How To Find True Love , Alain de Botton

...generosity of interpretation...

Alain de Botton, How to think more about sex, quotes

Alain de Botton, How to think more about sex


"The act of sex plays out through the rubbing together of organs, but our excitement is no boorish physiological reaction; rather, it is an ecstasy we feel at encountering someone who may be able to put to rest certain of our greatest fears, and with whom we may hope to build a shared life based upon common values."

....

"Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately. We could age respectably, get used to our privileges and think we understood what was going on. We might disappear into numbers and words alone. It is sex that creates a necessary havoc in the ordinary hierarchies of power, status, money and intelligence."

Alain de Botton, quotes

i will not comment, often thought along these lines, but wish i wouldn't think..

"We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes.

How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right — in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable — given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.

The romantic story of love tells us that our search for a partner is inspired, above all else, by a desire to find someone who can make us happy. But the truth is a little more confused and peculiar, for one of the oddest aspects of love is that in tracking down a mate, we don’t, in fact, look out for just anyone who seems kind, good, and attractive. We look out for someone who can fulfill a number of pre-existing psychological requirements — which could include a subterranean appetite for frustration and humiliation.

We are constrained in our love choices by what we learned of love as children. Adult love is in central ways a search for rediscovery of emotions first known in childhood. In order to prove exciting and attractive, the partner we pick must re-evoke many of the feelings we once had around parental figures, and these feelings, though they may include tenderness and satisfaction, are also likely to feature a more troubling range of emotions.

[…]

Without being fully aware of our wish, we need our partner to have a failing that our parents once had, so that we can repeat a flawed but potent dynamic we once experienced as children.

[…]

It seems we are fated either to seek out the fault of a parent in a partner, or to mimic the fault of the parent with a partner. Either way, the fault of the parent remains central to our love choices. Without it, we may simply not be able to feel passionate and tender with someone. We might imagine we would only be attracted to admirable traits — to perfection, to very positive things about another — yet just below the conscious radar, it is the failings that lure us in.

Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton, interview

"..to learn art's general lesson which is it's power to reanimate our relationship with the world.."
a remark on the message of Proust




..nice also on kisses, welcome, exposure, on honesty and on editing ourselves, on oddities,
on sex, on relationships, on romanticism, on our travel through life..worth while listening

Alain de Botton on Romanticism

Alain de Botton, The Course of Love, quotes

"It may come very fast, this certainty that another human being is a soulmate. We needn't have spoken with them; we may not even know their name. Objective knowledge doesn't come into it. What matters instead is intuition: a spontaneous feeling that seems all the more accurate and worthy of respect because it bypasses the normal process of reason."

"Sexiness might at first appear to be a merely physiological phenomenon, the result of awakened hormones and stimulated nerve endings. But in truth it is not so much about sensations as it is about ideas- foremost among them, the idea of acceptance, and the promise of an end to loneliness and shame."

"Looked at through this ancient Greek lens, when lovers point out what might be unfortunate or uncomfortable about the other's character, they shouldn't be seen as giving up on the spirit of love.
They should be congratulated for trying to do something very true to love's essence: helping their partners to develop into better versions of themselves.

In a more evolved world, one a little more alive to the Greek ideal of love, we would perhaps know to be a little less clumsy, scared and aggressive when wanting to point something out, and rather less combative, and sensitive when receiving feedback. "


"Childhood sweetness: the immature part of goodness, as seen through the prism of adult experience, which is to say from the far side of a substantial amount of suffering, renunciation and discipline.
 We label as 'sweet' children's open display of hope, trust, spontaneity, wonder and simplicity-qualities which are under severe threat, but are deeply longed for in the ordinary run of grown-up life, The sweetness of children reminds us of how much we had to sacrifice on the path to maturity; the sweet is a vital part of ourselves-in exile."

Pronouncing a lover "perfect" can only be a sign that we have failed to understand them. We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially betrayed us."


In this book romanticism is being deeply questioned though the need to be loved is not being despised. the idea of love finds meaning.
No one can be fully understood, no one has no secrets .
There is a way to transcendence of self for another : but nobody is perfect. 
The secret of living  communication is in acceptance of each other.
I like this book.










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Perhaps..maybe

"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 who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved."

ALAIN DE BOTTON