Essays In Love Alain De Botton Pdf

de botton: this one: love is measured by how quickly you can get out of it. i had a friend who was pretty miserable with her husband. at one point he suggested that they didnt love each other anymore. her immediate reply was, well, youre certainly not gonna stay married for the rest of your life if that was the case. this is true, and it starts to reveal the motives that actually underlie the experience of love: the experience of love, as many people have noticed, is that it gives the illusion of making you happy, but in reality it only makes you sad.

Essays In Love Alain De Botton Pdf

tippett: wow. i mean, thats really interesting. so, i wonder, part of what weve heard from all the guests over the years is that love isnt selfish; it doesnt really look out for number one, as it were, it has its own agenda. and you say, well, i think thats silly. i think thats really interesting, that you would say that love doesnt look after number one. why?

de botton: its got to be a little bit self-interested, but its more than that. its got to be something more than that, which is a sense of sympathy. if you want to be sentimental about it, if you want to be romantic about it, love is a kind of mirror, in which we can see ourselves better than we see ourselves. what im saying is that love is not something which comes out of nowhere, but which comes out of a sense of recognition that you want to be in a certain way, that you would like to be certain things. and, of course, that you wont be if you dont. we can see our own wretchedness and our own misery in the eyes of someone we love. its a way of coming to terms with who we are.