“Domestic preoccupation is not a sign of the death of love; it is what we start to get involved with when love has succeeded brilliantly.”

Someone on bookstagram recommended this as one of her favourite books from the School of Life. Since I enjoyed How to be Bored, I decided that I had to read this one too.

The Sorrows of Love is a fairly short book/long essay on love and why we tend to feel sad in relationships. In short, the fact that we have to live with and love another imperfect human being means that friction and sorrow are a necessary part of love; it’s a feature, not a bug.

If you’ve read Alain de Botton’s essay “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person” or “The Course of Love”, you’ll find the ideas here very similar (I’m fairly sure I’ve read a couple of paragraphs in this essay in either one of the two pieces mentioned about. Still, this essay is very prettily written and each chapter is short and easy to digest.

Personally, I found the ideas in this book to be very familiar because I’ve already read de Botton’s other works on love and “romantic realism.” I think this book would be more suited to someone who has not read any of his writings on love and is looking for an introduction to his ideas.

Featured Image: Photo from Canva