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 idea that things would be ideal with any other creature in this galaxy. There can only ever be a “good enough” relationship.
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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. The sadness must be someone’s fault: and we conclude that the blame has to lie with the partner. At an extreme, we exit the relationship far too early. We blame our lover in order not to blame love itself, the truer but more elusive target.
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 to be our lover, our best friend, our confidant, our nurse, our financial adviser, our social partner, and our sex mate.The job description is so long and so demanding, that no one in the standard employment market could conceivably deliver perfectly on even a fraction of the demands .
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 comfort, guide, entertain, feed and clear up while remaining almost always warm and cheerful. Plenty of parents don’t reveal how often they have bitten their tongue, fought back the tears and been too tired to take off their clothes after a day of childcare. We should renounce the desire to be loved and instead strive to love.
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 draw up work rosters, clean, cook, fix, throw away, mind, hire, fire, reconcile and budget. None of these activities have a glamourous halo. And yet these tasks are what is truly “romantic” in the sense of “conducive and sustaining of love” and should be interpreted as the bedrock of a successful relationship.
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, at best, one or two years. This is not anyone’s fault. Relationships in the long term have other key concerns (companionship, administration, another generation).
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 be true in the short term. Over an extended period of time, the relevance of this fades dramatically; differences inevitably emerge. It is the one with a capacity to tolerate difference that is the true marker of the right person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.
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 another’s across a room and how that leads to happily ever after. But, love isn’t an indescribable feeling – it’s a skill – and one that we have to work on .
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 people in relationships should alter between teacher and student, student and teacher, in an ongoing pursuit of becoming the best versions of ourselves.
‘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-awareness about the many ways in which we are uniquely mad. Alain de Botton believes we should be swapping instruction manuals on the first date.
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 is: leave them. If it’s not, you may be experiencing the bitterness of life alongside another person, not because of another person. Can you be sure that your suffering won’t come with you into the next relationship or into your singe life?
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 loveable idiot . Compatibility is an achievement, not an algorithm.
“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 new beau. The idea that relationships can be built on the need to say very little comes from the Romantics. It creates problems later on when your partner does something you don’t like, and instead of talking about it, you shut yourself in the bathroom and wait till they guess what they did wrong.
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 with a degree of patience and understanding that we forget to use with our partners. Grown-ups are just big versions of babies, and sometimes we act like it.
Expensive weddings
Alain de Botton is all for having expensive ceremonies. It makes it harder for you to quit your marriage and it’s embarrassing to quit if you spent all that money. It sets the bar high for your relationship and that’s a healthy thing.
"One of the first things couples should do is rather than saying how perfect they are, they should say 'I'm crazy like this, how are you crazy?'. Most of the time we make discoveries about how difficult people are at the moment when the difficulties have actually hurt us, therefore, we are not likely to be forgiving or sympathetic."
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 soul mate, everybody has somebody who will cure them of all loneliness. We make the equation that, if you love me, you are supposed to understand me even if I don't explain what's wrong. With any good relationship, unfortunately, we often have to spell out what we need. People cannot be mind readers."
"There are lovely moments in early childhood when your parent can guess pretty well what you need. In the early days of love sometimes, you will report an ecstatic feeling you have met someone who seems to understand you without you needing to speak. So many problems of relationships (are) where we have things to say we haven't said, and we blame people and get bitter that people haven't understood what we never explained to them."
"Love gives us a ringside seat on somebody else's flaws. You will spot things that need to be mentioned. The romantic view is to say 'If you loved me, you wouldn't criticize me'. Actually, true love is often trying to teach someone how to be the best version of themselves."
"We are obsessed (in popular culture) with beginnings of love, the magic meet-cute we call it, or the end of love, the tragic undoing and death and whatnot. But you want to focus on the drudgery of the middle, almost. Often we think love is a feeling, that you spontaneously experience it. I think, ultimately, it is a skill that needs to be learned. We are not set up for that."
"Never believe anything is below you as a topic of discussion. Often people insist their way is the way and refuse to have a discussion because they think it is not serious."
We can’t sift
What differentiates the emotionally damaged from the more robustly healthy is their tendency for being unable to spot the problems in due time and remove themselves with the requisite ruthlessness and decisiveness.
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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 leave. Our tendency is to wonder what we might have done to provoke the problem. Our past gives us a disastrous tendency to think against ourselves – and give an unnatural degree of credit to the other.
We can’t disappoint anyone
Looking after ourselves requires a rare skill: a capacity to disappoint another person in the name of our own protection. To remain sane, we may have to decline a friend’s suggestion – and in love, upset someone else substantially. To someone who doesn’t possess a full tank of inner love, how dare one turn down the love of another, even if it comes wrapped in tricky or poisonous elements?
We hope too much
Children who grow up in the company of difficult adults settle on doing one thing extremely well: hoping against hope that these adults will magically change and learn to be kind. This kind of 'patience' is then transferred into their adult relationships, with similarly negligible results.
Our ideas of love
The differences in how people have loved throughout history suggest that our style of loving is to a significant extent determined by what the prevailing environment dictates. It is through novels, poems, songs and, latterly, films that we have acquired our misleading ideas about love.
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 are neither very possible nor very practical. We learn to judge ourselves by the hopes and expectations fostered by a misleading artistic medium.
How love stories affect us
Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary (1856) spent her childhood immersed in Romantic fiction. As a result, she’s expecting that her husband will be someone who understands her soul perfectly. When she does get married to the kind, thoughtful but human. But she is quickly bored by the routines of married life. She is convinced that her life has gone profoundly wrong for one central reason: because it’s so different from what the novels she knows told her it would be.
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 as relevant to the enduring of a relationship . Yet, in reality, part of the rationale of any relationship is to enable two people to function as a stable joint economic unit for the education of the next generation.
Romanticism and capitalism
Romanticism and capitalism are the two dominant ideas of our time, guiding the way we think and feel about the two things that usually matter most in our lives: relationships and work . The impressive philosophy of romantic love in art ( with focus on intimacy and openness and spending carefree days together) matches poorly with the requirements of working routines that fill our heads with complex demands, keep us away from home for long stretches and render us insecure about our positions in a competitive environment.
Domestic issues
Until our art changes radically, we won’t go into relationships ready to perceive domestic issues as important potential flashpoints to look out for and pay attention to.
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. We learn to judge ourselves by the hopes and expectations cultivated by a confusing artistic medium. We need to tell ourselves more accurate stories about the progress of relationships, stories that normalise troubles and show us an intelligent, helpful path through them.
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 be tolerable and that we'll be able to manage it. How much better to watch our best hopes crash helplessly against the shores of our current partner’s obdurate and quietly or even unconsciously sadistic personality?
We find kindness ‘boring’
We find nice people instinctively boring and unsexy. This usually has its roots in a troubled past, which makes us unusually unforgiving towards genuine kindness. If we knew ourselves better, we would find out that some of our potential partners feel wrong because we know they will be unable to deliver the sort of suffering that we’ve grown up to feel is essential to our sense of feeling loved.
