Alain De Botton

They're allowing me to do that thing, you know, and that's the thrill.

And then suddenly you've got permission to do anything, anytime.

And it becomes a lot less interesting and you become fused.

And I think that, you know, why do people have a better time in hotel rooms?

What is this thing about hotel rooms and, you know, sexual relationships?

Right.

In a hotel room, you're allowed to return to a view of your partner as an independent being.

You don't own them.

They were around before you were.

They could walk away from you.

They don't exist simply through the prism of your own kind of relationship.

And suddenly that's deeply exciting and you want to kind of bridge the distance again.

So I think, you know, the best thing to do is to create a little bit of distance in order for that distance then to become an attractive thing to want to bridge.

It's funny that you mentioned Jane Austen because she was very much in my mind when I wrote this book.

Not that there's any kind of immediate similarity, but her vision of the novel is primarily an educational vision.

I mean, she's seeing it as a kind of Christian moralist.

She wants her characters to grow and develop.

And the whole point of the novel is to show us how two people who are quite immature grow up

And she wants our reader, she wants her readers to do the same thing.

And this sounds quite unfashionable.