Essays in Love
A stage-by-stage analysis of a romantic relationship from beginning to end, Essays in Love doesn’t completely lose its focus amid the passion of love, but it isn’t so objective that it reads like an academic paper. It’s full of discomfiting facts for romantics everywhere: chief among them is that we have little to no control over people falling in and out of love with us – a thought obvious, yet terrifying to the uninitiated. In spite of this, de Botton observes that it’s in these relationships that people are momentarily unshackled from societal expectations and mores – it’s here that they’re able to know their selves better than they could alone.
