“On Love”—Alain De Botton Helped Me Leave My Abusive Relationship

Trigger Warning: This article discusses relationship abuse

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, call +1 (800)-799-7233 or visit www.thehotline.org

I picked up “On Love” by Alain de Botton in a quaint bookstore in Berlin, Germany. It was the summer of my early 20s, and I had just embarked on a month-long trip through Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. I met my friends in Copenhagen, where they were studying abroad, and we decided to travel to Berlin together. I left early to have some alone time and visit my family in the area. I wandered the streets, reminiscing about times that had passed. You see, this was not my first trip to Berlin, nor my second.

My first visit to Berlin was in the late summer. I was visiting my great-aunt just outside Munich prior to studying abroad in Florence, Italy, that autumn. In the middle of my stay in Florence, I returned to Berlin, the more notable of the two trips.

My second trip to Berlin was during Halloween weekend. My ex and I were on a “break” at the time (I’ll warn you, it’s complicated), but I agreed to meet them in Berlin. Our relationship was not in the best of places. Prior to studying abroad, my life had fallen apart, and they had taken advantage of my vulnerability. I felt like I couldn’t leave because they had convinced me there was nothing else in my life but them. I knew deep down that we needed to break up, but I couldn’t get myself to pull the plug. So, I told them that we should go on a break (which they didn’t allow to happen).

When we met up in Berlin, we were living straight out of scenes from the film “Before Sunrise.” We traipsed around the city—exploring, dancing, loving. It felt like we had begun our relationship anew. As we were meandering through the city, we visited a neighborhood that quickly became my favorite: Neukölln.

It was in that neighborhood, on my third trip, that I had walked into my favorite bookstore, Buchbund, and stumbled upon On Love. It felt fitting that I was reminiscing on a love that had once been so strong in this particular city, that had fizzled and faded outside of it. After I made my purchase, I walked over to the cafe next door, where we had once shared a delicious meringue tart and our thoughts on the future. We dreamt of an apartment in Berlin. I would hear a knock at the door as they came home with the groceries as I lay in bed, waking up for the day. They would make me breakfast, and I would read the paper. They would waltz off to their job, and I would wander around the city to purchase goodies for our dinner party later that evening. We would laugh and get drunk off red wine. Once our guests had left, we would quietly revel in the life we had created.

I wish I could’ve believed this would happen—this fantasy. But I truly never did. We were never going to have an apartment in Berlin. We were never going to be madly in love and get married. Even though we stared lovingly at one another over that meringue and thought about our future, it was a future that would come to pass before it even started. I sat inside and ordered a lemon fruit tart and began reading.

I finished the book before my friends arrived from Copenhagen. I was still convinced that she and I would see each other again. I wrote a note for them in the back of the book:

I give this book to you not for you to place us in the Chloe or narrator role, but to see that love is all the same. We think our story is so different, but it has been written before. This book helped me think about our love in a different way, and I hope it helps you too. All my love, Emma.

I quickly realized I was not meant to impart the wisdom of this book upon them. They didn’t deserve it. In all likelihood, they would have made fun of me for trying to share my love with them in this way.

“On Love” became my little portal of epiphanies.

Even though I devoured the book in about a day or so, I never stopped thinking about it. The book begins with the narrator, who may or may not be Alain himself, meeting a woman named Chloe on a British Airways flight from Paris to London. The two are seat partners who begin chatting after a long streak of boredom. They had talked through the rest of the flight and into the airport. In Botton’s words: “By the time I had collected my luggage and passed through customs, I had fallen in love with Chloe” (P.6).

Throughout the book, we see the evolution of the narrator and Chloe’s relationship through philosophical inquiries posed by the former. The first serious squabble the two have is over a jar of jam. Chloe has prepared a feast of a breakfast, and the narrator ignores all the hard work she has put in by focusing on the fact that his favorite jam is not on the table. There is raspberry and blackberry, but no strawberry. Chloe proceeds to go into her bedroom, shut the door, and cry. The narrator mentally responds as such:

The repugnance I felt toward myself for hurting Chloe was momentarily turned against her. I hated her for all the efforts she had made with me, for her weakness in believing in me, for her bad taste in allowing me to upset her. It suddenly seemed pitiable that she had given me a toothbrush, prepared breakfast for me, and begun to cry in the bedroom like a child. I was filled with an overwhelming urge to punish her for her weakness (p. 45).

I read this paragraph, and something clicked for me. I realized that throughout our relationship, I was being punished for my “weaknesses.” I was punished for wanting things to be different. I was punished for being too much and too little. I was punished for trying to set boundaries and advocate for the healthy relationship I wanted to be in. It took me until the end of this book to realize that there was no healthy relationship to advocate for.

As their relationship began to fall apart, so did my faith in ours. Chloe starts to take a particular interest in Will Knott, a fellow architect and coworker of the narrator. There is a moment where Chloe shames the narrator for his work, or lack thereof, at an office cocktail party that sends the narrator into another query:

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test. Do you love me stripped of everything that might be lost, for only the things I will have forever? (p. 134)

I was never going to be loved enough that I could be weak with my ex without consequence. There was always some sort of give and take. I would show them who I was, stripped of everything, and they would use every single vulnerability against me. My mistake was that I continued to buy into the false sense of trust that had been cultivated through manipulation tactics and false promises.

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test. Do you love me stripped of everything that might be lost, for only the things I will have forever?
(P. 134)

When I read On Love, I didn’t realize I was in an abusive relationship. I didn’t realize that us spending every single day together wasn’t because they just loved me “that much”; it was a tactic to isolate and control me so that a world without them in it felt terrifying. I was on a precipice and thought, “Even if I have nothing, it is better than this.” So I jumped.

When I made it to Switzerland, I sent my ex an email saying that I couldn’t see us being together upon my arrival back home. We didn’t speak for months after that.

I carried the weight of our relationship everywhere I went. I moved apartments, I stopped going to my favorite places and hanging out with certain people because I was terrified they were going to try to manipulate me back into a relationship. But: “Then, inevitably, I began to forget. […] I noticed that the thought of her had lost much of the agony it once held” (p. 182).

I always found this quote so special, but I couldn’t figure out why until I started to forget. I forgot their middle name, their favorite songs, what car they drove, when we first said “I love you,” the sound of their voice, the nasty words they said, and how awful they made me feel.

There is only one text message that I kept from them. It reads, “Yes, I do think of how everything I do and say is hurtful to you, but I’m not changing because then I wouldn’t be myself.”

The strongest thing I ever did was leave. It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I was being verbally and psychologically abused. When I read the text above to my therapist, I realized that this kind of behavior wasn’t normal. That our relationship wasn’t just “toxic,” and that our breakup wasn’t just messy. It took years of therapy and an order of protection to finally feel free from abuse.

When I broke up with them, it was not the true end of our relationship. They would call and text me to the point of excess, and it was all to no avail. The hardest part of leaving was not turning back around. I might not ever have been able to leave my abusive relationship if I hadn’t been in that bookstore in Berlin on that day.