Alain de Botton On Love

• Perfection is unrealistic

  

  Whomever we get together with will be radically imperfect in a host of deeply serious ways.  We must kill the id...

  'Romantic realism': the seven rules to help you avoid divorce

• Learn to blame love

  When difficulties strike in relationships, we often fall prey to the idea that we are going out with a foolish human....

  'Romantic realism': the seven rules to help you avoid divorce

• Love makes irrational demands

  The person we love becomes involved in some of the grandest and most complex matters we ever undertake: we ask them t...

  'Romantic realism': the seven rules to help you avoid divorce

• Striving to love

  

  We start out knowing only about being loved. To the child, it feels as if the parent is spontaneously on hand to com...

  'Romantic realism': the seven rules to help you avoid divorce

• Relationships require administration

  What a couple gets up to over a lifetime has much more in common with the workings of a small business. They must dr...

  'Romantic realism': the seven rules to help you avoid divorce

• Sex and love

  The general view expects that love and sex will be aligned. But in truth, they won’t stay so beyond a few months or, ...

  'Romantic realism': the seven rules to help you avoid divorce

• We’re not that compatible

  The right person is expected to be someone who shares our tastes, interests and general attitudes to life. This might...

  'Romantic realism': the seven rules to help you avoid divorce

• Fiction has ruined love

  

  Fiction is where we learn about love, about having a crush on someone; about the magical moment that one’s eyes meet ...

  8 things we learned about love from Alain de Botton

• Love is a classroom

  The Ancient Greeks had a good understanding of input vs. output in a long-term relationship. Their view was that peop...

  8 things we learned about love from Alain de Botton

• ‘How I’m crazy’ instruction manual

  Thinking we’re easy to live with is an easy mistake to make.  We’re all broken in some way. We lack self-aware...

  8 things we learned about love from Alain de Botton

• We want to suffer a little bit

  If you’re thinking of leaving a partner, ask yourself if things are bad because it really is all their fault? If it i...

  8 things we learned about love from Alain de Botton

• Don’t be yourself

  You might think that your partner is a little bit of an idiot, but you are too.  Elevate yourself to being a lo...

  8 things we learned about love from Alain de Botton

• “They just get me” is wrong

  In the dating days, it’s comforting to know you’re on the same page without having to say all that out loud to your n...

  8 things we learned about love from Alain de Botton

• Love is a skill

  Alain de Botton suggests imagining your partner as a two-year-old. The logic is that we’ve learned to treat children ...

  8 things we learned about love from Alain de Botton

• Expensive weddings

  Alain de Botton is all for having expensive ceremonies.  It makes it harder for you to quit your marriage and i...

  8 things we learned about love from Alain de Botton

• 

  "One of the first things couples should do is rather than saying how perfect they are, they should say 'I'm crazy lik...

  Alain de Botton on love: Admit you're crazy up front

• 

  "There is a cult of romanticism. It started in the 18th century, and it basically told people that everybody has a so...

  Alain de Botton on love: Admit you're crazy up front

• 

  "There are lovely moments in early childhood when your parent can guess pretty well what you need. In the early ...

  Alain de Botton on love: Admit you're crazy up front

• 

  "Love gives us a ringside seat on somebody else's flaws. You will spot things that need to be mentioned. The romant...

  Alain de Botton on love: Admit you're crazy up front

• 

  "We are obsessed (in popular culture) with beginnings of love, the magic meet-cute we call it, or the end of love, th...

  Alain de Botton on love: Admit you're crazy up front

• 

  "Never believe anything is below you as a topic of discussion. Often people insist their way is the way and refuse ...

  Alain de Botton on love: Admit you're crazy up front

• We can’t sift

  

  What differentiates the emotionally damaged from the more robustly healthy is their tendency for being unable to spot...

  6 Reasons We Choose Badly in Love

• We aren’t a friend to ourselves

  When someone lets us down, breaks promises, our first, second and hundredth impulse is never simply to up sticks and ...

  6 Reasons We Choose Badly in Love

• We can’t disappoint anyone

  Looking after ourselves requires a rare skill: a capacity to disappoint another person in the name of our own protect...

  6 Reasons We Choose Badly in Love

• We hope too much

  Children who grow up in the company of difficult adults settle on doing one thing extremely well: hoping against hope...

  6 Reasons We Choose Badly in Love

• Our ideas of love

  

  The differences in how people have loved throughout history suggest that our style of loving is to a significant exte...

  How fiction ruined love

• What is lacking in art

  ... are crucial elements of wisdom, realism and maturity. Our love stories excite us to expect things of love that ar...

  How fiction ruined love

• How love stories affect us

  

  Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary (1856) spent her childhood immersed in Romantic fiction. As a result, she’s expecting th...

  How fiction ruined love

• What is missing from romantic fiction

  

  Our art is full of omissions. For example, in so many romantic stories, the whole business of work is rarely viewed a...

  How fiction ruined love

• Romanticism and capitalism

  Romanticism and capitalism are the two dominant ideas of our time, guiding the way we think and feel about the two th...

  How fiction ruined love

• Domestic issues

  Until our art changes radically, we won’t go into relationships ready to perceive domestic issues as important potent...

  How fiction ruined love

• Skillful depictions of love

  Our culture is full of skillful depictions of love. But at the same time, many of these stories are very unhelpful.&n...

  How fiction ruined love

• We're scared of being alone

  

  Our willingness to quit a bad relationship is to some extent a measure of our confidence that being on our own will b...

  6 Reasons We Choose Badly in Love

• We find kindness ‘boring’

  We find nice people instinctively boring and unsexy. This usually has its roots in a troubled past, which makes ...

  6 Reasons We Choose Badly in Love