We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes. How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right–in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable–given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration. Alain De Botton
About This Quote

The idea that love is not all about the feeling of happiness but more about familiarity, comfort and security brought to you by your loved one. Most of the time people are looking for love, but at times they will choose someone else because of familiarity. They would rather be with someone who resembles the person they wanted to be with when they were younger.

Source: The Course Of Love

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More Quotes By Alain De Botton
  1. One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
  2. There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
  3. There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
  4. The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
  5. The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
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