On Love by Alain de Botton.
I’m not totally sure how I came into possession of this book. It doesn’t seem the kind of book I would pick up, or be in a section of the book store I would frequent. Maybe my sister left it here on her last visit — was it hers or was it left for me? Who knows.
And yet I found myself rolling through its love theories on Thursday when I had cleared my schedule for some mental rejuvenation.
On the positive tip, Alain gives breath to an early stage version of romance that I have fallen victim to in the past: like some sort of warped Cassandra I am fast to imagine the whole arc of a love story in the earliest moments of its birth.
On the negative, through a drawn out parable of the unfolding love of two young hopefuls, he posits that the cycle of infatuation, love, coupling and breaking is inevitable, and that the early phases ruin the hope for success in the latter.
The text is strangely light-hearted but peppered with cumbersome over-phrases like “cartographic fascism” that break the flow of reading. It’s like he occasionally has to remind us that he’s smart and well read. He is no prisoner to:
Orwell’s Six Rules of Good Writing
- Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.
.. or “don’t let good grammar ruin good writing”.
What are the takeaways:
- My guess is that almost anyone who has had more than a handful of relationships will find it easy to taste the truths in his conclusions — we spend a lot of mental energy and emotional effort trying to present our ideal self (even our self-perceived ideal self) instead of our true self, and this sets us up for failure on both sides.
- There is no recovery from the slow reveal of the “true”.
My counter is that while early stage energy is most definitely regularly misspent, it can also set high shared expectations as both people evolve towards that aspiration. The magic of the romance can be extended and color the non-finite life of the relationship.
I see AdB has another, more recent book. Probably better I find something from less of an anti-romantic so I can reinforce my existing theories on love.