filled me with such regret, it seemed like the only solution might be to tell them how I felt and thus alleviate the burden of sadness (I resisted the impulse). Standing on a train platform or in the line at the bank I would catch sight of a given face, perhaps overhear a snatch of conversation (the woman’s car had broken down, she was graduating from university, her mother was ill . . .), and feel torn apart by being unable to know the rest of the story and kiss its protagonist.

  8. I could have chatted to Alice on the sofa after dinner, but something made me reluctant to do anything but dream. Alice’s face evoked a void inside of me with no clear dimensions or intentions and that my love for Chloe had somehow not resolved. The unknown carries with it a mirror of all our deepest, most inexpressible wishes. The unknown is the fatal proposition that a face seen across the room will always hold out to the known. I may have loved Chloe but because I knew Chloe, I did not long for her. 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.

  9. ‘So, did you fall in love with her?’ Chloe asked in the car.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘She’s your type.’

  ‘No, she isn’t. And anyway, you know I’m in love with you.’

  In the typical scenario of betrayal, one partner asks the other, ‘How could you have betrayed me with x when you said you loved me?’ But 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’. I was not lying to Chloe, but my words were time-bound promises, a truth too disturbing for most relationships fully to take on board, or else couples would have little to talk about other than their fluctuating feelings.

  10. I was not only imaginatively unfaithful, I was also often bored. As inhabitants of luxury hotels and palaces attest, one can get used to anything. For periods, I entirely ceased to notice the miracle that was Chloe’s love for me. She became a normal and hence invisible feature of my life.

  11. Then would come moments when I’d recover the ability to see her as I had done in the early days of our love story. One weekend, on a visit to Winchester, we broke down on the motorway and called the AA for help. When a van arrived a quarter of an hour later, Chloe went to deal with the mechanic (a primitive impulse had left me unable to talk to him, from a feeling of embarrassment that, though I was a man, I hadn’t been able to repair the car, let alone work out how the bonnet opened). Watching her talk to this stranger (he was in leather from tip to toe, for reasons I hoped were strictly related to his professional role), by a form of identification with him, the woman I knew ab
ruptly appeared foreign to me. I looked at her face and heard her voice without the dulling blanket of familiarity, I saw her as she might strike a leather-clad mechanic, I saw her stripped of the normalizing influence of time.

  12. As a result, I was overcome by an urge to tear off her grey-green cardigan and make passionate love to her on the motorway embankment. The disruption of habit had made Chloe unknown and exotic again, desirable like a woman I had never touched, even though she had only that morning walked around my flat naked without arousing any wish in me beyond that of finishing an article I had begun reading on macro-economics in the developing world.

  13. It took the AA man a few minutes to locate the fault, something to do with the battery (‘You want to watch your levels, darling,’ he had called out to Chloe from behind the bonnet), and we were ready to continue to Winchester. But my desire signalled otherwise.