Then I find reasons to hate that person and think about how they failed to understand me, this super spEciAl and diFfeReNT person.

I am more than aware of the numerous red flags that stick out of my back and I’m certain there are more that I’m not even conscious of. Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and out weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble.It's a book that contains moments of high humour and accurately depicts the frustrations, confusions, joy and desolate despair that only romantic entanglement can bring. Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves? We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other.

I also think that the resentment we feel for our lover (who is holding us back from dating others) is terrifying.I think when relationships don’t turn out the way you want them to, it’s so easy to go back into your shell and wallow. Alain de Botton is the author of Essays in Love (1993), The Romantic Movement (1994), Kiss and Tell (1995), How Proust can Change your Life (1997), The Consolations of Philosophy (2000) The Art of Travel (2002), Status Anxiety (2004) and most recently, The Architecture of Happiness (2006). It is one of the ironies of love that it is easiest confidently to seduce those to whom we are least attracted. The sulker is a complicated creature, giving off messages of deep ambivalence, crying out for help and attention, while at the same time rejecting it should it be offered, wanting to be understood without needing to speak. So, to have it written that even the best relationships don’t have that element of complete vulnerability was heartening.

Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believe the the beloved now that they believe in us? While gripping the reader with the talent of a great novelist, de Botton brings a philosopher's sensibility to his analysis of the emotions of love, resulting in a genre-breaking book that is at once touching and thought-provoking. Then again, I wouldn’t say I have a lot of experience in this realm so I probably need to get a second opinion.As in a novel, there are characters and realistic settings, but these are blended in with a host of more abstract ideas. That made me want to realign my goal for beauty (which is, currently, stuck in an Audrey Hepburn-esque body) to being associated with warmth and kindness and comfort. This is the kind of book that we should have read in PSHE rather than watching pointless videos about puberty. I’m also very good at nursing grudges so that and my disappointed idealism are a devastating combination. Essentially, if self-love wins, then both partners understand their love is reciprocated not because their partners are idiots but because they themselves are truly lovable.

Imagine, of all impossible things, a young British Woody Allen with the benefit of a classical education and you have the nameless and exquisitely erudite narrator of Essays in Love. The book's success has much to do with its beautifully modelled sentences, its wry humour and its unwavering deadpan respect for its reader's intelligence .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 the two extremes.