On Love: A Novel

By Alain De Botton

The New York Times–bestselling author’s modern classic that “takes a conventional love story and textures it with philosophical ruminations” (Kirkus Reviews).

A man and a woman meet over casual conversation on a flight from Paris to London, and so begins a love story—from first kiss to first argument, elation to heartbreak, and everything in between. Each stage of the relationship is illuminated with starling clarity, as novelist and philosopher Alain de Botton explores young love and its emotions, often felt but rarely understood.


With a brilliant new introduction by Sheila Heti, the New York Times-bestselling author of How Should a Person Be?, On Love is a contemporary classic from an author “who seems to have been born to write” (The Boston Globe).

“Smart and ironic…The book’s success has much to do with its beautifully modeled sentences, its wry humor, and its unwavering deadpan respect for the reader's intelligence.” —Francine Prose, New Republic

“Witty, funny, sophisticated…full of wise and illuminating insights.” —P.J. Kavanagh, Spectator

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9780802189967

Alain De Botton

Alain de Botton is the author of a number of books that try to throw light on the big challenges of our lives. His books have been sold in thirty-five countries and many have been international bestsellers, including How Proust Can Change Your Life, Essays in Love and The Art of Travel. He is the founder of two social enterprises, the first promoting architecture, Living Architecture, which gets top architects to build holiday homes for rental by everyone. The second enterprise is The School of Life.

Book preview

on love

ALSO BY ALAIN DE BOTTON:

The Romantic Movement

Kiss & Tell

How Proust Can Change Your Life

The Consolations of Philosophy

The Art of Travel

Status Anxiety

Alain de Botton

ON LOVE

Copyright © 1993, 2006 by Alain de Botton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011.

First published in 1993 by MacMillan

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

De Botton, Alain.

On love / Alain de Botton.

ISBN 0-8021-4240-0 (pbk.)

eISBN 978-0-8021-8996-7

I. title.

PR6054.E1324O5 1994 823'914—dc20 94-25089

Cover design by Carin Goldberg

Design by Laura Hammond Hough

Grove Press

An imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

CONTENTS

Romantic Fatalism

Idealization

The Subtext of Seduction

Authenticity

Mind and Body

Marxism

False Notes

Love or Liberalism

Beauty

Speaking Love

What Do You See in Her?

Skepticism and Faith

Intimacy

I-Confirmation

Intermittences of the Heart

The Fear of Happiness

Contractions

Romantic Terrorism

Beyond Good and Evil

Psycho-Fatalism

Suicide

The Jesus Complex

Ellipsis

Love Lessons

on love

ROMANTIC FATALISM

1. The longing for a destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share a bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be excused for believing (contrary to all the rules of our enlightened age) that we are fated one day to run into the man or woman of our dreams? Can we not be allowed a certain superstitious faith that we will ultimately locate a creature who can appease our painful yearnings? Though our prayers may never be answered, though there may be no end to relationships marked by mutual incomprehension, if the heavens should come to take pity on us, then can we really be expected to attribute our encounter with our prince or princess to a mere coincidence? Or can we not for once escape logic and read it as nothing other than a sign of romantic destiny?

2.One mid-morning in early December, with no thought of love or stories, I was sitting in the economy section of a British Airways jet making its way 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 brilliant blue waters. Bored and unable to concentrate, I had picked up the airline magazine, passively imbibing information on resort hotels and airport facilities. There was something comforting about the flight, the dull background throb of the engines, the hushed gray 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 neither hungry nor thirsty, it filled me with the vague anticipation that meals may elicit in aircraft.

3.Morbidly, perhaps, the passenger on my left had taken off her headphones in order to study the safety instruction card placed in the pouch in front of her. It depicted the ideal crash, passengers alighting softly and calmly onto land or water, the ladies taking off their high heels, the children dexterously inflating their vests, the fuselage still intact, the kerosene miraculously nonflammable.

4.We’re all going to die if this thing screws up, so what are these jokers on about? asked the passenger, addressing no one in particular.

I think perhaps it reassures people, I replied, for I was her only audience.

Mind you, it’s not a bad way to go—very quick, especially if we hit land and you’re sitting in the front. I had an uncle who died in a plane crash once. Has anyone you know ever died like that?

They hadn’t, but I had no time to answer, for a stewardess arrived and (unaware of the ethical doubts recently cast on her employers) offered us lunch. I requested a glass of orange juice and was going to decline a plate of pale sandwiches when my traveling companion whispered to me,

Take them anyway. I’ll eat yours—I’m starving.

5. She had chestnut-colored hair, cut short so that it left the nape of her neck exposed, and large watery green eyes that refused to look into mine. She was wearing a blue blouse and had placed a gray cardigan over her knees. Her shoulders were slim, almost fragile, and the rawness of her nails showed they were often chewed.

Are you sure I’m not depriving you?

Of course not.

I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Chloe, she announced, and extended her hand across the armrest with somewhat touching formality.

An exchange of biography followed. Chloe told me she’d been in Paris in order to attend a trade fair. For the past year, she’d been working as a graphic designer for a fashion magazine in Soho. She’d studied at the Royal College of Art, had been born in York but moved to Wiltshire as a child, and was now (at the age of twenty-three) living alone in a flat in Islington.

6. I hope they haven’t lost my luggage, said Chloe as the plane began to drop toward Heathrow. Don’t you have that fear, that they’ll lose your luggage?

I don’t think about it, but it’s happened to me—twice in fact: once in New York, and once in Frankfurt.

God, I hate traveling. Chloe sighed and bit the end of her index finger. I hate arriving even more—I get real arrival angst. After I’ve been away for a while, I always think something terrible has happened: all my friends have come together and decided they hate me or my cacti have died.

You keep cacti?

Several. I went through a cactus phase a while back. Phallic, I know, but I spent a winter in Arizona and sort of got fascinated by them. Do you have any interesting plants?

Only an aspidistra, but I do regularly think all my friends might hate me.

7. The conversation meandered, affording us glimpses of one another’s characters, like the brief vistas one catches on a winding mountain road—this before the wheels hit the tarmac, the engines were thrown into reverse, and the plane taxied toward the terminal, where it disgorged its cargo into the crowded immigration hall. By the time I had collected my luggage and passed through customs, I had fallen in love with Chloe.

8.Until one is close to death, it must be difficult to declare anyone as the love of one’s life. But only shortly after meeting her, it seemed in no way out of place to think of Chloe in such terms. After our return to London, Chloe and I spent an afternoon together. Then, a few weeks before Christmas, we had dinner in a West London restaurant and, as though it was both the strangest and the most natural thing to do, ended the evening in bed. She spent Christmas with her family, I went to Scotland with friends, but we found ourselves calling one another every day, sometimes as many as five times a day, not to say anything in particular, but simply because both of us felt we had never spoken like this to anyone before, that all the rest had been compromise and self-deception, that only now were we finally able to understand and make ourselves understood—that the waiting (quasi-messianic in nature) was truly over. I recognized in her the woman I had clumsily been seeking all my life, a creature whose smile and whose eyes, whose sense of humor and whose taste in books, whose anxieties and whose intelligence miraculously matched those of my ideal.

9.Because I came to feel that we were so right for one another, I grew unable to contemplate the idea that meeting Chloe had simply been a coincidence. I lost the ability to consider the question of predestination with the necessary skepticism. Though neither of us had until then been superstitious, Chloe and I seized upon a host of details, however trivial, as confirmation of what intuitively we felt: that we had been destined for one another. We learnt that both of us had been born at around midnight (she at 11:45 P.M., I at 1:15 A.M.) in the same month of an even-numbered year. Both of us had played clarinet and had had parts in school productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (she had played Helena, I an attendant to Theseus). Both of us had two large freckles on the toe of the left foot and a cavity in the same rear molar. Both of us had a habit of sneezing in bright sunlight and of drawing ketchup out of its bottle with a knife. We even had the same copy of Anna Karenina on our shelves (the old Oxford edition)—small details perhaps, but were these not grounds enough on which believers could found a new religion?

10.We attributed to events a narrative logic they could not inherently have possessed. We mythologized our aircraft encounter into the goddess Aphrodite’s design, Act One, Scene One of that primordial narrative, the love story. From the time of each of our births, it seemed as though the giant mind in the sky had been subtly shifting our orbits so that we would one day meet on the Paris-London shuttle. Because love had come true for us, we could overlook the countless stories that fail to occur, romances that never get written because someone misses the plane or loses the phone number. Like historians, we were unmistakably on the side of what had actually happened.

11.We should, of course, have been more sensible. Neither Chloe nor I flew regularly between the two capitals, nor had we been planning our respective trips for any length of time. Chloe had been sent to Paris at the last minute by her magazine after the deputy editor had happened to fall sick, and I had gone there only because an architectural conference in Bordeaux had finished early enough for me to spend a few days in the capital with a friend. The two national airlines running services between Charles de Gaulle and Heathrow offered us a choice of six flights between nine o’clock and lunchtime on our intended day of return. Given that we both wanted to be back in London by the early afternoon of December 6, but were unresolved until the very last minute as to what flight we would end up taking, the mathematical probability at dawn of us being on the same flight (though not necessarily in adjoining seats) had been a figure of one in six.

12.Chloe later told me that she had intended to take the ten-thirty Air France flight, but a bottle of shampoo in her bag had happened to leak as she was checking out of her room, which had meant repacking the bag and wasting a valuable ten minutes. By the time the hotel had produced her bill, cleared her credit card, and found her a taxi, it was already nine-fifteen, and the chance that she would make the ten-thirty Air France flight had receded. When she reached the airport after heavy traffic near the Porte de la Villette, the flight had finished boarding and, because she didn’t feel like waiting for the next Air France, she went over to the British Airways terminal, where she booked herself on the ten forty-five plane to London, on which (for my own set of reasons) I happened also to have a seat.

13.Thereafter, the computer so juggled things that it placed Chloe over the wing of the aircraft in seat 15A and I next to her in seat 15B. What we had ignored when we began speaking over the safety instruction card was the minuscule probability that our discussion had been reliant upon. As neither of us were likely to fly Club Class, and as there were 191 economy-class seats and Chloe had been assigned seat 15A and I, quite by chance, had been assigned seat 15B, the theoretical probability that Chloe and I would be seated next to one another (though the chances of our actually talking to one another could not be calculated) worked itself out as 220 in 36,290, a figure reducible to a probability of 1 in 164.955.

14. But this was of course only the probability that we would be seated together if there had been just one flight between Paris and London, but as there were six, and as both of us had hesitated between these six and yet had chosen this one, the probability had to be further multiplied by the original one chance in six, giving a final probability that Chloe and I would meet one December morning over the English Channel in a British Airways Boeing as 1 chance in 989.7.

15. And yet it had happened. The calculation, far from convincing us of rational arguments, only backed up the mystical interpretation of our fall into love. If the chances behind an event are enormously remote, yet it occurs nevertheless, may one not be forgiven for invoking a fatalistic explanation? Flipping a coin, a probability of one in two prevents me from turning to God to account for the result. But given a probability of 1 in 989.7, it seemed impossible, from within love at least, that this could have been anything but fate. It would have taken a steady mind to contemplate without superstition the enormous improbability of a meeting that had turned out to alter our lives. Someone (at 30,000 feet) must have been pulling strings in the sky.

16.From within love, we conceal the haphazard nature of our lives behind a purposive veil. We insist that the meeting with our redeemer, objectively haphazard and hence unlikely, has been prewritten in a scroll slowly unwinding in the sky. We invent a destiny to spare ourselves the anxiety that would arise from acknowledging that the little sense there is in our lives is merely created by ourselves, that there is no scroll (and hence no preordained face awaiting) and that whom we may or may not be meeting on airplanes has no sense beyond what we choose to attribute to it—in short, the anxiety that no one has written our story or assured our loves.

17.Romantic fatalism protected Chloe and me from the idea that we might equally well have begun loving someone else had events turned out differently, shocking given how closely love is bound up with a feeling of the necessity and uniqueness of the beloved. How could I have imagined that the role Chloe

Reviews for On Love

[Joel O · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Just beautiful!
The book really expressed emotions I had not been able to find words for for so long.

[Ann Ina · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Book failed to load despite several attempts now.... Could you please help fix this? I can't wait to read it....

[andycyca-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

TL;DR: Get this book if you've ever (over)analyzed a relationship or been in love. Alain de Botton guides us through the mind of a young man in love, carefully dissecting those thoughts that we've all had about ourselves, a loved one, doubts, hidden messages and everything happening during a romantic relationship. This vivisection is minute enough to help us recognize these little thoughts as observers, which in turn lead to simple descriptions of those nagging questions and their now very logical answers. We can live the hardships of love with a clear mind and come out, if not wiser, at least a lot more knowledgeable about ourselves and our loved ones. It's exactly as a reviewer said: a return to philosophy's core, which is to help us live our lives. Full marks for this one.

[phoibee-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's the (commercialized) love month so I decided to read a book about love.
At first, my head hurts from reading it. Haha. I don't really like the whole notion of analyzing bit by bit a word that could only be described by actually feeling it. As I go on, however, I think that it's what makes it different from other books I read. Like the persona loving Chloe, I begin to love the book. The theories and references sometimes threw me off but sometimes drew me in. I highlighted/noted most lines. (Also, London baby! They also went to London by the early afternoon of my birthday. Nothing much, I just like it lol. I wish to go to London again. ) In the end, the feeling I have is the same of what I felt after watching the movie called 500 Days of Summer. Hopeful. I think it just had the same attack on me.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Love him or hate him, De Botton has some good ideas but sometimes fails to find interesting or non-cliched ways to express them.

[brakketh-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved this novel. A romance with philosophical musings built around the characters. Perceptive and very enjoyable.

[a_forester-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Strange but interesting approach to a novel. Entertaining the thoughtful.

[sometimeunderwater · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The ending has some emotional resonance, but mainly its just banal, like most of De Botton's work. It's clear that 'Philosopher' is used here solely as a brand to market his books rather than as a meaningful category. It's just a boring novel with some Sunday Supplement musings. The most annoying thing is how it aims to speak about the 'universality of love', but it's all about a pair of upper-middle class North London creative economy types, and the rest of the world doesn't get a look in. It's just infuriating.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Wat een heerlijk boek. De Botton schetst een groot aantal van de psychologische en sociale processen die zich voordoen als je verliefd wordt en in een relatie stapt en zet alles meteen in een filosofische context. Dit klinkt zwaar op de hand, maar het is het (meestal) niet: de Botton gebruikt het fictieve verhaal van twee mensen om het concreet en verteerbaar te maken. Heel af en toe vergaloppeert hij zich een beetje (zoals in het voorbeeld van de "marxistische paradox"), maar bijna voortdurend had ik een bevrijdend gevoel van herkenning. Absoluut aan te bevelen voor wie dat ondoorgrondelijk mysterie van liefde tussen twee mensen een ietsje beter wil "ondergaan".

[untraveller · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent reading getting to the very heart of relationships. Read may 2015 while in Hay-on-Wye, Wales.

[y2ash · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

On Love is Alain de Botton's way of explaining his courtship with Chloe. He uses many theories of philosophers (Plato, Kant, Nietzsche), psychologists and psychiatrists(Jung, Freud, Dr. Peggy Nearly), and even religion to describe the near delirium of the beginnings of love and relationships to their disastrous and paranoid filled endings.

I really adored this book on the mystifying, frustrating yet satisfying aspects of Love. I feel like I could have written this book if I had the eloquence of words behind me. Although I have never experienced love or more specifically, reciprocated love, I understood wholeheartedly how you love a person more when the object of your affection doesn't know.

On Love reminded me of a combination of 500 Days of Summer and Down to You. The former more. de Botton had a way of explaining a multitude of theories, practically all I agree with especially mature and immature love, in a very garrulous but relatable way.

[carrieprice78 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The lusty musings of a self-involved, egotistical narrator. The writing is enough to keep the reader involved for about half of it, then one just can't take it any more. Who cares? Annoying. de Botton appears to be very well read, as he is able to draw on writings of philosophers and others throughout history to bring light to his subject, and I found that at least moderately entertaining.

[globalnole · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

On Love is a hilarious anecdote about the trials and tribulations we face when one begins the process of falling in love. de Botton takes us through his feelings of masculinity, insecurity and the absolutes of a relationship. He describes the object of his desire, Chloe, with detailed precision and reminds us that we are all capable of making mistakes in the art of love. I completely recommend this book for anyone, no matter where they are in finding love.

[myhi_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great novel/essay on love ! On of the best ever.... so very modern approach, describing every-day details and attitudes ! Was absolutely impressed by this discovery... a book that doesn't claim to be a 100% essay, nor a regular novel.While the structure is rather common, the way AdB combines the action of the novel with his personal (scientific) explanations on the phenomenon turns the book into a masterpiece. Every single chapter has just enough of both, so one couldn't get bored - and also go home with a lesson learned !Also, the way characters are described -through lots of details related to their behavior under certain circumstances- makes the story believable.On the last page of the book.... was wondering if I should feel sad about the way things turned out to end; the book is not a happy-or-less-happy-ending story, but an essay using a story as an example.

[kidrah_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A great personal story about falling in love and relationships - written in a tone that is similar to the way we would write emails or have late night conversations: authentic and human. The character (the author) meets someone on a plane, and then goes through all the ups and downs of falling in love and the complications with it - really rings true with real life.

[kpodesta_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fiction (or is it??) about a love affair, from the male writer's perspective. Relationship start to end. The observations & wit sound real - a testament to the writer whether they are true or not (he describes them well). Enjoyable, fun, with some poignancy.

[alana_leigh_6 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Every reader simply must identify with the narrator in some capacity. Each time I read it, I see myself in new passages. This is a book that I will only recommend or give to people who I believe can appreciate it.