Essays In Love

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An old story, the twist here is in how De Botton relates it, dwelling and (over)analyzing each and every aspect, and looking to see greater truths in them.

He met his wife Charlotte in 2001 in a typically quirky de Bottonian way. He was talking with friends late at night and someone asked him to describe his ideal girlfriend, so he did, in great detail, and "miraculously one person in the room took note of this and introduced me to Charlotte the very next weekend." It was miraculous, given the specificity of his demands. He said his ideal girlfriend had to be a doctor's daughter who grew up outside London and worked in business or science, all of which Charlotte was. "She was a businesswoman, she'd started her own company, she knew how to create an Excel spreadsheet or run a payroll - she can do all these things that I can't do." A central solution to these patterns is to normalize a new and more accurate picture of emotional functioning: to make it clear just how predictable it is to be in need of reassurance, and at the same time, how understandable it is to be reluctant to reveal one’s dependence. We should create room for regular moments, perhaps as often as every few hours, when we can feel unembarrassed and legitimate about asking for confirmation. “I really need you. Do you still want me?” should be the most normal of enquiries. This thin red-colored book is a timely and appropriate Valentine’s read for everyone who wants to know more about the mechanics of falling in and out of love. It reminds me of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving which was a required reading in my college days at the De La Salle University. However, since Erich Fromm (1900-1990) was a psychologist and a social philosopher, his approach in his book was more theoretical and profound. De Botton probably thought that a landmark book on love like Fromm’s could not be duplicated so he mixed theories and a fiction in this book On Love and oh dear he did it so beautifully. There is beauty and pain here which are essential ingredients of novels and there is the absence of any preaching or cliché.Adams, Stephen (1 July 2009). "Alain de Botton tells New York Times reviewer: 'I will hate you until I die' ". Telegraph. London . Retrieved 1 July 2015.

Sure, the books can define you, the music you listen to. But the list of books continues, you read on, convinced you will find, after all - an answer. The chapter that resonated like a hammer blow for me was the "I-confirmation" chapter, which describes how your image of yourself is affected by the person you're with. Oh dear, it seems like we have another Byronic, middle-class “romantic” who’s frustrated that the women in this world aren’t meeting the standards set by Rossetti’s paintings. But I thought life imitated art - cried the young “philosopher”. He failed to get into Eton, but went to Harrow and then Cambridge, getting a double first in history before doing a master's in philosophy and starting a PhD. But he found Cambridge a disappointment. He went there hoping to fall in love, to make hundreds of friends, and to be taught by brilliant teachers. "None of those things happened - I didn't fall in love in a transforming way, I wasn't taught brilliantly and I didn't make hundreds of friends. But it was a good time for thinking and working out what I wanted to do. I didn't find the history course particularly challenging, so I just spent all my time reading things that were not on the course syllabus. And started writing." The result was his first, brilliantly original Essays in Love, published when he was just 23. Where was I? Oh yeah. On Love is the type of book that I love -- a painfully analytical narrator going through every detail of more or less universal experiences. Other books along those lines that come to mind: The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis, The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, and Pleasant Hell to a certain extent.The almost banal affair itself does stifle the narrative (De Botton's strength is certainly essayistic, which is why his Proust book is far superior to the novels), but there are enough well-conceived flights of fancy to keep the reader amused.