Essays In Love

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The Subtext of Seduction” and “ Authenticity” discuss our desire and frustration with our worthiness, “ Marxism” on our fear of being loved back (“ how soon their attractions might pale if they began to love us back! And it feels like the only option IS to kill yourself and be done with it and then think about how guilt-wrecked the other party will be for causing you to go to such measures. Imagine, of all impossible things, a young British Woody Allen with the benefit of a classical education and you have the nameless and exquisitely erudite narrator of Essays in Love. That’s generally a result of one of the partners thinking the other isn’t good enough for them (because that partner thinks the other associates with “no-good” people including themselves.

How could they be divine as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us? I oscillate a lot between the two until I come to a sort of acceptance that nothing will ever happen and kind of sort of move on–which is, indeed, what happens to the narrator.The work's genius lies in the way it minutely analyses emotions we've all felt before but have perhaps never understood so well: it includes a chapter on the anxieties of when and how to say 'I love you' and another on the challenges of disagreeing with someone else's taste in shoes. To have killed myself would have been to forget that I would be too dead to derive any pleasure from the melodrama of my own extinction. And that is already illogical thinking because duh doy, of course, such a person doesn’t exist (*sigh*) and I, as Bo Burnham said, have to lower my expectations.

When you realise that you’re starting to move on, I think it can be a little sad that this person doesn’t have as strong an effect on you anymore. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. I think my problem with this book was my expectation; I thought it would be thoughtful essays on the subject of love. I will love you not just for your wit and talent and beauty, but simply because you are you, with no strings attached.

Like, sometimes, I like to be prodded for information and other times I just want you to shut up and I don’t want to have to SAY that because that just means you don’t understand me! De Botton was the one who made me realise that my soulmate was a sensitive mindreader who knew instinctively what I needed and when without my having to say a single word. The book tells the story of their relationship and their eventual break up when she goes off with one of Alain's work colleagues. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.

Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believe the the beloved now that they believe in us?I think when relationships don’t turn out the way you want them to, it’s so easy to go back into your shell and wallow. There is usually a Marxist moment in every relationship, the moment when it becomes clear that love is reciprocated. I have a lot of time for Alain de Botton, I loved 'A Week At The Airport' and enjoyed 'The Consolations of Philosophy'.