I shouldn’t comment because I only read a short section of this piece. But it was apparent that he wasn’t going to talk about the fact that women have only had a say in who they partnered with (or to choose not to partner at all) for a nano-second of our history. I remember an old joke about the difference between a horse and a mule. “The mule has a vote and sometimes it votes”no”” Women in some parts of the world can finally vote “no” and that changes everything.
Indeed your comment is not on the general theme raised by this essay, but on a quite different thread. It's about all kinds of love and human relationships.
This kind of thinking is exactly what has brought down our moral center over the decades in the West. We are now taught to only think of self instead of family, community, and faith.
People scoff at tradition, but we used to be a people that did not mind sacrificing for others. Not only is the world a better place when we do this, we feel better about ourselves.
Falling in love, starting a family, becoming a stable part of society.... what is wrong with these things? For 95% of people that is the thing you should be doing. It is a proven road map to success. There are a few who strive outside that norm. God bless them. That is not most of us.
The challenge with assuming a linear trajectory is that it isn't realistic, as a vast number of unprivileged people do not share this reality as a given. To begin from scarcity — not as exception, but as condition — is to acknowledge that for many people, love itself is not a resource that was ever reliably available.
This theory assumes a love-starved context simply isn't the norm, yet for a significant portion of people it is precisely where life begins. The archetypal figures of mother and father are treated as baseline wholesome, attuned presences — but this is a projection of a particular experience onto a universal framework. In reality, those figures are just as likely to have been absent, harmful, inconsistent, or themselves depleted by the same structural conditions their children would later inherit. The "baseline" is relative — and calling it a baseline at all already privileges one experience over another.
When love and significant relationships are then proposed as therapeutic, this too presupposes access to something many people were never given the conditions to form, sustain, or trust. You cannot offer relational healing as a foundation to someone for whom relationships have predominantly been sites of scarcity, harm, or rupture — not without first reckoning with the fact that the therapeutic relationship itself is unevenly distributed, shaped by class, race, stability, and survival.
Any framework that does not begin here — with scarcity as the lived reality rather than the deviation — will continue to center the privileged experience as the human one.
Want to push this further into a specific theoretical or applied direction?
I stopped reading this interview when the speaker dated the birth of romanticism to late eighteenth century Europe. In fact the phenomenon has been documented for thousands of years in probably every know culture. It seems highly probable to me that humans have always been capable of these feelings for one another for good evolutionary reasons. Deeply attached serial monogamy helps raise children, especially if you’re only going to live to 35 anyway and so kids don’t get grandparents. Yes, there were and will always be practical challenges of balancing romance with partnership (which includes managing careers and resources), but romance seems more the norm of human experience than an aberration. See Odysseus and Penelope, Pantheia and Abradatas (Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus), Pericles and Aspasia, Antony and Cleopatra, Pompey and Julia, Plato’s Symposium (where also homoerotic romance is idealized), Aeneas and Dido, Jason and Medea, Pyramus and Thisbe, and all the Roman love poets: Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, and Tibullus. There’s a reason these people had gods of romance (Aphrodite, Eros, Venus, Cupid). Lots of people grappled with these feelings and needed to figure out how to integrate them into their lives, some with greater and lesser success.
I’m sure he’s aware of all of that and I doubt he’d disagree on the point. Fascinating, by the way - the examples you gave in your comment. Thanks :) (emoji for goodwill emphasising purposes).
Maybe he could have stated it better as “the coming of age” of Modern Romanticism as the prevalent way we (in certain parts of the world) think about how to love and be loved. I did not interpret it as an assertion that romanticism has its origins beginning 200 years ago - but forgive me if I am not seeing the larger point you are contending with.
Perhaps I will have to go back and listen to that part of the video again. But if it’s worth anything, given the content of the essay (and the book, and the large amount of work his organisation has published) I don’t think the phrasing in that excerpt necessarily demerits the ideas he discusses here.
Surely in times past not all marriages were based on dynastic considerations. What about the masses of people who were from the lower classes? Did they not marry and have children? What brought these couples together? I’m sure there were considerations such as the man’s capacity for work and his craftsmanship, or the woman’s domestic talents. To be sure, in some societies, marriages were arranged. I’m still thinking there may have been some spark that suggested to two people that “this might be the one.”
To me that does still sound like the individuals involved in the alliance were brought together by by pragmatic reasons, "u can do this and I can do that ". There's no emotional prejudice or irrational drive bringing them together. You can also consider the fact that it's that much easier for a girl working at McDonald's and multi billionaire to get married than it would have been 300 years ago. And I think that's the core of his essay. Take love out of the equation and there's almost no logical reason for those 2 to be together
I usually enjoy De Botton’s reflections on love, and enjoyed his book Essay’s on Love.
However, I think this piece aims to explain too broad a thesis without contextualising. Dynastic marriages are not universally accepted as the stage prior to romanticism. It is true for Western societies but even then, only within the wealthiest classes.
Consider for example (whatever their moral value) child marriages where reproductive maximisation to avoid high maternal mortality rates rather than a clear dynastic inheritance plays the central role. There are other examples of types of marriages that are for different purposes, such as for labour maximisation of the household in peasant farmer communities.
Consider as well that women may tell a different story about the evolution of marriage. The story of marriage from a women’s perspective would look quite different, and that isn’t reflected at all. I bet the eras of women who married to get a bank account, or women who were considered legally children/wards of their husbands may have a different and quite interesting perspective here. These women may trace the modern love thesis as a trend line of an increase in agency, and maybe the age of romanticism is welcome in this case…
A lovely, thoughtful essay. The aspirational you, especially in relation to others. What we wish we were, what we strive towards, not what we are and how we delude ourselves.
I did a Substack called "Romantic Asymmetry" about people (mostly men) who cast a wide net versus people (mostly women) who are quite selective. Who say yes a lot versus no a lot. One prioritizes optionality, the other accuracy. It was based on Columbia's vast speed-dating dataset - lots of mismatches, not much alignment.
Are both sides doomed to marry the wrong person? Only if there's only one right person and everybody else is wrong. For the rest of us, good enough is good enough. What a relief. This essay left me feeling better.
Modern love is to romanticism what recovery culture is to alcoholism — a prefab orthodoxy spray-painted over something it can’t actually contain.
The real magic trick of modern society isn’t the mythology. It’s our collective tolerance for knowing the mythology is hollow and maintaining it anyway.
Romanticism at least had the dignity of aspiration.
The modern romantic concept learned lands somewhere between the tooth fairy and the Wizard of Oz.
My kids won’t know much bread that isn’t sliced, bagged, and tagged. Nobody mourns what they never tasted.
That Gary Thomas-Sacred Secrets-I ponder how many relationships and marriages he has destroyed-well I know 1 for sure-mine. What this speaker says makes sense. But here is the thing-my fiancé or I should clarify ex-fiancé would not have been open to “therapeutic” relationship. If it doesn’t evolve Christ and “The Holy Spirt “ she shuts the door. Thomas said “ladies make sure your man’s knees are red(red from praying).” How ridiculous is that? Pray to who, or more importantly who is answering? You are. What good is that. When I heard Thomas say that (we were at Church talking this “pre-marital “ course watch 8 hours of Thomas Sacred Secrets YouTube waste of time.)
In this culture, unless your pulling in the big bucks very few of us these days can afford the privilege of psychotherapy. Survival priorities are elsewhere and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.
I think Religion more often than Not gets in the way of living you best life-- Every Religious TEXT has "Some" Kind of command(S) that we be Empathetic/Caring ect However"" Most" of the content is Showing Distain for anyone Different-- So--when we enter a Relationship (Friendship or love affair) & that person shows signs of being Different we perceive that Difference as a Negative trait-
In the Mosuo culture in China, mothers and their blood relatives raise the children. It’s a matrilineal culture, with no concept of fathers. Uncles, brothers, and female relatives care for children. Marriage and the nuclear family are outdated ways for structuring families.
You make really good points. However, two points to consider: One, in order to know ourselves we need the interactions with other people. We cannot do it all before we interact. Two, Love is generally a projection. The other elicits love because they exhibit characteristics we admire and want to be. Loving someone is the means to recognizing that longing to be
Not sure about this. I don't think there's any way to rationally anticipate what Ego will do. Even in the stablest of marriages, or any kind of relationship, Ego can cut loose and ravage the countryside. Arranged marriages, community arranged marriages or the marriage of the willing & rational can be blindsided by the needs of the occasionally hungry ghost of Ego - sometimes seeming very irrational. If a partner isn't prepared to go through this crucifixion of their own Ego, the relationship won't survive. Or it will be a lop sided, lifelong torture. Or a spirit numbing shutting down. In other words, every relationship demands surrender - and sometimes it's massive. If we aren't willing to work through that, the relationship is doomed. Add this comment to all the other great comments that came before me and I'd say this man might not be on the same planet the rest of us are.
I shouldn’t comment because I only read a short section of this piece. But it was apparent that he wasn’t going to talk about the fact that women have only had a say in who they partnered with (or to choose not to partner at all) for a nano-second of our history. I remember an old joke about the difference between a horse and a mule. “The mule has a vote and sometimes it votes”no”” Women in some parts of the world can finally vote “no” and that changes everything.
Indeed your comment is not on the general theme raised by this essay, but on a quite different thread. It's about all kinds of love and human relationships.
Off topic.
This kind of thinking is exactly what has brought down our moral center over the decades in the West. We are now taught to only think of self instead of family, community, and faith.
People scoff at tradition, but we used to be a people that did not mind sacrificing for others. Not only is the world a better place when we do this, we feel better about ourselves.
Falling in love, starting a family, becoming a stable part of society.... what is wrong with these things? For 95% of people that is the thing you should be doing. It is a proven road map to success. There are a few who strive outside that norm. God bless them. That is not most of us.
The challenge with assuming a linear trajectory is that it isn't realistic, as a vast number of unprivileged people do not share this reality as a given. To begin from scarcity — not as exception, but as condition — is to acknowledge that for many people, love itself is not a resource that was ever reliably available.
This theory assumes a love-starved context simply isn't the norm, yet for a significant portion of people it is precisely where life begins. The archetypal figures of mother and father are treated as baseline wholesome, attuned presences — but this is a projection of a particular experience onto a universal framework. In reality, those figures are just as likely to have been absent, harmful, inconsistent, or themselves depleted by the same structural conditions their children would later inherit. The "baseline" is relative — and calling it a baseline at all already privileges one experience over another.
When love and significant relationships are then proposed as therapeutic, this too presupposes access to something many people were never given the conditions to form, sustain, or trust. You cannot offer relational healing as a foundation to someone for whom relationships have predominantly been sites of scarcity, harm, or rupture — not without first reckoning with the fact that the therapeutic relationship itself is unevenly distributed, shaped by class, race, stability, and survival.
Any framework that does not begin here — with scarcity as the lived reality rather than the deviation — will continue to center the privileged experience as the human one.
Want to push this further into a specific theoretical or applied direction?
I stopped reading this interview when the speaker dated the birth of romanticism to late eighteenth century Europe. In fact the phenomenon has been documented for thousands of years in probably every know culture. It seems highly probable to me that humans have always been capable of these feelings for one another for good evolutionary reasons. Deeply attached serial monogamy helps raise children, especially if you’re only going to live to 35 anyway and so kids don’t get grandparents. Yes, there were and will always be practical challenges of balancing romance with partnership (which includes managing careers and resources), but romance seems more the norm of human experience than an aberration. See Odysseus and Penelope, Pantheia and Abradatas (Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus), Pericles and Aspasia, Antony and Cleopatra, Pompey and Julia, Plato’s Symposium (where also homoerotic romance is idealized), Aeneas and Dido, Jason and Medea, Pyramus and Thisbe, and all the Roman love poets: Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, and Tibullus. There’s a reason these people had gods of romance (Aphrodite, Eros, Venus, Cupid). Lots of people grappled with these feelings and needed to figure out how to integrate them into their lives, some with greater and lesser success.
I’m sure he’s aware of all of that and I doubt he’d disagree on the point. Fascinating, by the way - the examples you gave in your comment. Thanks :) (emoji for goodwill emphasising purposes).
Maybe he could have stated it better as “the coming of age” of Modern Romanticism as the prevalent way we (in certain parts of the world) think about how to love and be loved. I did not interpret it as an assertion that romanticism has its origins beginning 200 years ago - but forgive me if I am not seeing the larger point you are contending with.
Perhaps I will have to go back and listen to that part of the video again. But if it’s worth anything, given the content of the essay (and the book, and the large amount of work his organisation has published) I don’t think the phrasing in that excerpt necessarily demerits the ideas he discusses here.
Surely in times past not all marriages were based on dynastic considerations. What about the masses of people who were from the lower classes? Did they not marry and have children? What brought these couples together? I’m sure there were considerations such as the man’s capacity for work and his craftsmanship, or the woman’s domestic talents. To be sure, in some societies, marriages were arranged. I’m still thinking there may have been some spark that suggested to two people that “this might be the one.”
To me that does still sound like the individuals involved in the alliance were brought together by by pragmatic reasons, "u can do this and I can do that ". There's no emotional prejudice or irrational drive bringing them together. You can also consider the fact that it's that much easier for a girl working at McDonald's and multi billionaire to get married than it would have been 300 years ago. And I think that's the core of his essay. Take love out of the equation and there's almost no logical reason for those 2 to be together
I usually enjoy De Botton’s reflections on love, and enjoyed his book Essay’s on Love.
However, I think this piece aims to explain too broad a thesis without contextualising. Dynastic marriages are not universally accepted as the stage prior to romanticism. It is true for Western societies but even then, only within the wealthiest classes.
Consider for example (whatever their moral value) child marriages where reproductive maximisation to avoid high maternal mortality rates rather than a clear dynastic inheritance plays the central role. There are other examples of types of marriages that are for different purposes, such as for labour maximisation of the household in peasant farmer communities.
Consider as well that women may tell a different story about the evolution of marriage. The story of marriage from a women’s perspective would look quite different, and that isn’t reflected at all. I bet the eras of women who married to get a bank account, or women who were considered legally children/wards of their husbands may have a different and quite interesting perspective here. These women may trace the modern love thesis as a trend line of an increase in agency, and maybe the age of romanticism is welcome in this case…
Why is it so hard to find the name of this speaker? What is his name?
Alain de Botton
A lovely, thoughtful essay. The aspirational you, especially in relation to others. What we wish we were, what we strive towards, not what we are and how we delude ourselves.
I did a Substack called "Romantic Asymmetry" about people (mostly men) who cast a wide net versus people (mostly women) who are quite selective. Who say yes a lot versus no a lot. One prioritizes optionality, the other accuracy. It was based on Columbia's vast speed-dating dataset - lots of mismatches, not much alignment.
Are both sides doomed to marry the wrong person? Only if there's only one right person and everybody else is wrong. For the rest of us, good enough is good enough. What a relief. This essay left me feeling better.
Wow, this is far ranging AND it feels so true and real. I resonate and appreciate.
Modern love is to romanticism what recovery culture is to alcoholism — a prefab orthodoxy spray-painted over something it can’t actually contain.
The real magic trick of modern society isn’t the mythology. It’s our collective tolerance for knowing the mythology is hollow and maintaining it anyway.
Romanticism at least had the dignity of aspiration.
The modern romantic concept learned lands somewhere between the tooth fairy and the Wizard of Oz.
My kids won’t know much bread that isn’t sliced, bagged, and tagged. Nobody mourns what they never tasted.
That Gary Thomas-Sacred Secrets-I ponder how many relationships and marriages he has destroyed-well I know 1 for sure-mine. What this speaker says makes sense. But here is the thing-my fiancé or I should clarify ex-fiancé would not have been open to “therapeutic” relationship. If it doesn’t evolve Christ and “The Holy Spirt “ she shuts the door. Thomas said “ladies make sure your man’s knees are red(red from praying).” How ridiculous is that? Pray to who, or more importantly who is answering? You are. What good is that. When I heard Thomas say that (we were at Church talking this “pre-marital “ course watch 8 hours of Thomas Sacred Secrets YouTube waste of time.)
In this culture, unless your pulling in the big bucks very few of us these days can afford the privilege of psychotherapy. Survival priorities are elsewhere and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.
I think Religion more often than Not gets in the way of living you best life-- Every Religious TEXT has "Some" Kind of command(S) that we be Empathetic/Caring ect However"" Most" of the content is Showing Distain for anyone Different-- So--when we enter a Relationship (Friendship or love affair) & that person shows signs of being Different we perceive that Difference as a Negative trait-
In the Mosuo culture in China, mothers and their blood relatives raise the children. It’s a matrilineal culture, with no concept of fathers. Uncles, brothers, and female relatives care for children. Marriage and the nuclear family are outdated ways for structuring families.
You make really good points. However, two points to consider: One, in order to know ourselves we need the interactions with other people. We cannot do it all before we interact. Two, Love is generally a projection. The other elicits love because they exhibit characteristics we admire and want to be. Loving someone is the means to recognizing that longing to be
Not sure about this. I don't think there's any way to rationally anticipate what Ego will do. Even in the stablest of marriages, or any kind of relationship, Ego can cut loose and ravage the countryside. Arranged marriages, community arranged marriages or the marriage of the willing & rational can be blindsided by the needs of the occasionally hungry ghost of Ego - sometimes seeming very irrational. If a partner isn't prepared to go through this crucifixion of their own Ego, the relationship won't survive. Or it will be a lop sided, lifelong torture. Or a spirit numbing shutting down. In other words, every relationship demands surrender - and sometimes it's massive. If we aren't willing to work through that, the relationship is doomed. Add this comment to all the other great comments that came before me and I'd say this man might not be on the same planet the rest of us are.