a·​lain

Text from Alain de Botton's work, Heartbreak. To me, the last quote below feels like repotting a plant or upgrading your hotel room - unsettle and resettle, reprioritize and recalibrate.

“We should never compound our grief with the thought that our ex will be uncomplicatedly happy.”

“That there is much wrong with us is, of course, true; but this dark fact invariably sits within a far larger, grimmer and yet strangely consoling truth: that every person has much wrong with them.”

“To forget, we have to impose a new layer of experience on the things we associate with lost love.”

“When we say we miss them what we really mean is that it is a set of good qualities and experiences that we are missing. It is tenderness, conviviality and open-mindedness we love, first and foremost rather than, inherently, the bodily home in which these qualities came to rest. We encountered these things in and with them and so assume that to lose the person is to lose everything linked to them.”

“Paradoxically, it is friendship that often offers us the real route to the pleasures that Romanticism associates with love. That this sounds surprising is only a reflection of how underdeveloped our day-to-day vision of friendship has become. We associate it with a casual acquaintance we see only occasionally to exchange inconsequential banter. But real friendship is something altogether more profound: It is an arena in which two people can get a sense of each other's vulnerabilities, appreciate each other's follies without recrimination, reassure one another as to their value and greet the sorrows and tragedies of existence with wit and warmth.”