False Notes” and “ Love or Liberalism” for instance, symbolises a choice also in the political arena. I’d first discovered its possibilities when reading Montaigne’s Essays, where the author takes the reader around some highly thought-provoking philosophical ideas, in a tome that is intimate, digressive and charming. 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. 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. With the verve of a novelist and the insight of a philosopher, Alain de Botton uncovers the mysteries of the human heart.

As in a novel, there are characters and realistic settings, but these are blended in with a host of more abstract ideas. I know I keep saying this but de Botton articulated a lot of things I’ve been thinking about regarding romance, especially the end of a relationship. Like, sometimes, I like to be prodded for information and other times I just want you to shut up and I don’t want to have to SAY that because that just means you don’t understand me! There’s an essay on how uncomfortable it can be to disagree with a lover’s taste in shoes and a lengthy discussion about the role of guilt in love.I know I’d feel very left out and somewhat frustrated that I couldn’t just scoop out their memories and understand every aspect of their being. He is the founder of two social enterprises, the first promoting architecture, Living Architecture, which gets top architects to build holiday homes for rental by everyone. Written in the style of a novel, this genre-defying book charts the relationship of a man and a woman from the first kiss to the onset of anxiety and heartbreak, illuminating emotions we have all felt but perhaps never fully understood. This means that the version of me that my school teachers know is VERY different from what my family knows which is different to what my university friends know and so on and so forth.

I wonder whether De Botton would have written a very different book today, at the age of 40, than when this was written in his early 20's? I think my problem with this book was my expectation; I thought it would be thoughtful essays on the subject of love.I know I wouldn’t reject someone if they reciprocated my feelings solely on the basis of them loving me. However, I also know, as Simon Spier says, that everyone deserves a love story and surely I’m not different. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It will make you analyse not only the way you are affecting your beloved but the 'how come' and 'why' they affect you.

Then again, I wouldn’t say I have a lot of experience in this realm so I probably need to get a second opinion. Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bitter-sweet as it is self-induced. If I could be that beacon of hope for someone, I hope that I won’t be too caught up in whether my stomach is too big or that I don’t have a six-pack. I was astounded that de Botton was only twenty-one when he wrote this book because, wow, the amount of maturity and insight this book has. And I’m pretty damn certain that all of us could do with hearing how much we are loved simply for being ourselves.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.

Alain De Botton encapsulates his many experiences in love in one relationship between a 'fictional' man and woman. Through the ordinary story of two young people, who met on an airplane from Paris to London and fell in love soon after, De Botton went into extraordinary depth in analysing the nuances, the emotional swings, the sweet and sour we all identify in a relationship. We had often read the same books at night in the same bed, and later realized that they had touched us in different places: that they had been different books for each of us.If someone thinks I am shy, I will probably end up shy, if someone thinks me funny, I am likely to keep cracking jokes.