de Botton on the heightened romanticism of exotic lands

“To the appeal that an attractive person might possess in one’s own country is added, in an exotic land, an attraction deriving from his or her location. If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another country, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing in our own culture.”
–Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel (2002)