Alain De Botton

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1,037 appearances 5 recordings 5 series first heard Jan 2024 last heard 1 Jul

Alain De Botton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Conversations · Special Collection: Alain de Botton on the true hardwork of love and relationships · 22 May 2026 podcast

that the writer creates for you, you're able to go through some experiences which should help you to grow and develop.

And I wrote this book explicitly as a kind of growth story that we go from a couple who don't know anything about love.

They're romantics.

They just love the enthusiasm.

And then painfully, painfully, they pick up certain lessons along the way.

And I think that many of the reasons why

We have difficult love lives and it sounds odd, but I think that a lot of the blame is because we don't read the right books and we don't see the right films.

And we therefore constantly think that our lives have gone wrong or different from the movies and from the novels are telling us.

So we're lying in bed and we're thinking, is this normal?

Is this, you know, whatever it is, an argument or no sex or lots of sex or whatever it is, some issue.

And we're implicitly comparing our love situation with what we've seen in art.

And I think most of the time we've got the wrong art around us.

We've got art that panics us because it doesn't confirm the things we're actually going through.

And I think, you know, my deepest wish for the novel, and I've had some lovely comments from readers occasionally, they'll say things like, it felt a bit like my own marriage.

It felt like my relationship, but it felt like things that other people don't talk about.

And I think that for me is what literature should be doing.

It should be putting its finger on the awkward, lonely bits of our experience that don't get mentioned in culture generally.

I think the other thing that age brings with it is self-awareness.

Most of us are so un-self-aware when we're younger.

So we go into relationships not knowing how we are trouble for other people.

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