“The Course of Love” 
by Alain de Botton (Simon & Schuster, 225 pages, $26)

“Labor of Love:

The Invention of Dating” 
by Moira Weigel 
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 292 pages, $26)

“I’m single because I was born that way,” Mae West said. Not all of us wear that fact with such flair and instead spend our time in varying states of anxiety wondering how to change it. Two new books — one by Moira Weigel, a doctoral candidate at Yale, and the other by the essayist, novelist and professional aperçu generator Alain de Botton — take strikingly different approaches to analyzing how we seek out and hold on to love.

Weigel’s “Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating” finds the roots of our modern efforts to pair off in the late 19th century, when courting shifted from a businesslike, family-monitored activity in parlor rooms to a wilder free-for-all in very public spheres. As more people relocated to cities, the countless unfamiliar faces streaming by the sales counters at Macy’s or Gimbels functioned much as Tinder does today.

Dating, Weigel writes, “is the form that courtship takes in a society where it takes place in a free market.” She acknowledges “all the works of Marxist and feminist theory” that influenced her thinking on the subject, and a good deal of her book is colored by those theories.

The scholar in Weigel didn’t set a fine-grain filter on the research for this book. She always returns to the “landscape of dating” as her intended theme, but the landscape appears horizonless and the detours can be maddeningly circuitous. Just a small sample of subjects that catch her eye include prostitution; historical parenting trends; the U.S. military’s treatment of homosexuals; the aesthetic theories of Kant; and anti-colonial revolutions in Latin America.

These frequent changes in direction require Weigel to make some textbooklike transitions: “The rise of college and the spread of coeducation in the 20th century also shaped the history of dating.” The book is hung on many statements like that one, true but awfully broad.

Marbled throughout are sharp summaries of history’s trendy strategies for meeting people, from working at those department store counters to the advent of singles bars to the video-dating services of the 1980s (hysterical and mortifying examples of that genre are preserved on YouTube) to our current app-driven mating practices.

Weigel also proves herself a canny film critic, offering a firm takedown of the gender dynamic in Judd Apatow’s “Knocked Up” and a funny parsing of the essential similarities between “American Psycho” and “Pretty Woman.”

But “Labor of Love” skims over an enormous number of topics, many of which could prop up entire books of their own. It’s hard to tell whether Weigel’s aim is far too ambitious or not nearly ambitious enough.

She surveys her subject from something like 40,000 feet, at which height human desire and idiosyncrasy, the pillars of dating and its hardships, appear vanishingly small. She imagines dates in the 1950s fueled by fear of nukes. “Teens, who could now afford movie tickets, Cokes, and hamburgers, did not want to die alone on doomsday.” And today, in a time of global warming and wealth disparity, “when so much feels precarious, serial monogamists cling to their partners for comfort.”

But when are things not precarious, especially when it comes to securing human attachment? Surely population trends and other seismic social changes have influenced dating, but what really separates the “callers” to those 19th-century parlors from the millions now editing their OkCupid profiles?

What, in other words, are people doing all of this for? Only remarkably late in the book does Weigel make this statement about the very fuel of her subject: “All humans long for others with whom to share our lives.”

Where Weigel hovers far above the emotional texture of that longing, de Botton omnisciently narrates from right inside of it in his new novel, “The Course of Love,” which follows a couple, Kirsten and Rabih, from dates to marriage to children to infidelity.

“The Course of Love” is a return to the form that made de Botton’s name in the mid-1990s, when he was in his mid-20s and published three novels, starting with “On Love,” that elegantly fussed over and annotated the neuroses of romance. In a series of nonfiction books since then, he has acted as a kind of cosmopolitan Yoda, dispensing gnomic wisdom about Proust, travel, architecture, work and religion.

But love is the subject best suited to his obsessive aphorizing, and in this novel he again shows off his ability to pin our hopes, methods and insecurities to the page. (“His clumsiness is at least an incidental sign of his sincerity: we tend not to get very anxious when seducing people we don’t much care about.” “It is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt.”)

Kirsten and Rabih feel real enough, but they’re primarily inventions that allow for de Botton’s discourse on what it means to stay together over time. He pithily covers our continual need to re-establish that we’re wanted, the dangers of sharing the contents of our sexual imagination and dozens of other subcategories.

“The Course of Love” explicitly argues that romance can only survive, once it has moved from boil to simmer (or less), if buttressed by resignation and stoicism. It imagines marriage vows in an ideal world: “We accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.”

Weigel’s book operates from the totalizing assumption that larger social forces shape our personal intimacies; de Botton believes there’s enough war going on inside any individual love-seeker to match a thousand dysfunctional societies. There’s room for both theories, but de Botton’s book is the more satisfying in conveying its particular truth. Weigel espouses a utopian impulse that would make falling in love easier and more equitable; de Botton says fat chance.

(Moira) Weigel’s book operates from the totalizing assumption that larger social forces shape our personal intimacies; (Alain) de Botton believes there’s enough war going on inside any individual love-seeker to match a thousand dysfunctional societies.