Essays In Love

by Alain De Botton

  9. What is the point of this story? It merely shows that though one may be living under a delusion (love, the belief that one is an egg), if one finds the complementary part of it (another lover like Chloe under a similar delusion, a piece of toast) then all may be well. Delusions are not harmful in themselves, they only hurt when one is alone in believing in them, when one cannot create an environment in which they can be sustained. So long as both Chloe and I could preserve the yolk of love intact, what did it matter quite what the truth was?

  13

  Intimacy

  1. Watching a cube of sugar dissolve into a cup of camomile tea, Chloe, whose company I relied upon to make my life meaningful, remarked, ‘We can’t move in together because of my problem: I have to live on my own or else I melt. It’s not that I don’t want you, it’s that I’m afraid of wanting only you, of finding that there’s nothing left of me. So excuse it as part of my general screwed-upness, but I’m afraid I have to stay a bag lady.’

  2. I had first seen Chloe’s bag at Heathrow Airport, a bright pink cylinder with a luminous green shoulder strap. She had arrived at my door with it the first night she came to stay, once more apologizing for its offensive colours, saying she had used it to pack a toothbrush and a set of fresh clothes for the next day. I had assumed the bag would be temporary, but she never gave it up, repacking it every morning as though this might be the last time we would ever see one another, as though to leave even a pair of earrings behind created an unsustainable risk of dissolution.

  3. Yet whatever her enthusiasm for independence, with time Chloe nevertheless began leaving things behind. Not toothbrushes or pairs of shoes, but pieces of herself. It began with language, with Chloe leaving me her way of saying not ever instead of never, and of stressing the be of before, or of saying take care before hanging up the telephone. She in turn acquired use of my perfect and if you really think so. Habits began to leak between us: I acquired Chloe’s need for total darkness in the bedroom, she followed my way of folding the newspaper, I took to wandering in circles around the sofa to think a problem through, she acquired a taste for lying on the carpet.

  4. Diffusion brought with it intimacy. The borders between us ceased to be strictly patrolled. Our bodies no longer felt watched or judged. Chloe could read in bed and slide a finger into her nostril to clear an obstruction, roll it into a ball till it was dry and hard, and swallow it whole – without needing to hide or apologize. We could risk intervals of silence, we were no longer paranoid talkers, unwilling to let the conversation drop lest tranquillity seem unfaithful. We grew assured of ourselves in the other’s mind, rendering perpetual seduction (stemming from a fear of the opposite) obsolete.

  5. I got to know not only Chloe’s opinions and habits, but also the finer grain of her being: the sound of her voice when she spoke on the phone in the next room, the rumble of her stomach when she was hungry, her expression before a sneeze, the shape of her eyes when she awoke, the way she shook a wet umbrella, and the sound of a brush through her hair.

  6. An awareness of each other’s particularities gave us a need to rename one another. Chloe and I had met with names given to us by our parents and formalized by passports and birth registers and naturally found that the more private knowledge we had acquired of one another deserved to find expression (however oblique) in names that others didn’t use. Whereas in her office, Chloe was Chloe, to me, for reasons neither of us ever quite understood, she became known simply as Tidge. For my part, because I had once amused her with talk of a word for the pessimistic outlook of German intellectuals, I became known, perhaps less mysteriously, as Weltschmerz. The importance of these nicknames lay not in the particular name we had landed on – we might have ended up calling one another Pwitt and Tic – but in the fact that we had chosen to relabel one another. Tidge suggested a knowledge of Chloe that Roy in accounts did not possess (the knowledge of the sound of a brush through her hair). Whereas Chloe belonged to her civil status, Tidge lay beyond the ordinary social realm, in the more secret and unique folds of love.

  7. In each other’s company, we spent a good deal of time discussing how awful other people were. Unable to express ourselves honestly in most of our daily interactions, we could between us aerate our lies and atone for the social niceties we had performed. Chloe became the final repository of my harsh verdicts on friends or colleagues. Things I had long thought about them but had tried to deny, I was free to share with a sympathetic and even encouraging audience. We frequently indulged in orgies of gossip. Whatever the pleasures of discovering mutual loves, nothing compares with the intimacy of landing on mutual hates. At times, we came close to concluding (though coyness prevented us from quite admitting this openly) that everyone we’d ever come across was deeply flawed – and that we were in truth the only decent humans left on the planet. Love nourished itself through perpetual criticism of outsiders. The finest proof of our loyalty towards one other was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.

  8. We retreated into each other’s company to laugh at the hypocrisy demanded by society. We returned from formal work dinners and mocked the accents and opinions of those to whom we had politely said goodbye minutes before. We might in bed replay a conversation we had just had. I would impersonate a bearded journalist Chloe had spoken to, she would reply as she had done originally, all this while she masturbated me beneath the sheets. I would pretend to be shocked to find Chloe’s hand where it was and ask her in the tone of a virginal parson: ‘Madam, what on earth are you doing with my honourable member?’ ‘Sir,’ she would reply like an aristocratic lady in a period drama, ‘I have no idea how this dishonourable member ever came to be in my sight.’ Or she would leap out of bed and scream, ‘Sir, please leave my bed immediately, or I will have to call my manservant Bernard.’ In our intimacy, social formalities found themselves rerun in a comic light, like a tragedy which is spoofed by the actors backstage, the actor playing Hamlet seizing Gertrude after the performance and shouting through the dressing room, ‘Fuck me, Mummy!’

  9. We even started to acquire a story. Love seems indispensably connected to stories. ‘One day, a boy met a girl’ is enough for an audience to start to want to know what happened next. Powering most love stories are obstacles. Paul and Virginie, Anna and Vronsky, Tarzan and Jane tend to struggle against odds that confirm and enrich their bond. In a jungle, on a shipwrecked boat or the side of a mountain, the classic romantic couple proves the strength of its love by the vigour with which it overcomes adversities.

  10. But there wasn’t much adventure or struggle around to be had. The world that Chloe and I lived in had largely been stripped of capacities for epic conflict. Our parents didn’t care, the jungle had been tamed, society hid its disapproval behind universal tolerance, restaurants stayed open late, credit cards were accepted almost everywhere, and sex was a duty, not a crime. Yet Chloe and I did have a modest story of our own, a set of common experiences that bonded us together. What is an experience? Something that breaks a polite routine and for a brief period allows us to witness things with the heightened sensitivity afforded to us by novelty, danger, or beauty – and it’s on the basis of shared experiences that intimacy is given an opportunity to grow. Friendships nourished solely by occasional dinners will never have the depth of those forged on a trek or at a university. Two people who are surprised by a lion in a jungle clearing will – unless one of them is eaten – be effectively bonded by what they have seen.

  11. Chloe and I were never surprised by a predator, but we lived through a host of small urban experiences. Returning from a party one warm summer’s night, we came across a dead body. The corpse lay on the corner of Charlwood Street and Belgrave Road. It was a beautiful young woman who looked at first as though she had collapsed drunk on the pavement. But as we were about to pass her, Chloe noticed the handle of a knife sticking out of her stomach. How much does one know of someone till one has seen a corpse with them? We kneeled down over the body, Chloe took on the voice of a pil
ot commandeering an agitated or plain hysterical crew (me) during an emergency landing, told me not to look, got me to call the police, checked the woman’s pulse, and carefully left everything as she had found it. I felt in awe of her professionalism, though in the middle of police questioning she broke into uncontrollable sobbing and was unable to banish the image of the knife handle for several weeks. It was a barbaric incident, but one that served to unite us. We spent the rest of the night awake, drinking whisky in my apartment, telling each other a series of increasingly macabre and silly stories, impersonating policemen and corpses with kitchen knives in order to exorcize our fears.

  12. A few months later, we were in a bagel shop in Brick Lane, when an elegant man in a pinstripe suit next to us in the queue silently handed Chloe a crumpled note, on which was scrawled in large letters the words: ‘I love you.’ Chloe opened the piece of paper, swallowed hard on reading it, then looked back at the man who had given it to her. But he had chosen to act as though nothing had happened and simply stared out at the street with the dignified expression of a man in a pinstripe suit. So just as innocently, Chloe folded the note and slipped it into her pocket. The bizarreness of the incident meant that, as with the corpse only more light-heartedly, it became something of a leitmotif in our relationship, an incident in our story to which we constantly alluded. In restaurants, we would occasionally silently slip one another notes with all the mystery of the man in the bagel shop, but with only the message Please pass the salt written on them. For anyone watching, it must have seemed odd and incomprehensible to see us collapsing into giggles. But the essence of leitmotifs is that they refer back to incidents others cannot understand because they were absent from the founding scene. No wonder if such self-referential, egotistical behaviour drives those standing on the sidelines to distraction.

  13. There were plenty of other joint experiences – people we had encountered or things we had seen, done, or heard – which helped to create a common heritage. There was a psychoanalyst we met at a dinner who told Chloe that he was currently sleeping with two of his patients. There was my friend Will Knott who, having initially taken little interest in Chloe, started sending her obscure books on architecture accompanied by quizzical notes (‘Who can say how long each of us will stand??!’ ran one, appended to Steel – the Material of the Future). There was the toy giraffe we bought in Bath to keep Chloe’s elephant company on the bed and ended up calling Geoffrey after a long-necked colleague of Chloe’s at work. And there was a meeting with an accountant on a train who confessed she always carried a gun in her handbag.

  14. Interest did not naturally belong to such anecdotes. For the most part, only Chloe and I appreciated them, because of the subsidiary associations we attached to them. Yet these leitmotifs were important because they gave us the feeling that we were far from strangers to one another, that we had lived through things together, and remembered the joint meanings we had derived from them. However slight these leitmotifs were, they acted like cement. The language of intimacy they helped to create was a reminder that (without clearing our way through jungles, slaying dragons, or even sharing apartments) Chloe and I had created something of a world together.

  14

  ‘I’-Confirmation

  1. Late one Sunday in the middle of July, we were sitting in a cafe at the unkempt end of the Portobello Road. It had been a beautiful day, spent largely in Hyde Park, tanning and reading books. But since around five o’clock, I had been sliding into depression. I felt like going home to hide under the bedclothes. Sunday evenings had long saddened me, reminders of death, unfinished business, guilt, and loss. We had been sitting in silence, Chloe reading the papers, I gazing through the window at the traffic and people outside. Suddenly she leaned over, gave me a kiss, and whispered, ‘You’re wearing your lost orphan boy look again.’ No one had ever ascribed such an expression to me before, though when Chloe mentioned it, it at once accorded with and alleviated the confused sadness I happened to be feeling at the time. I felt an intense (and perhaps disproportionate) love for her on account of that remark, because of her awareness of what I had been feeling but had been unable to formulate myself, for her willingness to enter my world and objectify it for me – a gratefulness for reminding the orphan that he is an orphan, and hence returning him home.

  2. Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone there who can understand what we are saying, in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.

  3. What does it mean that man is a ‘social animal’? Only that humans need one another in order to define themselves and achieve self-consciousness, in a way that molluscs or earthworms do not. We cannot come to a proper sense of ourselves if there aren’t others around to show us what we’re like. ‘A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character,’ wrote Stendhal, suggesting that character has its genesis in the reactions of others to our words and actions. Our selves are fluid and require the contours provided by our neighbours. To feel whole, we need people in the vicinity who know us as well, sometimes better, than we know ourselves.

  4. Without love, we lose the ability to possess a proper identity, within love, there is a constant confirmation of our selves. It is no wonder that the concept of a God who can see us has been central to many religions: to be seen is to be assured that we exist, all the better if one is dealing with a God (or partner) who loves us. Surrounded by people who precisely do not remember who we are, people to whom we often relate our stories and yet who will repeatedly forget how many times we have been married, how many children we have, and whether our name is Brad or Bill, Catrina or Catherine (and we forget much the same about them), is it not comforting to be able to find refuge from the dangers of invisibility in the arms of someone who has our identity firmly in mind?

  5. It is no coincidence if, semantically speaking, love and interest are almost interchangeable, ‘I love butterflies’ meaning much the same as ‘I am interested in butterflies’. To love someone is to take a deep interest in them, and by such concern to bring them to a richer sense of what they are doing and saying. Through her understanding, Chloe’s behaviour towards me gradually became studded with elements of what could be termed ‘I’-confirmation. Contained in her understanding of many of my moods, in her knowledge of my tastes, in the things she told me about myself, in her memory of my routines and habits, and in her humorous acknowledgement of my phobias lay a multitude of varied ‘I’-confirmations. Chloe noticed that I was a hypochondriac, that I was shy and hated speaking on the phone, was obsessive in my need to get eight hours’ sleep a night, hated lingering in restaurants at the end of meals, used politeness as an aggressive defence, and preferred to say ‘maybe’ rather than yes or no. She would quote me back at myself (‘Last time, you said you didn’t like that kind of irony . . .’), patiently holding in mind elements – both good and bad – of my character (‘You always panic whenever . . .’ ‘I’ve never seen anyone forget petrol as often as you do . . . ‘). I was afforded a chance to mature thanks to the insights into my personality that Chloe afforded me. It takes the intimacy of a lover to point out facets of character that others simply don’t bother with. There were times when Chloe would tell me frankly that I was defensive or critical, or more colourfully, ‘a jumped-up twerp’ or ‘as nasty as congealed gravy’ – and I would be brought face to face with areas of myself that ordinary introspection (in the interests of inner harmony) would have avoided, that others would have been too uninterested to highlight, and that it needed the honesty of the bedroom to reveal.

  6. Happiness with other people seems bounded by two kinds of excess: suffocation and loneliness. Chloe had always felt the former to be the greater danger. Oppressed by the judgemental and controlling attitudes of her parents, at school she had dreamt of spending time wholly on her own – and in her year off before university, flew to Arizona on the proceeds of money she had saved up from years of holiday a
nd Saturday jobs. She rented a cabin on the edge of a tiny town she had picked almost at random on a map. She acquired a shelf full of books that she’d always longed to read, and which she intended to work her way through as she watched the sun rise and set over the moonscape. But within a few weeks of arriving, she began to feel the solitude that she had longed for all her life start to work a disorienting and frightening effect on her. The sound of her own voice came as a shock when she heard it in the shops. Her books felt remote and unengaging. She took to staring at herself in the mirror to retain a sense of being. She felt paranoid and ethereal. After only a month, she abruptly decided to leave her cabin for a job as a waitress in a restaurant in Phoenix, unable to bear any longer the feeling of unreality that had descended on her. When she reached Phoenix, social contact was like water to a parched survivor. She launched into conversations whenever she could, delighting in the comfort offered by the simplest exchanges.

  7. It was a long time before I was in any position to help Chloe to feel understood. Only slowly did I begin to unearth, from among the millions of words she spoke and actions she performed, the great themes of her life. In our knowledge of others, we are necessarily forced to interpret clues, we are like detectives or archaeologists who piece together stories from fragments, tracing the origins of a murder from a kitchen towel and a lemon squeezer or a civilization from a gardening implement and an earring. I often got it wrong. For example, it was a while before I quite appreciated the role of self-denial in her life. One morning in my flat, as we were having breakfast, she told me she had been ill in the night, had crept out of bed and driven to a chemist, all without waking me up. My first reaction was bewildered anger. Why had she not said something? Was our relationship really so distant that she couldn’t wake me up even in a crisis? But my anger (only a form of jealousy) was crude, it failed to take into account what I only gradually learnt: how deep-seated and pervasive was Chloe’s inclination to suffer in silence. She would have to have been near death before waking me, for everything about her wished not to place responsibility on others. Once I had located this strand in her nature, other aspects could be understood as related manifestations of it: her lack of acknowledged anger towards her parents (an anger that allowed itself expression only in savage irony), her self-deprecation, her harshness towards self-pitying people, her sense of duty, even her way of crying (muted sobs rather than hysterical wailing).