Essays In Love

by Alain De Botton

  6. I had to find out more about Chloe, for how could I abandon my true self unless I knew what false self to adopt? But the patience and intelligence required to fathom someone else went far beyond the capacities of my anxious, infatuated mind. I behaved like a reductive social psychologist, eager to press my companion into simple categories, unwilling to apply the care of a novelist to capturing the subtleties of human nature. Over the first course, I blundered with heavy-handed, interview-like questions: What do you like to read? (‘Joyce, Henry James, Cosmo if there’s time’), Do you like your job? (‘All jobs are pretty crap, don’t you think?’), What country would you live in if you could live anywhere? (‘I’m fine here, anywhere where I don’t have to change the plug for my hairdryer’), What do you like to do on weekends? (‘Go to the movies on Saturday, on Sunday, stock up on chocolate for getting depressed with in the evening’).

  7. Behind such clumsy questions (with every one I asked, I seemed to get further from knowing her) rested an impatient attempt to get to the most direct question of all, ‘Who are you?’ – and hence ‘Who should I be?’ But my directness was doomed, and the more I practised it, the more my subject escaped through the net, letting me know what newspaper she read and music she liked, but not thereby enlightening me as to who she might really be.

  8. Chloe hated talking about herself. Perhaps her most obvious feature was a certain modesty and self-deprecation. When the conversation led her to refer to herself, it would not simply be ‘I’ or ‘Chloe’, but ‘a basket-case like me’. Her self-deprecation was all the more attractive for it seemed to be free of the veiled appeals of self-pitying people, the false self-deprecation of the I’m so stupid / No, you’re not school.

  Her childhood had been awkward, but she was stoic about the matter (‘I hate childhood dramatizations that make Job look like he got off lightly’). She had grown up in a financially comfortable home. Her father (‘All his problems started when his parents called him Barry’) had been an academic, a law professor, her mother (‘Claire’) had for a time run a flower shop. Chloe was the middle child, a girl sandwiched between two favoured and faultless boys. When her older brother died of leukaemia shortly after her eighth birthday, her parents’ grief expressed itself as anger at their daughter who, slow at school and sulky around the house, had obstinately clung to life instead of their son. She grew up guilty, filled with a sense of blame for what had happened, feelings that her mother did little to alleviate. The mother liked to pick on a person’s weakest characteristics and not let go. Chloe was forever reminded of how badly she performed at school compared to her dead brother, of how gauche she was, and of how disreputable her friends were (criticisms that were not particularly true, but that grew more so with every mention). Chloe had turned to her father for affection, but the man was as closed with his emotions as he was open with his legal knowledge, which he would pedantically share with her as a substitute for warmth, until her adolescence when Chloe’s frustration with him turned to anger and she openly defied him and everything he stood for (it was fortunate that I had not chosen the legal profession).

  9. Of past boyfriends, only hints emerged over the meal: one had worked as motorcycle mechanic in Italy and had treated her badly, another, who she had mothered, had ended up in jail for possession of drugs. A third had been an analytical philosopher at London University (‘You don’t have to be Freud to see he was the daddy I never went to bed with’), a fourth a test-car driver for Rover (‘To this day I can’t explain that one. I think I liked his Birmingham accent’). But no clear picture was emerging and therefore the shape of her ideal man forming in my head needed constant readjustment. There were things she praised and condemned within sentences, forcing me into frantic rewriting. At one moment she seemed to be praising emotional vulnerability, and at the next, damning it in favour of independence. Whereas honesty was at one point extolled as the supreme value, adultery was at another justified on account of the greater hypocrisy of marriage.

  10. The complexity of her views led to a schizophrenia in mine. The main course (duck for me, salmon for her) was a marshland sowed with mines. Did I think two people should live solely for one another? Had my childhood been difficult? Had I ever been truly in love? Was I an emotional or a cerebral person? Who had I voted for in the last election? What was my favourite colour? Did I think women were more unstable than men? Because it involves the risk of alienating those who don’t agree with what one is saying, originality proved wholly beyond me.

  11. Chloe was facing a different dilemma, for it was time for dessert, and though she had only one choice, she had more than one desire.

  ‘What do you think, the chocolate or the caramel?’ she asked, traces of guilt appearing on her forehead. ‘Maybe you can get one and I’ll get the other and then we can share.’

  I felt like neither, I was not digesting properly, but that wasn’t the point.

  ‘I just love chocolate, don’t you?’ asked Chloe. ‘I can’t understand people who don’t like chocolate. I was once going out with a guy, this guy Robert I was telling you about, and I was never really comfortable with him, but I couldn’t work out why. Then one day it all became clear: he didn’t like chocolate. I mean he didn’t just not love it, this guy actually hated it. You could have put a bar in front of him and he wouldn’t have touched it. That kind of thinking is so far removed from anything I can relate to, you know. Well, after that, you can imagine, it was clear we had to break up.’

  ‘In that case we should get both desserts and taste each other’s. But which one do you prefer?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ lied Chloe.

  ‘Really? Well if you don’t mind, then I’ll take the chocolate, I just can’t resist it. In fact, you see the double chocolate cake at the bottom there? I think I’ll order that. It looks far more chocolaty.’

  ‘You’re being seriously sinful,’ said Chloe, biting her lower lip in a mixture of anticipation and shame, ‘but why not? You’re absolutely right. Life is short and all that.’

  12. Yet again I had lied (I was beginning to hear the sounds of cocks crowing in the kitchen). I had been more or less allergic to chocolate all my life, but how could I have been honest when the love of chocolate had been so conclusively identified as a criterion of Chloe-compatibility?

  I had decided that attraction was synonymous with the removal of all personal characteristics, my true self being necessarily in conflict with, and unworthy of the perfections found in the beloved.

  13. I had lied, but did Chloe like me any the more for it? Curiously, she merely expressed a certain disappointment, in view of the inferior taste of caramel, that I should have insisted so strongly on taking the chocolate – adding in an off-hand way that a chocophile was in the end perhaps as much of a problem as a chocophobe.

  14. We charm by coincidence rather than design. What had Chloe done to make me fall in love with her? My feelings had as much to do with the adorable way she had asked the waiter for extra butter as they had to do with her views on politics or the dress she had carefully chosen.

  The steps I had on occasion seen women take to seduce me were rarely the ones I had responded to. I was more likely to be attracted by tangential details that the seducer had not even been sufficiently aware of to push to the fore. I had once taken to a woman who had a trace of down on her upper lip. Normally squeamish about this, I had mysteriously been charmed by it in her case, my desire stubbornly deciding to collect there rather than around her warm smile or intelligent conversation. When I discussed my attraction with friends, I struggled to suggest that it had to do with an indefinable ‘aura’ – but I could not disguise to myself that I had fallen in love with a hairy upper lip. When I saw the woman again, someone must have suggested electrolysis, for the down was gone, and (despite her many qualities) my desire soon followed suit.

  15. The Euston Road was still blocked with traffic when we made our way back towards Islington. Long before such issues could have become meaningful, we’d arra
nged that I would drop Chloe home, but nevertheless the dilemmas of seduction remained a weighty presence in the car. At some point in the game, the actor must risk losing his audience. However, reaching the door of 23a Liverpool Road, awed by the dangers of misreading the signs, I concluded that the moment to propose metaphorical coffee had not yet arisen.

  But after such a tense and chocolate-rich meal, my stomach suddenly developed different priorities, and I was forced to ask to be allowed up to the flat. I followed Chloe up the stairs, into the living room and was directed to the bathroom. Emerging a few minutes later with my intentions unaltered, I reached for my coat and announced, with all the thoughtful authority of a man who has decided restraint would be best and fantasies entertained in weeks previous should remain just that, that I had spent a lovely evening, hoped to see her again soon and would call her after the Christmas holidays. Pleased with such maturity, I kissed her on both cheeks, wished her goodnight and turned to leave the flat.

  16. It was therefore fortunate that Chloe was not so easily persuaded, arresting my flight by the ends of my scarf. She drew me back into the apartment, placed both arms around me and, looking me firmly in the eye with a grin she had previously reserved for the idea of chocolate, whispered, ‘We’re not children, you know.’ And with these words, she placed her lips on mine and we embarked on one of the longer and more beautiful kisses mankind has ever known.

  5

  Mind and Body

  1. Few things are as antithetical to sex as thought. Sex is instinctive, unreflexive and spontaneous, while thought is careful, uninvolved, and judgemental. To think during sex is to violate a fundamental law of intercourse. But did I have a choice?

  2. It was the sweetest kiss, everything one dreams a kiss might be. It began with a light grazing and tender tentative forays that secreted the unique flavour of our skins. Then the pressure increased, our lips rejoined and parted, mine leaving Chloe’s for a moment in order to run along her cheeks, her temples, her ears. She pressed her body closer and our legs intertwined. Dizzy, we collapsed onto the sofa, clutching at one another.

  3. Yet if there was something interrupting this Eden, it was the awareness of how strange it was for me to be lying in Chloe’s living room, my lips on hers, feeling her heat beside me. After all the ambiguity, the kiss had come so suddenly that my mind now refused to cede control of events to the body. It was the thought of the kiss, rather than the kiss itself, that was holding my attention.

  4. I couldn’t help but think that a woman whose body had but a few hours ago been an area of complete privacy (only suggested by the outlines of her blouse and the contours of her skirt) was now preparing to undress before me. Though we had talked at length, I felt a disproportion between my day-time and night-time knowledge of Chloe, between the intimacy that contact with her body implied and the largely unknown realms of the rest of her life. But the presence of such thoughts, flowing in conjunction with our physical breathlessness, seemed to run rudely counter to the laws of desire. They seemed to be ushering in an unpleasant degree of objectivity, like a third person who would watch, observe, and perhaps even judge.

  5. ‘Wait,’ said Chloe as I unbuttoned her blouse, ‘I’m going to draw the curtains, I don’t want the whole street to see. Or why don’t we move into the bedroom? We’ll have more space.’

  We picked ourselves up from the cramped sofa and walked down a book-lined corridor into Chloe’s bedroom. A large white bed stood in the centre, piled high with cushions and papers, clothes, and a telephone.

  ‘Excuse the mess,’ said Chloe, ‘the rest of the place is just for show, this is where I really live.’

  There was an animal on top of the mess.

  ‘Meet Guppy – my first love,’ said Chloe, handing me a furry grey elephant whose face bore no signs of jealousy

  6. There was an awkwardness while Chloe cleared the surface of the bed, the eagerness of our bodies only a minute before had given way to a heavy silence that indicated how uncomfortably close we were to our own nakedness.

  7. When Chloe and I undressed one another on top of the large white bed and, by the light of a small bedside lamp, saw each other naked for the first time, we attempted to be as unselfconscious as Adam and Eve before the Fall. I slipped my hands under Chloe’s skirt and she unbuttoned my trousers with an air of indifferent normality, like someone opening the post or changing a duvet.

  8. But if there was one thing likely to check our passion, it was clumsiness. It was clumsiness that reminded Chloe and me of the humour and bizarreness of having ended up in bed together, I struggling to peel off her underwear (some of it had become caught around her knees), she having trouble with the buttons of my shirt – yet each of us trying not to comment, not to smile even, looking at one another with an earnest air of desire, as though oblivious to the potentially comic side of what was going on, sitting semi-naked on the edge of the bed, our faces flushed like those of guilty school-children.

  9. The philosopher in the bedroom is as ludicrous a figure as the philosopher in the nightclub. In both arenas, because the body is predominant and vulnerable, the mind becomes an instrument of silent, uninvolved assessment. Thought’s infidelity lies in its privacy. ‘If there is something that you cannot say to me,’ asks the lover, ‘things that you must think alone, then can you really be trusted?’

  I wasn’t thinking anything cruel while I ran my hands and lips across Chloe’s body, it was simply that Chloe would probably have been disturbed by news that I was thinking at all. Because thought implies judgement, and because we are all paranoid enough to take judgement to be negative, it is constitutionally suspect in the bedroom. Hence the sighing that drowns the sounds of lovers’ thoughts, sighing that confirms: I am too passionate to be thinking. I kiss, and therefore I do not think – such is the official myth under which lovemaking takes place, the bedroom a unique space in which partners tacitly agree not to remind one another of the awe-inspiring wonder of their nudity.

  10. There is the story of a nineteenth-century pious young virgin who, on the day of her wedding, was warned by her mother, ‘Tonight, it will seem your husband has gone mad, but you will find he has recovered by morning.’ Is the mind not offensive precisely because it symbolizes a refusal of this insanity, seeming like an unfair way of keeping one’s head while others are losing their breath?

  11. In the course of what Masters and Johnson have called a plateau period, Chloe looked up at me and asked,

  ‘What are you thinking about, Socrates?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I answered.

  ‘Bullshit, I can see it in your eyes, what are you smiling about?’

  ‘Nothing, I tell you, or else everything, a thousand things, you, the evening, how we ended up here, how strange and yet comfortable it feels.’

  ‘Strange?’

  ‘I don’t know, yes, strange, I suppose I’m being absurdly self-conscious about things.’

  Chloe laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Turn round for a second.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just turn over.’

  On one side of the room, positioned over a chest of drawers and angled so it had been in Chloe’s field of vision, was a large mirror that showed both of our bodies lying together, entangled in the bed linen.

  Had Chloe been watching us all the while?

  ‘I’m sorry, I should have told you,’ she smiled, ‘it’s just I didn’t want to ask – not on the first night. It might have made you self-conscious.’

  6

  Marxism

  1. When we look at someone (an angel) from a position of unrequited love and imagine the pleasures that being in heaven with them might bring us, we are prone to overlook a significant danger: how soon their attractions might pale if they began to love us back. We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as ideal as we are corrupt. But what if such a being were one day to turn around and love us back? We can only be shocked. How could they be divin
e as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us? If in order to love, we must believe that the beloved surpasses us in some way, does not a cruel paradox emerge when we witness this love returned? ‘If s/he really is so wonderful, how could s/he could love someone like me?’

  2. There is no richer territory for students of romantic psychology than the atmosphere of the morning after. But Chloe had other priorities upon stumbling out of sleep. She went to wash her hair in the bathroom next door and I awoke to hear water crashing on tiles. I remained in bed, encasing myself in the shape and smell of her body that lingered in the sheets. It was Saturday morning, and the timid rays of a December sun were filtering through the curtains. It was a privilege to be curled up in Chloe’s inner sanctum, looking at the objects that made up her daily life, at the walls she woke to every morning, at her alarm clock, a packet of aspirins, her watch and her earrings on the bedside table. My love manifested itself as a fascination for everything Chloe owned, for the material signs of a life I had yet fully to discover but that seemed infinitely rich, full of the wonder the everyday takes on in the hands of an extraordinary being. There was a bright yellow radio in one corner, a print by Matisse was leaning against a chair, her clothes from the night before were hanging in the closet by the mirror. On the chest of drawers there was a pile of paperbacks, next to it, her handbag and keys, a bottle of mineral water and Guppy the elephant. By a form of transference, I fell in love with everything she owned, it all seemed so intriguing, tasteful, different from what one could ordinarily buy in the shops.