When I was young, I was deeply committed to a life of love: my twenties were a string of intense affairs and serious long-term relationships interrupted only by brief periods of singledom.  I loved to love, to be loved: the tender kisses, the holding hands, the constant person to lean on.  I loathe to admit it but I’ve always devoured sappy romantic comedies and weepy chick flicks: my earliest memories are singing along with Roy Orbison during the ending credits of Pretty Woman (a movie, I now realize, for a four year old was wildly inappropriate).  These movies all seemed to say one thing: love is an integration of two inadequate, incomplete halves to make a perfect whole; to be happy, you had to have someone.  I blame these enduring myths of modern knights in shining armor for my deep-seated terror of being alone.

Because I thought love was a need rather than a want, I leaped from relationship to relationship, becoming a sort of serial monogamist.  The result?  I lost who I was (after all, isn’t that, to some extent, what a relationship is: a steady dissolution of self?).  Perhaps love is always a kind of osmosis, a process by which our personality passes through a semipermeable membrane and intermingles with that of someone else.  In a relationship, two independent, autonomous “I’s” merge into an indivisible “we”: we adopt their preferences, we trade tastes in books and movies.  In an ideal relationship, this would be an equal exchange between partners.  But in a lopsided union, only one partner is assimilated into the culture of the other, absorbing their viewpoints, their philosophies, their beliefs, their ideas.

This subsumption of self begins with the very first date.  During the initial stages of infatuation, we long for one thing: our beloved.  In order to allure our lover, we’ll do almost anything from pretend to be obsessed with their favorite band to overstate our admiration for Jack Kerouac.  Dating is a masquerade ball where we conceal our real self behind many masks.  Existing at the intersection of psychology and philosophy, the idea-orientation of an essay and the narrative-orientation of a novel, Alain de Botton’s On Love explores this phenomenon with great wit.  Though a portrait of a single couple, a nameless narrator and Chloe, his beloved, the story gives us broader insight into the riddles of attraction and seduction, desire and love.  In one of my favorite chapters “Authenticity,” our narrator takes Chloe to Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a chic new French restaurant on Fulham Road.  In an exquisite sentence that superbly captures the timidity and tension of a first date, de Botton writes:

“I had lost all capacity either to think or speak, only able to draw silently invisible patterns on the starched white table cloth and take unnecessary sips of bubbled water from a glass goblet.” 

But why is it so nerve-wracking to get to know someone?  Why do we get the first date jitters, even the most seemingly self-assured among us?

When we go on a date, especially with someone we’re fond of, dinner is no longer casual, convivial conversation over the clink of champagne glasses and beef bourguignon— it’s a performance carried out with the intent to seduce someone.  The label of “date” transforms a simple evening out into a blinding extravaganza of sparkling costumes and Oscar-worthy drama.  If, as Fitzgerald wrote in his quintessential American masterpiece, personality is an “unbroken series of successful gestures,” so is seduction.  In many ways, seduction is a form of acting, a theater where our behavior is not spontaneous but carefully calculated and rehearsed.  Dating requires we play a part.  After all, if on a first date we were completely, unreservedly ourselves, would anyone ever love us?  Probably not.  No potential paramour would be enthralled by our annoying habit of always arriving at least thirty minutes late or won over by our troubled history of abusive relationships and alcoholism.  Just as we adopt the role of perfectly punctual, reliable candidate when interviewing for a job, on the stage of seduction, we craft ourselves into the character we imagine our beloved most wants:

“Out of this perceived inferiority emerged the need to take on a personality that was not directly my own, a seducing self that would locate and respond to the demands of this superior being.  Did love condemn me not to be myself?  Perhaps not forever, but, if it was to be taken seriously, it did at this stage of seduction, for the seducing position was one that led me to ask What would appeal to her? rather than What appeals to me?  I asked How would she perceive my tie? rather than How do I judge it?  Love forced me to look at myself as through the imagined eyes of the beloved.  Not Who am I? but Who am I for her?  And in the reflexive movement of that question, my self could not help but grow tinged with a certain bad faith and inauthenticity.”

On some level, dating always requires we exchange our authentic self for a fictitious one.  Though he desires one of Les Liaisons Dangereuses’s delectable wines, the narrator resists for fear of looking like a drunkard when Chloe only orders a glass of water.  Abstaining from a glass of pinot noir may sound trivial but it represents one of a million ways seduction demands we reject who we really are and assume a persona:

“If staying true to oneself is deemed an essential criterion of moral selfhood, then seduction had led me to resolutely fail the ethical test.  Why had I lied about my feelings toward a delicious-looking selection of wines, prominently advertised on a blackboard above Chloe’s head?  Because my choice had suddenly seemed inadequate and crude next to her mineral thirst.  Seduction had split me in two, into a true [alcoholic] self and a false [aquatic] one.”

In a witty if not altogether serious moment, the narrator encounters a serious roadblock on his route to seduce his beloved: he knows little about her.  How, he wonders, can he mold himself into the role of her ideal lover if he doesn’t have the script for the part?

“Given my wish to seduce Chloe, it was essential that I find out more about her.  How could I abandon my true self unless I knew what false self to adopt?  But this was no easy task, a reminder that understanding another requires hours of careful attention and interpretation, teasing a coherent character from a thousand words and actions.  Unfortunately, the patience and intelligence required went far beyond the capacities of my anxious, infatuated mind.  I behaved like a reductive social psychologist, eager to press a person into simple definitions, unwilling to apply the care of a novelist to capturing the polyvalence of human nature.”

When we first meet someone, they are black-and-white, as bare as the stark outlines of a spaceship in a coloring book.  It is only with time that we can color in the lines and a clearer, more three-dimensional picture of who they are can emerge.  Because they’ve only just met, the narrator sets out to get to know Chloe better.  In a painfully relatable scene, he fumbles clumsily through first date conversation, asking canned questions with the stiff formality of a job interviewer: 

“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 crappy, 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.”].”

What I love about de Botton is his ability to extract weighty philosophical significance from the seemingly mundane.  For him, a first date isn’t just friendly chit chat at a cafe: it’s an occasion for in-depth examination of human mating.  Much like the peacock displays his magnificent iridescent feathers to attract a mate, we homo sapiens put on countless poses to impress a potential partner.  A man on a first date, for example, might boast about his six figure salary or make it a point to pick up his paramour in his brand new Tesla.  A woman, on the other hand, might entice a lover with a tantalizingly low neckline or a spritz of her most mesmerizing perfume from Dolce & Gabbana.  Ultimately, dating is a spectacle where we wear innumerable costumes.  And what is a costume but a kind of impersonation?  a means of convincing our audience that we are someone infinitely more interesting than ourselves?

Though an elaborate ensemble might dazzle with its embellishment, it will always be uncomfortable compared to our workaday clothes.  The contraptions of a costume, the zippers and clasps and buttons, are far more confining than our usual uniform of jeans and a tee shirt.  Dating is exhausting because we can’t fuss with a too tight blouse or a sexy but too revealing short skirt— we have to keep up a charade.  But just as an actor must eventually take off his stage attire and return to real life, we can’t maintain a facade forever: in time, if we are to truly love and be loved, we have to unveil who we are.  In an analogy that aptly captures the laborious difficulty and overall uneasiness of pretending to be someone we’re not, Botton parallels his authentic self to a corpulent man and what he imagines Chloe wants to a too small suit:

“The evening was a process resembling a fat man’s trying to fit into a suit that is too small for him.  There was a desperate attempt to repress the bulges that did not fit the cut of the fabric, to shrink my waist and hold my breath so that the material would not tear.  It was not surprising if my posture was not as spontaneous as I might have liked.  How can a fat man in a suit too small for him feel spontaneous?  He is so frightened the suit will split, he is forced to sit in complete stillness, holding his breath and praying he can get through the evening without disaster.”

On Love penetrates the complexities of the human heart and is brilliant from start to finish (as is always the case with Alain de Botton).  For more penetrating insights into this at times maddening aspect of the human experience, read de Botton on the lover as a detective obsessed with decoding symbols and discerning meaning, love as the origin of beauty, and love’s two stages: idealization and disillusionment.  If you’re more interested in his philosophical musings on success and status, revisit him on status as the construction of culture, how gazing upon once great ruins can cure us of our status anxiety, and how expectation causes anxiety, malaise and discontentment.

What is the secret to seduction?  For Marcel Proust, the answer is two words: denial and delay. “There is no doubt that a person’s charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: ‘No, this evening I shan’t be free,'” he once said.  What makes a potential paramour so appealing is their very potentiality: the fact that they remain a distant horizon instead of a familiar shore makes us desire them all the more desperately.  First love is exciting because there’s an element of uncertainty.  When a crush is just a crush instead of a long-term partner, we’re not certain of anything: does he/she like me?  if I declare my love, will my feelings be reciprocated?  or will I be met with the most demoralizing rebuff in the English language (“Oh, I really like you but not in that way…”).

The early days of love are equal parts excitement and torture.  On one hand, it’s thrilling to get to know someone: on the stage of dating, each party performs a role and exhibits only their best behavior.  Before a heart-racing one-night stand transforms into monogamous matrimony, we don’t really know our possible lover: he/she is simply an embodiment of our fantasies and desires.  Each silence in the conversation, each lingering, too-long glance offers the opportunity to project what we most long for.  But therein lies the torture.  Was our beloved’s invitation to a movie Saturday night really a bold romantic gesture?  or was it simply the request of a purely platonic friend and not a lover?  When he/she holds our hand as we stroll through the aisles of the grocery store is it a sign of deeper commitment or an act merely undertaken out of obligation because we’re sleeping together?

No one explores the obsessiveness of first love with more charmingly British wit and humorous insight than Alain De Botton.  In his best-selling part-novel, part-philosophical inquiry, On Love, Botton maps the topography of romantic relationships from the exhilarating heights of initial attraction to the devastating deserts of heartache and despair.  When his nameless narrator first falls in love with Chloe, he exhibits all the tell-tale signs of lovesickness: an undying, irrational devotion to the beloved, a mind made mad by obsessive-compulsion, a pathological tendency to locate meaning in the smallest deeds from an innocent “hello, how are you this morning?” to a passing text.  As Botton writes, love is a language brimming with indecipherable words and meanings that are difficult to detect:

“Every smile and every word reveals itself as an avenue leading to a dozen if not twelve thousand possibilities.  Gestures and remarks that in normal life [that is, life without love] can be taken at face value now exhaust dictionaries with possible definitions.  And, for the seducer at least, the doubts reduce themselves to one central question, faced with the trepidation of a criminal awaiting sentence: Does s/he, or s/he not, desire me?” 

To be in love is to be in a state of perpetual distraction.  Whether we’re only pretending to listen to our best friend or are absent-mindedly looking out the window while our tweed-jacketed professor is lecturing about Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when we’re in love, we can think of only one thing: our beloved.  He/she is an all-consuming obsession, the epicenter around which all other thoughts pivot:

“Though under pressure to complete plans for an office near King’s Cross, my mind drifted irresponsibly but irresistibly back to her.  There was a need to circle around this object of adoration.  She kept breaking into my consciousness with the urgency of a matter that had to be addressed, though these thoughts were part of no agenda; they were [objectively speaking] desperately uninteresting, having no development or point to them.  They were pure desire.” 

Why is love at once ecstasy and agony?  Botton would say the answer is uncertainty.  After all, the initial stages of love are defined by a lack of knowledge.  Is the man we’re sleeping with actually interested in us or merely using us for our bodies?  Does our crush view dinner and drinks as a rendezvous of lovers or a platonic evening between friends?  Is he/she as enamored of us as we are of them?  Behind every exchange lies a mysterious subtext. 

Words that at one time only had a single meaning now have countless definitions.  Take, for example, a smile.  Oxford English Dictionary defines smile (v.) rather unambiguously as “to form one’s features into a pleased or kind expression, typically with the corners of the mouth turned up and the front teeth exposed.”  But in the romantic arena, the meaning of a smile is manifold: it can be a coy come hither invitation to greater flirtation or simply a sign that our love interest is carefree and convivial; it can express smugness or amusement, derision or approval.  And what of a graze of the arm?  Does he gently caress you to establish intimacy?  Or does she only brush the arm of your blazer to entice you to buy her one more round?  In love, there are endless questions but few answers.  As the narrator recounts his first date with Chloe, he writes:

“Questions pursued me throughout seduction, questions relating to the unmentionable subtext of every word and action.  What did Chloe think as we made our way to Trafalgar Square from her office in Bedford Street?  The evidence was tantalizingly ambiguous.  On the one hand, Chloe had been happy to take the afternoon off to tour a museum with a man she had only briefly met in an airplane a week before.  But on the other, there was nothing in her behavior to suggest this was anything but an opportunity for an intelligent discussion on art and architecture.  Perhaps all this was simply friendship, a maternal, sexless bond of a female for a male.  Suspended between innocence and collusion, Chloe’s every gesture had become imbued with maddening significance.  Did she know I desired her?  Did she desire me?  Was I correct in detecting traces of flirtation at the ends of her sentences and the corners of her smiles, or was this merely my own desire projected onto the face of innocence?”

Ideally, words are mathematical equations: a single word equals a single meaning.  But in love, words (not to mention actions) are no longer solid anchors affixed to one singular stable definition— they are bobbing buoys floating free of fixed significance: on a first date, it’s just as likely that a man’s offer to pay is a generosity demanded by old-fashioned heteronormative notions of gender as a genuinely thoughtful gesture.  Similarly, an “I had such a good time” text after a date can mean he sincerely enjoyed your company and can’t wait to see you again or he’s only texting as a common courtesy— there will be no part two in your short-lived saga. 

In love, text messages become cryptic codes to decipher, incomprehensible foreign languages in need of translation.  Why, we wonder, did he use a period instead of his usual lack of punctuation?  What is the significance of a strategically placed smiley face?  What do all his conventional expressions of endearment (“honey”/”cutie”/”babe”) really mean?  Does he only address us in these affectionate terms because he’s performing his socially defined role as masculine courter?  Is all love a stage and are we merely players?  Or do his adoring words contain hints of genuine feeling?  When we’re besotted with a beloved, anything and everything has meaning:

“As soon as one begins looking for signs of mutual attraction, then everything that the beloved says or does can be taken to mean almost anything.  And the more I looked for signs, the more there were of them to read.  In every movement of Chloe’s body, there seemed to be potential evidence of desire— in the way she straightened her skirt [as we crossed into Early Northern Painting], or coughed by van Eyck’s The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini, or handed me the catalogue in order to rest her head on her hand.  And when I listened closely to her conversation, it too revealed itself as a minefield of clues— was I wrong to read a degree of flirtation in her remark that she was tired, or her suggestion we look for a bench?”

Ultimately, love is a maddening form of reading, the lover, an enigmatic text.  Romance operates by hints and implication— little is directly said.  After all, when we’re lovesick for someone, do we confess our infatuation?  When someone is smitten with us, do we expect them to simply state, in no uncertain terms, the depths of their devotion?  Of course not: the language of love consists not of easily understandable modes of expression, but a series of strange symbols as inscrutable as ancient hieroglyphics.  To solve the puzzle of our paramour, we have to read between the lines of what is done and said.

The result?  We become romantic schizophrenics and drive ourselves mad with over-analysis.  Desire behaves like a drug, injecting an intoxicating, addictive surge of dopamine straight to our brains and impairing our intellect.  Soon the most trivial things take on colossal significance: a tender kiss over coffee and breakfast is an indication our connection is not purely physical but also romantic, an invitation to the family dinner of our sort-of-boyfriend is a sure sign things are getting serious.

Struck by Cupid’s bow, we begin to read less and less critically.  Because we so hopelessly yearn for our lover to love us, we can no longer distinguish what we see from what we want to see.  Rather than use rationality to interpret the raw data of our experience, we have a tendency toward confirmation bias, a systematic (and tragic) error of reasoning:

“It was desire that had turned me into this detective, a relentless hunter for clues that would have been ignored had I been less afflicted.  It was desire that made me into a romantic paranoiac, reading meaning into everything.  Desire had transformed me into a decoder of symbols, an interpreter of the landscape [and therefore a potential victim of the pathetic fallacy].

[…]

“Nothing of what she said could I take at face value.  I clung instead to the underbelly of her words, sure the meaning lay there rather than its obvious location, interpreting instead of listening.  We were talking of love, my Venus idly stirring her now-cold tea, but what did this conversation mean for us.  Who were these “most people” she spoke of?  Was I the man who would dispel her cynicism? 

[…]

Or was this a ridiculous suggestion?  Was there nothing on the table but a half-eaten carrot cake and two cups of tea?  Was Chloe perhaps being as abstract as she wished?  Did she mean precisely what she was saying, the diametrical opposite of the first rule of flirtation, where what is said is never what is meant?  How hard it was to keep a level head, when Cupid was a biased interpreter, when it was so clear what he wanted to be true.  Was he attributing to Chloe an emotion that only he felt?  Was he guilty of the age-old error whereby the thought that I desire you is mistakenly equated with the corresponding thought You desire me?” 

Quintessential lady’s man Casanova once said, “love is three quarters curiosity.”  In On Love, Botton’s narrator recognizes this fundamental law, noting the key to seduction is concealment, not disclosure:

“Yet whatever my impatience, nor were these questions free of the inflaming power of all things enigmatic.  The ambiguity promised either salvation or damnation, but demanded a lifetime to reveal itself.  And the longer I hoped, the more the person I hoped for became exalted, miraculous, perfect, worth hoping for.  The very delay helped to increase desirability, an excitement that instant gratification could never have provided.  Had Chloe simply shown her cards, the game would have lost its charm.  However much I resented it, I recognized that things needed to remain unsaid.  The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between two extremes.” 

An astute analysis of the human heart, On Love is a delight from start to finish.  For more witty insights into this at times maddening aspect of the human experience, read De Botton on dating as a sort of performative play-acting, love as the origin of beauty, and love’s two stages: idealization and disillusionment.  If you’re more interested in his philosophical musings on success and status, revisit De Botton on status as the construction of culture, how expectation causes anxiety, malaise and discontentment, and how gazing upon once great ruins can cure us of our status anxiety.