Essays In Love

by Alain De Botton

  14. The reasons behind such arguments were never the surface ones: whatever Chloe’s deficiencies with the Guide Michelin, or my intolerance to driving around in large circles through the Spanish countryside, what was at stake were far deeper anxieties. The strength of the accusations we made, their sheer implausibility, showed that we argued not because we hated one another, but because we loved one another too much – or, to risk confusing things, because we hated loving one another to the extent we did. Our accusations were loaded with a complicated subtext, I hate you, because I love you. It amounted to a fundamental protest, I hate having no choice but to risk loving you like this. The pleasures of depending on someone pale next to the paralysing fears that such dependence involves. Our occasionally fierce and somewhat inexplicable arguments during our trip through Valencia were nothing but a necessary release of tension that came from realizing that each one had placed all their eggs in the other’s basket – and was helpless to aim for more sound household management. 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 accompanied by all the primitive fear of divine retribution.

  16. ‘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. But how could this possibly be achieved in love? Proust tells the story of Mohammed II who, sensing that he was falling in love with one of the wives in his harem, at once had her killed because he did not wish to live in spiritual bondage to another. Short of this, I had long ago given up hopes of achieving self-sufficiency. I had gone out of my room, and begun to love another – thereby taking on the risk inseparable from basing one’s life around another human being.

  17. The anxiety of loving Chloe was in part the anxiety of being in a position where the cause of my happiness might so easily vanish, where she might suddenly lose interest, die, or marry another. At the height of love, there appeared a temptation to end the relationship prematurely, so that either Chloe or I could play at being the executioner, rather than see the other partner, or habit, or familiarity end things. 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. Lovers 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.

  18. 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.

  17

  Contractions

  1. Though questions of reality and falsehood in this area are notorious for resisting scrutiny and systematic analysis, after our return from Spain I began to suspect – without quite being able to look at the evidence in the face – that Chloe had started to simulate all or some of her orgasms.

  2. Her customary behaviour was replaced by an exaggerated activity apparently designed to divert me from her lack of genuine involvement in the process. The change was not accompanied by any obvious sign of uninterest. Indeed, lovemaking as a whole became more passionate. Not only was it performed more often, it was also performed in different positions and at different hours of the day, it was more turbulent, there were screams, even crying, the gestures closer to anger than the gentleness normally associated with the act.

  3. What should have been said to Chloe was eventually shared with a great male friend instead.

  ‘I don’t know what’s happening, Will, sex simply isn’t what it used to be.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it goes in phases, you can’t expect it to be high octane every time. Not even I expect that.’

  ‘I just feel something else is wrong, I don’t know what, but in the months since we came back from Spain, I’ve been noticing stuff. And I don’t mean only in the bedroom, that’s just a kind of symptom. I mean everywhere.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Well, nothing I could put a finger on directly. All right, here’s one thing I remember. She likes a different cereal than me, but because I spend a lot of time at her place, she usually buys the kind of cereal I like so we can have breakfast together. Then all of a sudden last week, she stops buying it, and says it’s too expensive. I don’t want to come to any conclusions, I’m just noticing.’

  4. Will and I were standing in the reception area of our office. A cocktail party was in progress to celebrate the firm’s twentieth birthday. I had brought Chloe with me, for whom this was a first chance to see my work-space.

  ‘Why does Will have so many more commissions than you?’ Chloe asked Will and me after wandering around the exhibits.

  ‘You answer that one, Will.’

  ‘That’s because real geniuses always have a hard time getting their work accepted,’ answered Will, cancelling out what might have been a compliment through exaggeration.

  ‘Your designs are brilliant,’ Chloe told him, ‘I’ve never seen anything so inventive, especially for office projects. The use of materials is just incredible, and the way you’ve managed to integrate the brick and metal so well. Couldn’t you do things like that?’ Chloe asked me.

  ‘I’m working on a number of ideas, but my style is very different, I work with different materials.’

  ‘Well, I think Will’s work is great, incredible in fact. I’m so glad I came to see it.’

  ‘Chloe, it’s great to hear you say so,’ answered Will.

  ‘I’m so impressed, your work is exactly the kind of thing I’m interested in and I think it’s such a pity that more architects don’t do what you’re trying to do. I imagine it can’t be easy.’

  ‘It’s not that easy, but I’ve always been taught to go with the things I believe in. I build the houses that make me feel real, and then the people who live in them end up absorbing a kind of energy from them.’

  ‘I think I see what you mean.’

  ‘You’d see better if we were out in California. I was working on a project in Monterey, and I mean, there you’d really get a sense of what you can do by using different kinds of stone as well as some steel and aluminium, and working with the lands
cape instead of against it.’

  5. 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.

  6. 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’ – an answer that would place love above the mundane surfaces of the body, 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?

  7. That evening at the architectural office, I first began to sense Chloe slipping away from me, losing admiration for my work and beginning to question my value in relation to other men. Because I was tired, and Chloe and Will were not, I went home and they chose to go on to the West End for a drink. Chloe told me she’d call as soon as she got home, but by eleven o’clock, I decided to call her. The answerphone replied, as it did when I called again at two thirty that morning. The urge was to confess my anxieties into the machine, but to formulate them seemed to bring them closer into existence, dragging a suspicion into the realm of accusation and counter-accusation. Perhaps it was nothing – or at least everything: I preferred to imagine her in an accident than playing truant with Will. I called the police at four in the morning, and asked them in the most responsible tone a man drunk on vodka may adopt, if they had not seen evidence, perhaps a mutilated body or wrecked Volkswagen, of my angel in a short green skirt and black jacket, last seen in an office near the Barbican. No, sir, no such sighting had been made, was she a relative or just a friend? Could I wait till morning, and contact the station again then?

  8. ‘One can think problems into existence,’ Chloe had told me. I dared not think, for fear of what I might find. The freedom to think involves the courage to stumble upon our demons. But the frightened mind cannot wander, I stayed tethered to my paranoia, brittle as glass. Bishop Berkeley and later Chloe had said that if one shuts one’s eyes, the outer world may be said to be no more real than a dream, and now more than ever the power of illusion came to seem comforting, the urge not to look truth in the face, the urge that if only one did not think, an unpleasant truth might not exist.

  9. Feeling implicated in her absence, guilty for my suspicions, and angry at my own guilt, I pretended to have noticed nothing when Chloe and I met at ten o’clock the following day. Yet she must have been guilty – for why else would she have gone to her local supermarket to add to her kitchen the missing breakfast cereal to fill Weltschmertz’s stomach? She accused herself not by her indifference, but by her sense of duty, a large packet of Three Cereal Golden Bran prominently placed on the window ledge.

  ‘Is something wrong with it? Isn’t that the one you like?’ asked Chloe, watching me stumble over my mouthfuls.

  10. She said she had stayed the night at her girlfriend Paula’s house. Will and she had chatted till late in a bar in Soho, and as she’d had a bit to drink, it had seemed easier to stop off in Bloomsbury than make the journey back home to Islington. She had wanted to call me, but it would surely have woken me up. I had said I wanted to go to sleep early, so wasn’t it the best thing? Why was I making that face? Did I want more milk to go with the three cereals?

  11. An urge accompanies epistemically stunted accounts of reality – the urge, if they are pleasant, to believe them. Like an optimistic simpleton’s view of the world, Chloe’s version of her evening was desirably believable, like a hot bath in which I wished to sit for ever. If she believes in it, why shouldn’t I? If it’s this simple for her, why should it be so complicated for me? I wished to be taken in by her story of a night spent on the floor of Paula’s flat in Bloomsbury, able in that case to set aside my alternative evening (another bed, another man, unfaked pleasure). Like the voter from whom the politician’s caramel promise draws a tear, I was lured by falsehood’s ability to appeal to my deepest emotional yearning.

  12. Therefore, as she had spent the night with Paula, had bought cereal, and all was forgiven, I felt a burst of confidence and relief, like a man awaking from a nightmare. I got up from the table and put my arms around the beloved’s thick white pullover, caressing her shoulders through the wool, then bending down to kiss her neck, nibbling at her ear, feeling the familiar perfume of her skin and the brush of her hair against my face. ‘Don’t, not now,’ said the angel. But, disbelieving, caught up in the familiar perfume of her skin and brush of hair against his face, Cupid continued to pucker his lips against her flesh. ‘I said once already, not now!’ repeated the angel, so that even he might hear.

  13. The pattern of the kiss had been formed during their first night together. She had placed her head beside his and, fascinated by this soft juncture between mind and body, he had begun running his lips along the curve of her neck. It had made her shudder and smile, she had played with his hand, and shut her eyes. It had become a routine between them, a signature of their intimate language. Don’t, not now. Hate is the hidden script in the letter of love, its foundations are shared with its opposite. The woman seduced by her partner’s way of kissing her neck, turning the pages of a book, or telling a joke watches irritation collect at precisely these points. It is as if the end of love was already contained in its beginning, the ingredients of love’s collapse eerily foreshadowed by those of its creation.

  14. I said once already, not now. There are cases of skilled doctors, experts at detecting the first signs of cancer in their patients, who will somehow ignore the growth of football-sized tumours in their own body. There are examples of people who in most walks of life are clear and rational, but who are unable to accept that one of their children has died or that their wife or husband has left them – and will continue to believe the child has merely gone missing or the spouse will leave their new marriage for the old. The ship-wrecked lover cannot accept the evidence of the wreckage, continuing to behave as though nothing had changed, in the vain hope that by ignoring the verdict of execution, death will somehow be stalled. The signs of death were everywhere waiting to be read – had I not been struck by the illiteracy pain had induced.

  15. The victim of love’s demise grows unable to locate original strategies to revive the corpse. At precisely the time when things might still have been rescued with ingenuity, fearful and hence unoriginal, I became nostalgic. Sensing Chloe drawing away, I attempted to pull her back through blind repetition of elements that had in the past cemented us. I co
ntinued with the kiss, and in the weeks thereafter, insisted that we return to cinemas and restaurants where we had spent pleasant evenings, I revisited jokes we had laughed at together, I readopted positions our bodies had once moulded.

  16. I sought comfort in the familiarity of our in-house language, the language used to ease previous conflicts, a joke designed to acknowledge and hence render inoffensive the temporary fluctuations of love.

  ‘Is something wrong today?’ I asked one morning when Venus looked almost as pale and sad as I.

  ‘Today?’

  ‘Yes, today, is something wrong?’

  ‘No, why? Is there any reason it should be?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘So why are you asking?’

  ‘I don’t know. Because you’re looking a bit unhappy.’

  ‘Sorry for being human.’

  ‘I’m just trying to help. Out of ten today, what would you give me?’

  ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Come on, out of ten. Six? Three? Minus twelve? Plus twenty?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Have a guess.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, I don’t know, leave me alone, damn it!’

  17. The in-house language unravelled, it grew unfamiliar to Chloe, or rather, she feigned forgetting, so as not to admit denial. She refused complicity in the language, she played the foreigner, she began reading me against the grain, and found errors. I could not understand why things I was saying and that in the past had proved so attractive were now suddenly so irritating. I could not understand why, having not changed myself, I should now be accused of being offensive in a hundred different ways. Panicking, I embarked on an attempt to return to the golden age, asking myself, ‘What had I been doing then that I perhaps am not doing now?’ I became a desperate conformist to a past self that had been the object of love. What I had failed to realize was that the past self was the one now proving so annoying, and that I was therefore doing nothing but accelerating the process towards dissolution.