Alain de Botton: ‘The hardest part about being single is that you never stop thinking about love’

Alain de Botton, 56, welcomes EL PAIS in a home undergoing renovation. He gives meticulous instructions to the builders with a smile. He explains that his former partner lives four doors down. Both of their buildings stick out among the Victorian homes in their London neighborhood of Camden. He says he’s finishing work on another home in Mallorca. He fell in love with the Spanish island 15 years ago. “It will be strange to live there. I’ve never spent time by a tree,” he says. “But I’m getting ready for the journey.” In the foyer, there are vases of flowers. Also, a Seneca quote carved into stone: “What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.” He sees me reading it and offers an interpretation: “If your expectations are realistic, you won’t need to cry.”

Question. Are you prepared for the worst?

Answer. No one is. But if you get to 56, you know the ups and downs of life. That’s why at this age, we like flowers.

Q. Flowers?

A. They speak to a moment of plenty. Young people aren’t satisfied with that moment alone.

Q. At 23 years old, you sold two million copies of Essays in Love. What did you know about the subject back then?

A. A 23-year-old person knows something that people of 56 have probably forgotten. Technical experience grows, but not the emotional. Love was new, extraordinary and intense.

Q. Twenty-one years later, you wrote The True Hard Work of Love.

A. I had learned about the perversion of love. We get into relationships that work against us. It is the story of Adam and Eve: they’re in paradise, yet they make their lives miserable.

Q. Why is that?

A. Perhaps it can only be understood through psychoanalysis. The way in which we love always goes back to the way we were loved as children. The same way we don’t remember how we learned to talk, we learn the language of love unconsciously, and that echoes. Imagine your parents scolded you all the time. What do you do if you break a glass? You keep quiet. Imagine that you no longer want to have sex, and you keep quiet so that no one gets mad.

Q. The protagonist in your book keeps quiet until he explodes.

A. I identify with that. I understand those who go quiet and those who get mad.

Q. Were you a silent child?

A. Yes. I didn’t like rough-and-tumble games or the company of boys. I preferred to sit with the girls and play dolls. From the age of eight until my teenage years, I lived in boarding schools. It was a difficult experience. I had a military education, a holdover from the British Empire that taught children to be little soldiers. To not cry or communicate emotions.

Q. What did you learn?

A. Patience. I was waiting to be rescued. Also, to care for the place where I live. And to protect my freedom, I don’t want anyone to tell me what to do.

Q. What rescued you?

A. I survived. Curiosity kept me alive.

Q. What interested you?

A. I saw that my parents weren’t happy. Individually, and also together. And I didn’t understand why. My father was born in Alexandria. He came from a Sephardic family that had fled Spain. When he had to leave Egypt, he went to Switzerland and met my mother. That’s where I grew up. They worked in finance. They were professionally successful, but at home they lived in a state of torment and anxiety. That could be why I became used to holding my tongue. Also, to self-analysis. It was a survival tactic. I needed to understand what made me sad, to try to avoid it.

Q. As a writer, you venture into philosophy, art, architecture —

A. Everything can help us understand ourselves better. That’s why we founded the School of Life, my business. There are 50 of us teaching people how to look at the world. The idea came to me after reading Pierre Hadot, who studied the philosophical schools and realized that the Platonic Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum and The Garden of Epicurus were businesses. That appealed to the entrepreneur in me. It was a desire to make what interests me into a community, since the writer is a solitary being. We founded the school in Bloomsbury, between a kebab shop and a hair salon.

Q. Is the street a university?

A. Of course. I grew up in a snobby world in which knowledge is limited to the great universities. And… I don’t think that’s healthy. The university does not own knowledge. In Cambridge, I supposedly got one of the best educations the United Kingdom can offer. It was terrible. I was an idiot at the beginning and an idiot at the end. I didn’t learn anything that helped me to question the world. I had to do it on my own. Academia carries a poison: it doesn’t challenge you to think anything without having read 1,000 books about what other people think.

Q. Is philosophy self-awareness?

A. It is many things. The Greek translation of the word, “love of knowledge,” is interpretable. If you ask a taxi driver, their response will be something similar. But if you ask the question at Oxford University, the response will derail you and will be completely abstract. I get letters from young people who are excited to study philosophy. They think they will learn to live, think and love. I warn them that they’re not going to learn that.

Q. Do you criticize intellectualism?

A. Wisdom does not require a specific vocabulary. My parents did not raise me on their own. They hired a nanny who was a key part of my life. She didn’t have much formal education, but she was intelligent and lovable. She was the most important adult in my childhood. A friend once told me, “You write books that your father and your nanny could understand.” She was the queen of asking why. In the United Kingdom, T.S. Eliot said that culture must be preserved by the elite. Perhaps because I grew up in Switzerland, I don’t believe in that. Switzerland is a wealthy but dignified society.

Q. It has its contradictions. It stays neutral and banks money, no questions asked.

A. Outwardly, the Swiss are boring. But they value security, right up until they cut the rope. You cannot live surrounded by high mountains without being affected by them.

Q. Why do you live in London?

A. Because of the English. By the time I was 12, I’d had enough of French. French culture is narrow. They are at odds with the modern world.

Q. You’ve become a psychotherapist.

A. I trained for four years at the University of London, after getting psychoanalysis myself for a decade, five times a week.

Q. How did psychoanalysis change you?

A. You open doors and closets. It laid the way to my becoming a psychotherapist. If you don’t know yourself, you can’t know, or help, anyone else. Now I have clients.

Q. You call them clients?

A. Psychoanalysis has patients. Psychotherapy, clients.

Q. Who can pay for psychoanalysis five times a week for 10 years?

A. It’s a luxury, but not in NW3 [the postal code of his London neighborhood]. [Sigmund] Freud lived here. A psychoanalyst lives in every other house. I know because the three analysts I went to all lived within a few minutes of one another.

Q. How did you decide which therapist worked for you?

A. Therapy is an art, not a science. With one, I understood my inner landscape. I centered myself. And they gave me the confidence to try becoming a therapist. As a child, I had a very sparse emotional education.

Q. Have you been better with your own children?

A. Probably, but I can’t bear my children suffering. I think I haven’t prepared them for the world. We have gone from having a demanding childhood to overprotecting our kids.

Q. You link beauty to the good life.

A. In German Switzerland, design is key. Think of the company Vitra or Peter Zumthor. That simple architecture defends an idea of beauty for all. Everything is beautiful: schools, the station, the hospital. And everything is well-made.

Q. Was your house beautiful?

A. Yes. We lived in a flat that had an exposed concrete floor. Raw, simple, but I felt it to be solid. The building had a bomb shelter where my sister and I played. I think that’s where I developed my love for materials. Later on in England, everything seemed frail to me. That could be why I have dedicated myself to building simple houses, to bring something of my childhood to this country.

Q. Do you make your living as a developer?

A. To a large extent. I have built modern housing, and I have learned to appreciate tradition, updating it. I am not interested in perpetuating it.

Q. You’ve said that people should begin relationships by explaining where their madness lies. Where is yours?

A. I’m like the sea: deep down I’m calm, but on the surface I’m very turbulent. I often wonder why everything affects me so deeply. I experience everything at a level ten when I should probably experience it at a six. Intensity is a form of madness. I’m extreme even in love. My madness shows itself because I’m drawn to difficult situations, suffering, and complicated people who don’t give me exactly what I think I need: calm.

Q. Are you sure you’re looking for peace?

A. Perhaps not. But peace is where I want to live.

Q. Your house is very orderly.

A. We decorate our homes not as we are, but as we wish to be. Think of the painter Agnes Martin. She was a schizophrenic and tormented woman. In contrast, her canvases are pure order. Their power comes from not being calm paintings. They are paintings that are trying to create calm. That’s what makes them so moving.

Q. You make mutually exclusive arguments: either polyamory or boredom. Either safe sex or excitement.

A. The mind has a natural temptation to break itself. Naomi Klein has written that babies imagine two mothers: one good and one bad. When they are frustrated, they kill the bad mother. When content, they embrace the good one. Until they realize that the mother is one: sometimes good, other times not. Maturity brings with it a certain kind of depression, that of reality. But that is in the medium term. I am still an extreme person, but I seek the middle position through humor.

Q. Can humor be used as a way of not feeling?

A. Without a doubt. To cover up something painful.

Q. You have written that marriage is a prank we play on the person we supposedly love.

A. Bringing anyone deeply into one’s world is to torment them. To wound is to be wounded. It is easier to be a good friend. If they deceive you… you let them go. In love, we should do what good friends do: not take anything for granted. “How wonderful, my partner didn’t make me cry today.” Getting married is choosing someone to suffer with.

Q. Why do we do it?

A. Fear of being alone? The hardest thing about being single is that you never stop thinking about love. It’s the same as when you have no money: you never think about anything else.

Q. You are separated.

A. That’s why. Love steals so much time. You have dates and… I don’t know how it works in Spain, but in a city like London, you only meet people through apps, and that makes contact difficult, because there are too many possibilities. A young woman gets, in an hour, more than 200 match requests. The amount of work she has to do to rule out those offers requires time. Before, when you met someone who interested you, you put effort into it. Getting to know, understand, and love someone is an effort. Not a blessing.

Q. Is there skill in loving?

A. Of course: listening, asking for forgiveness. You don’t have to agree. But you do have to listen. That should be taught in primary school.

Q. Do you listen?

A. In love, a good part of dialogue is defensive. “I didn’t say that. I don’t agree.” That is poison to a relationship. We live in sophisticated societies, but we don’t learn how to utilize the basic tools of love.

Q. You wrote that alcohol and Christianity were the great European narcotics.

A. I am interested in the great void that religion has left. Religions did a lot of good things: build communities, search for beauty. The seriousness of art and architecture is due to religion. Today, art is confusing. Why? Because religion has disappeared. We no longer know what it is to form part of a group. I wonder what can spiritually inspire us. The figure of Jesus Christ set an example by avoiding a simple “yes” or “no” and offering a third way. The ancient Greeks avoided extremes.

Q. But they had slaves...

A. Every era of the world, and in every era of a person, there are lessons that teach us something. Studying history should mean studying the position of the spirit in the evolution of humanity. Today we know more, but are we wiser? In Greece, they read less, but they reflected more. We lack their clarity.

Q. Michel de Montaigne wrote that in friendship, joyfulness is more important than intelligence.

A. Intelligence is the openness to experience. A good friend tells the truth. If someone says, “I had a sexual fantasy,” and you respond with “You had what?” no one will ever tell you anything. Helping others to explore themselves is what a psychotherapist does, in a friendly way. With some people, listening is one of life’s pleasures. With others, you feel that they have no room left to listen to other people’s complications. It is difficult to have friends. I have three. Two men and one woman. They are all interested in introspection. And they all have a mixture of darkness and humor.

Q. Why are you so interested in darkness?

A. That’s what we are, right? It’s the media’s game: famous people are fascinating. And when they die… it turns out they weren’t, that they were unorganized, treated their family poorly… The story of the fall from perfection is a very unrealistic game that many people play.

Q. You’ve said that your priority has been more to enjoy than to tell the truth.

A. That’s why I became a writer. There is more freedom in writing than talking. Any dialogue departs from trying to please the other.

Q. How much love should one have for themself?

A. It’s possible that love is not the right word. How about generosity? Tolerance? Love yourself is the American message. No, I am content with being joyful. There comes a moment in which self-love becomes indulgence. A little bit of dissatisfaction is important. Human beings are lazy creatures: we don’t think until there’s a problem. In the lives of artists, there are periods of intense creativity. It’s often related to working through a problem. And there are periods during which nothing happens. If you think about The Beatles, between 19 and 28 years of age, they produced some of the best songs in the world. And then?

Q. Did Paul McCartney have fewer problems than John Lennon?

A. The album that caused the breakup, Let It Be, tells us something about human nature. We have moments of communion with life and others… of isolation. Isn’t that so? I have seen it with friends. When problems arise, they become better friends: more humble, better able to listen. That said, some problems destroy people.

Q. A strict routine or comfortable life?

A. [Arthur] Schopenhauer and [Friedrich] Nietzsche venerated discomfort, but [Gustave] Flaubert advocated living as a bourgeois to create as an artist.

Q. Did Marcel Proust change your life?

A. Very much so. Proust’s work tells you, “Art is not a dream, it is an awakening.” And also, “I’ve worked hard, you can too. Try it again.”

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