The Course of Love

by Alain de Botton

He will conclude that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling opening ambitions; and that for his relationships to work he will need to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place. He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.

Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.

Love means admiration for qualities in the lover that promise to correct our weaknesses and imbalances; love is a search for completion.

Sexiness might at first appear to be a merely physiological phenomenon, the result of awakened hormones and stimulated nerve endings. But in truth it is not so much about sensations as it is about ideas – foremost among them, the idea of acceptance, and the promise of an end to loneliness and shame.

They offer brief utopian interludes in which we can, with a rare and real friend, safely cast off our normal defences and share and satisfy our longings for extreme closeness and mutual acceptance

Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.

Romanticism is a philosophy of intuitive agreement. In real love, there is no need tiresomely to articulate or spell things out. When two people belong together, there is simply – at long last – a wondrous reciprocal feeling that both parties see the world in precisely the same way.

The small issues are really just large ones that haven’t been accorded the requisite attention. Their everyday disputes are the loose threads that catch on fundamental contrasts in their personalities.

Without patience for negotiation, there is bitterness: anger that has forgotten where it came from. There is a nagger who wants it done now and can’t be bothered to explain why. And there is a naggee who no longer has the heart to explain that his or her resistance is grounded in some sensible counter-arguments or, alternatively, in some touching and perhaps even forgivable flaws of character. The two parties just hope the problems – so boring to them both – will simply go away.

We should add that 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. It is one of the odder gifts of love.

in relationships, even the most eloquent among us may instinctively prefer not to spell things out when our partners are at risk of failing to read us properly. Only wordless and accurate mind-reading can feel like a true sign that our partner is someone to be trusted; only when we don’t have to explain can we feel certain that we are genuinely understood.

We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favour when we are able to regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant.

They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability.

When our minds are involved in transference, we lose the ability to give people and things the benefit of the doubt; we swiftly and anxiously move towards the worst conclusions that the past once mandated.

We don’t need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.

The accusations we direct at our lovers make no particular sense. We would utter such unfair things to no one else on earth. But our wild charges are a peculiar proof of intimacy and trust, a symptom of love itself – and, in their own way, a perverted manifestation of commitment.

these helpless creatures are here to remind us that no one is, in the end, ‘self-made’; we are all heavily in someone’s debt. We realize that life depends – quite literally – on the capacity for love.

The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behaviour.

and instead start to give love away (perhaps to a small person) with oblivious abandon without jealously calculating the chances of it ever returning.

Mediocrity, albeit the statistical norm, can never be the initial goal; the sacrifices required to get a child to adulthood are simply too great.

We might imagine that the fear and insecurity of getting close to someone would happen only once: at the start of a relationship, and that anxieties couldn’t possibly continue after two people had made some explicit commitments to one another,

Yet conquering distance and gaining assurances that we are needed aren’t exercises to be performed only once; they have to be repeated every time there’s been a break – a day away, a busy period, an evening at work – for every interlude has the power once again to raise the question of whether or not we are still wanted.

We are never through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn’t a curse limited to the inadequate and the weak. Insecurity is a sign of well-being. It means we haven’t allowed ourselves to take other people for granted, that we remain realistic enough to see that things could genuinely turn out badly and that we are invested enough to care.

Sexual desire is driven by a wish to establish closeness – and is hence contingent on a pre-existing sense of distance, which it is a perpetually distinctive pleasure and relief to try to bridge.

two people who have no further designs upon each other. Their lack of time is a privilege.

They will never have to be resentful; they can continue to appreciate each other as only those without a future can.

But the mind has many chambers, and a dazzling capacity for building firewalls.

Screwing around is not somewhat bad, it’s the very worst thing one person could do to another whom he or she claims to love.

A fourth assumption: monogamy is the natural state of love. A sane person can only ever want to love one other person. Monogamy is the bellwether of emotional health.

Isn’t the rejection of adulterous possibilities tantamount to an infidelity towards the richness of life itself?

would it be rational to trust anyone who wasn’t, under certain circumstances, really pretty interested in being unfaithful?

To be wise is to recognize when wisdom will simply not be an option.

Or that the married Romantic might unite sex with tenderness, and passion with routine.

A loving marriage and children kill erotic spontaneity; and an affair kills a marriage. A person cannot be at once a libertine and a married Romantic, however compelling both paradigms might be.

We have not been singled out. Marrying anyone, even the most suitable of beings, comes down to a case of identifying which variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

For most of recorded history, people stayed married because they were keen to fit in with the expectations of society, had a few assets to protect and wanted to maintain the unity of their families.

He knows to feel grateful for the fact that his external circumstances will sometimes be out of line with what he experiences in his heart. It is probably a sign that he is on the right track.

There’s too little time and too much fear for anything else. We let ourselves be guided by an instinct for self-preservation:

He looks at the familiar facts in a new way: he is a coward, a dreamer, an unfaithful husband and an overly possessive, clingy father. His life is held together by string.

He is a man with an exaggerated longing for Romantic love who nevertheless understands little about kindness and even less about communication.

The price of a few works of genius throughout history is a substantial portion of the human race being daily sickened by anxiety and mania.

What enables him to think of himself as sane is only a certain fragile chemical good fortune, but he knows he would be very much in the market for a tragedy if ever life chose to test him properly.

Few in this world are ever simply nasty; the vicious are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism or aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love.

Cynicism is too easy, and it gets you nowhere.

It’s impossible for the victims of adultery to appreciate what might actually have been going through a partner’s mind during the ‘betrayal’, when they lay entwined with a stranger for a few hours. We can hear their defence as often as we like, but we’ll be sure of one thing in our hearts: that they were hell-bent on humiliating us and that every ounce of their love has evaporated, along with their status as trustworthy humans. To insist on any other conclusion is like arguing against the tide.

Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the ‘right’ person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.

Its not the common thata important but how do we resolve conflicts

But we should be careful not to judge our relationships by the expectations imposed on us by a frequently misleading aesthetic medium.

we may need to tell ourselves more accurate stories – stories that don’t dwell so much on the beginning, that don’t promise us complete understanding, that strive to normalize our troubles and show us a melancholy yet hopeful path through the course of love.

The trick is perhaps not to start a new life but to learn to reconsider the old one with less jaded and habituated eyes.

It’s gone to her head too, making her brave; brave enough to be weak.