Essays In Love

by Alain De Botton

  18. I became an irritant, one who has gone beyond caring for reciprocation. I bought her books, I took her jackets to the dry cleaner’s, I paid for dinner, I suggested we make a trip to Paris at Christmas time to celebrate our anniversary. But humiliation could be the only result of loving against all evidence. She could sulk me, shout at me, ignore me, tease me, trick me, hit me, kick me, and still I would not react – and thereby grew abhorrent.

  19. At the end of a meal I had spent two hours preparing (largely taken up by an odd argument we fell into over Balkan history after Chloe began a peculiar defence of Serbian nationalism), I took Chloe’s hand and told her, ‘I just wanted to say, and I know it sounds sentimental, that however much we fight and everything, I still really care about you and want things to work out between us. You mean everything to me, you know that.’

  Chloe (who had always read more psychoanalysis than fiction) looked at me suspiciously and replied, ‘Listen, it’s kind of you to say so, but it worries me; you’ve got to stop turning me into your ego ideal like this.’

  20. Things had reduced themselves to a tragicomic scenario: on the one hand, the man identifying the woman as an angel, on the other, the angel identifying love as something only a little short of a pathology.

  18

  Romantic Terrorism

  1. Why don’t you love me? is as impossible a question (though a far less pleasant one) to ask as Why do you love me? In both cases, we come up against our lack of conscious control in the amorous structure, the fact that love has been brought to us as a gift for reasons we never wholly determine or deserve. To ask such questions, we are forced to veer on one side towards complete arrogance, on the other to complete humility: What have I done to deserve love? asks the humble lover; I can have done nothing. What have I done to be denied love? protests the betrayed one, arrogantly claiming possession of a gift that is never one’s due. To both questions, the one who hands out love can only reply: Because you are you – an answer that leaves the beloved dangerously and unpredictably strung between grandiosity and depression.

  2. Love may be born at first sight, but it does not die with corresponding rapidity. Chloe must have feared that to talk or even leave would have been hasty, that she might have been opting for a life offering no more favourable alternative. It was hence a slow separation, the masonry of affect only gradually prising itself loose from the loved one. There was guilt at the residual sense of responsibility towards a once-prized object, a form of treacly liquid left at the bottom of the glass that needed time to drain off.

  3. When every decision is difficult, no decision is taken. Chloe prevaricated, I joined her (for how could any decision be pleasant for me?). We continued to see one another and sleep with one another. We even made plans to visit Paris at Christmas time, yet Chloe was curiously disengaged from the process, as though she were making arrangements for someone else – perhaps because it was easier to deal in airline tickets than the issues that lay behind their purchase or non-purchase. Her apathy embodied the hope that by doing nothing, another might take the decision for her, that by displaying her indecision and frustration while not acting on it I would ultimately perform the move that she had needed (but been too scared) to make herself.

  4. We entered the era of romantic terrorism.

  ‘Is there anything wrong?’

  ‘No, why, should there be?’

  ‘I just thought you might want to talk about things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘About us.’

  ‘You mean about you,’ snapped Chloe.

  ‘No, I mean about us.’

  ‘Well, what about us?’

  ‘I don’t know, really. It’s just a sense I have that ever since about the middle of September, we haven’t really been communicating. It’s like there’s a wall between us and you’re refusing to acknowledge it’s there.’

  ‘I don’t see a wall.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. You’re even refusing to admit there was ever anything other than this.’

  ‘Than what?’

  5. Once a partner has begun to lose interest, there is apparently little the other can do to arrest the process. Like seduction, withdrawal suffers under a blanket of reticence. The very breakdown of communication is hard to discuss, unless both parties have a desire to see it restored. This leaves the lover in a desperate situation. Honest dialogue seems to produce only irritation and smothers love in the attempt to revive it. Desperate to woo the partner back at any cost, the lover might at this point be tempted to turn to romantic terrorism, the product of irredeemable situations, a gamut of tricks (sulking, jealousy, guilt) that attempt to force the partner to return love, by blowing up (in fits of tears, rage or otherwise) in front of the loved one. The terroristic partner knows he cannot realistically hope to see his love reciprocated, but the futility of something is not always (in love or in politics) a sufficient argument against it. Certain things are said not because they will be heard, but because it is important to speak.

  6. When political dialogue has failed to resolve a grievance, the injured party may also in desperation resort to terrorist activity, extracting by force the concession it has been unable to seduce peacefully from its opposite number. Political terrorism is born out of deadlocked situations, behaviour that combines a party’s need to act with an awareness (conscious or semi-conscious) that action will not go any way towards achieving the desired end – and will if anything only alienate the other party further. The negativity of terrorism betrays all the signs of childish rage, a rage at one’s own impotence in the face of a more powerful adversary.

  7. In May 1972, three members of the Japanese Red Army, who had been armed, briefed and financed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), landed on a scheduled flight at Lod Airport, near Tel Aviv. They disembarked, followed the other passengers into the terminal building, and once inside, pulled machine-guns and grenades out of their hand luggage. They began firing on the crowd indiscriminately, slaughtering twenty-four people and injuring a further seven before they were themselves killed by the security forces. What relation did such butchery have with the cause of Palestinian autonomy? The murders did not accelerate the peace process, they only hardened Israeli public opinion against the Palestinian cause, and in a final irony for the terrorists, it turned out the majority of their victims were not even Israelis, but belonged to a party of Puerto Rican Christians who had been on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Yet the action found its justification elsewhere, in the need to vent frustration in a cause where dialogue had ceased to produce results.

  8. Both of us could only spare a weekend in Paris, so we left on the last flight out of Heathrow on Friday, and planned to return late on the Sunday. Though we were going to France to celebrate our anniversary, it felt more like a funeral. When the plane landed in Paris, the airport terminal was sombre and empty. It had begun to snow and a fierce arctic wind was blowing. There were more passengers than taxis, so we ended up sharing a ride with a woman we had met at passport control, a lawyer travelling from London to Paris for a conference. Though the woman was attractive, I was in no mood to find her so, but nevertheless flirted with her as we made our way into the city. When Chloe attempted to join the conversation, I would interrupt her with a remark addressed exclusively (and seductively) to the woman. But success in inducing jealousy is dependent on a significant factor: the inclination of the targeted audience to give a damn. Hence terroristic jealousy is always a gamble: how far could I go in trying to make Chloe jealous? What if she were not to react? Whether she was merely hiding that jealousy so as to call my bluff (like politicians who appear on television and declare how unconcerned they are with the terrorist threat), or whether she genuinely did not care, I could not be sure. But one thing was certain, Chloe did not allow me the pleasure of a jealous reaction, and was more pleasant than she had been in a long time when we finally settled into our room in a small hotel on the Rue Jacob, perhaps cheered by the thought
that I would, after all, get over her.

  9. Terrorists take a gamble in assuming that their actions will prove terrifying enough to provide a form of bargaining power. There is the story of a wealthy Italian businessman who, late one afternoon, received a phone call in his office from a terrorist gang, telling him that they had kidnapped his youngest daughter. A huge sum was stipulated as ransom, and the threat levelled that if it wasn’t paid, the daughter would never be seen alive again. But the businessman casually replied that, if they killed the girl, they would in fact be doing him a huge favour. He had ten children, he explained wearily, and they had all been a great disappointment and a trial to him, expensive to keep and the unfortunate result of only a few moments of exertion in the bedroom on his part. The ransom would not be paid, and if they wanted to kill her, that was their choice. And with that blunt message, the businessman put down the phone. Within hours, the girl was released.

  10. It was still snowing when we awoke the next morning, but it was too warm for it to settle, so the pavements turned to mud, brown beneath a low grey sky. We had decided to visit the Musée d’Orsay after breakfast, and planned to go on to a cinema in the afternoon. I had just shut the door to the hotel room, when Chloe asked me brusquely, ‘Have you got the key?’

  ‘No,’ I answered, ‘you told me a minute ago you had it.’

  ‘Did I? No, I didn’t,’ said Chloe, ‘I don’t have the key. You’ve just locked us out.’

  ‘I haven’t locked us out. I shut the door thinking you had the key, because the key wasn’t where I left it.’

  ‘Well, that’s really silly of you, because I don’t have it either, so we’re locked out – thanks to you.’

  ‘Thanks to me! For Heaven’s sake, stop blaming me for the fact that it was you who forgot the key.’

  ‘I had nothing to do with the key.’

  At that moment, Chloe turned towards the lifts, and (with novelistic timing) the room key fell out of her coat pocket onto the maroon carpet of the hotel.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I did have it all along, oh, well,’ said Chloe.

  But I decided I would not forgive her with ease, and snapped, ‘That’s it,’ and headed for the stairs silently and melodramatically, Chloe calling after me, ‘Wait, don’t be silly, where are you going? I said I was sorry.’

  11. A structurally successful terroristic sulk must be sparked by some wrong-doing, however small, on the part of the sulked, and yet is marked by a disproportion between insult inflicted and sulk elicited, drawing a punishment bearing little relation to the severity of the original offence – and one that cannot easily be resolved through normal channels. I had been waiting to sulk Chloe for a long time, but to begin sulking when one has not been wronged in any definite way is counter-productive, for there is a danger the partner will not notice and guilt not flourish.

  12. I could briefly have shouted at Chloe, she back at me, and then our argument over the room key would have unwound itself. At the basis of all sulks lies a wrong that might have been addressed and disappeared at once, but that instead is taken by the injured partner and stored for later and more painful detonation. Delays in explanations give grievances a weight that they would lack if the matter had been addressed as soon as it had arisen. To display anger shortly after an offence occurs is the most generous thing one may do, for it saves the sulked from the burgeoning of guilt and the need to talk the sulker down from his or her battlement. I did not wish to do Chloe such a favour, so I walked out of the hotel alone and headed towards Saint-Germain, where I spent two hours browsing in a series of bookshops. Then, instead of returning to the hotel to leave a message, I ate lunch alone in a restaurant, then went to see two films in a row, eventually returning to the hotel at seven o’clock in the evening.

  13. The key point about terrorism is that it is primarily designed to attract attention, a form of psychological warfare with goals (for instance, the creation of a Palestinian state) unrelated to military techniques (opening fire in the arrival lounge of Lod Airport). There is a discrepancy between means and ends, a sulk being used to make a point relatively unconnected to the sulk itself – I am angry at you for accusing me of losing the key symbolizing the wider (but unspeakable) message I am angry at you for no longer loving me.

  14. Chloe was no brute and, whatever I might claim, had generous tendencies for self-blame. She had tried to follow me to Saint-Germain, but had lost me in the crowd. She had returned to the hotel, waited a while, and then gone to the Musée d’Orsay. When I finally came back to the room, I found her resting in bed, but without speaking to her, went into the bathroom and took a long shower.

  15. The sulker is a complicated creature, giving off messages of deep ambivalence, crying out for help and attention, while at the same time rejecting it should it be offered, wanting to be understood without needing to speak. Chloe asked if she could be forgiven, saying she hated to leave arguments unresolved and wanted us to spend a pleasant anniversary evening that night. I said nothing. Unable to express the full extent of my anger with her (an anger that had nothing to do with a key), I had grown unreasonable. Why had it become so hard for me to say what I meant? Because of the danger of communicating my real grievance: that Chloe had ceased to love me. My hurt was so inexpressible, had so little to do with a forgotten key, that I would have looked like a fool to bring the matter up at this stage. My anger was hence forced underground. Unable to say directly what I meant, I resorted to symbolizing meaning, half hoping, half dreading that the symbol would be decoded.

  16. After my shower, we finally made it up over the key incident, and went out for dinner to a restaurant on the Île de la Cité. We were both on best behaviour, keen to avoid tensions, chatting on neutral territory about books, films, and capital cities. It might have seemed (from the waiter’s point of view) that the couple was indeed a happy one – and that romantic terrorism had scored a significant victory.

  17. Yet ordinary terrorists have a distinct advantage over romantic terrorists, the fact that their demands (however outrageous) do not include the most outrageous demand of all, the demand to be loved. I knew that the happiness we were enjoying that evening in Paris was illusory, because the love that Chloe was displaying had not been given spontaneously. It was the love of a woman who feels guilty for the fact she has ceased to feel affection, but who nevertheless attempts a display of loyalty (as much to convince herself as her partner). Hence my evening was not a happy one: my sulk had worked, but its success had been empty.

  18. Though ordinary terrorists may occasionally force concessions from governments by blowing up buildings or school children, romantic terrorists are doomed to disappointment because of a fundamental inconsistency in their approach. You must love me, says the romantic terrorist, I will force you to love me by sulking you or making you feel jealous, but then comes the paradox, for if love is returned, it is at once considered tainted, and the romantic terrorist must complain, If I have only forced you to love me, then I cannot accept this love, for it was not spontaneously given. Romantic terrorism is a demand that negates itself in the process of its resolution, it brings the terrorist up against an uncomfortable reality – that love’s death cannot be arrested.

  19. As we walked back towards the hotel, Chloe slipped her hand in my coat pocket and kissed me on the cheek. I did not return her kiss, not because a kiss was not the most desired conclusion to a terrible day, simply because I could no longer feel Chloe’s kiss to be genuine. I had lost the will to force love on its unwilling recipient.

  19

  Beyond Good and Evil

  1. Early on Sunday evening, Chloe and I were sitting in the economy section of a British Airways jet, making our way back from Paris to London. We had recently crossed the Normandy coast, where a blanket of winter cloud had given way to an uninterrupted view of dark waters below. Tense and unable to concentrate, I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. There was something threatening about the flight, the dull background throb of the engines, the hushed gr
ey interior, the candy smiles of the airline employees. A trolley carrying a selection of drinks and snacks was making its way down the aisle and, though I was both hungry and thirsty, it filled me with the vague nausea that meals may elicit in aircraft.

  2. Chloe had been listening to her Walkman while dozing, but she now pulled out the plugs from her ears and stared with her large watery eyes at the seat in front of her.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

  There was a silence, as though she had not heard. Then she spoke.

  ‘You’re too good for me,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, “You’re too good for me.” ’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Because you are.’

  ‘What are you saying this for, Chloe?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘If anything, I’d put it the other way round. You’re always the one ready to make the effort when there’s a problem, you’re just more self-deprecating about your . . .’

  ‘Shush, stop, don’t,’ said Chloe, turning her head away from me.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’ve been seeing Will.’

  ‘You’ve what?’

  ‘I’ve been seeing Will, OK.’

  ‘What? What does seeing mean? Seeing Will?’

  ‘For God’s sake, I’ve been to bed with Will.’