The Course of Love

by Alain de Botton

The Romantic faith must always have existed, but only in the past few centuries has it been judged anything more than an illness; only recently has the search for a soulmate been allowed to take on the status of something close to the purpose of life.

Love is a dividend of gratitude for our lover’s insight into our own confused and troubled psyche.

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.

She doesn’t have a speech ready, this has come like a bolt from the blue, but how different it is from what ordinarily happens to her, how deeply kind and mad and courageous of him to come out with something like this now – and yet, despite her cynical character and her firm belief that she doesn’t care for these things, so long as he has truly understood what he wants and has noted what a monster she is, then she can’t really see why she wouldn’t say, with all her heart and with immense fear and gratitude, yes, yes, yes.

The marriage of reason was not, from any sincere perspective, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish, exploitative and abusive. Which is why what has replaced it – the marriage of feeling – has largely been spared the need to account for itself. What matters is that two people wish desperately for it to happen, are drawn to one another by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. The modern age appears to have had enough of ‘reasons’, those catalysts of misery, those accountants’ demands. Indeed the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six weeks since they met; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it may actually be deemed to be, for apparent ‘recklessness’ is taken as a counterweight to all the errors and tragedies vouchsafed by the so-called sensible unions of old. The prestige of instinct is the legacy of a collective traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable ‘reason’.

Being married may be associated with caution, conservatism and timidity, but getting married is an altogether different, more reckless and therefore more appealingly Romantic proposition.

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.

They’ve reached the point where, by rights, their story – always slight – should draw to a close. The Romantic challenge is behind them. Life will from now on assume a steady, repetitive rhythm, to the extent that they will often find it hard to locate a specific event in time, so similar will the years appear in their outward form. But their story is far from over: it is just a question of henceforth having to stand for longer in the stream and use a smaller-meshed sieve to catch the grains of interest.

Without patience for negotiation, there is bitterness: anger that has forgotten where it came from.

At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one. 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.

The sulker may be six foot one and holding down adult employment, but the real message is poignantly retrogressive: ‘Deep inside, I remain an infant, and right now I need you to be my parent. I need you correctly to guess what is truly ailing me, as people did when I was a baby, when my ideas of love were first formed.’

In the West, we owe to Christianity the view that sex should only ever rightly occur in the presence of love. The religion insists that two people who care for each other must reserve their bodies, and their gaze, for each other alone. To think sexually about strangers is to abandon the true spirit of love and to betray God and one’s own humanity. Such precepts, at once touching and forbidding, have not entirely evaporated along with the decline of the faith that once supported them. Shorn of their explicitly theistic rationale, they seem to have been absorbed into the ideology of Romanticism, which accords a similarly prestigious place to the concept of sexual fidelity within the idea of love. In the secular world, too, monogamy has been declared a necessary and crowning expression of emotional commitment and virtue. Our age has strikingly maintained the essential drift of an earlier religious position: the belief that true love must entail wholehearted sexual fidelity.

What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters.

Good listeners are no less rare or important than good communicators. Here, too, an unusual degree of confidence is the key – a capacity not to be thrown off course by, or buckle under the weight of, information that may deeply challenge certain settled assumptions. Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds; they’ve been there before and know that everything can eventually be set back in its place.

‘The nature of this particular daydream is foreign, unfamiliar and frankly not a little disgusting to me, but I’m interested in hearing about it nonetheless, because more critical than my relative comfort is my ability to cope with who you are. The person thinking of Antonella just now is the same person I married in Inverness and the same little boy who stares out from that picture on top of our chest of drawers. It’s him I love and refuse to think badly of, however much his thoughts may sometimes disturb me. You’re my best friend, and I want to know and come to terms with your mind in all its weird byways. I will never be able to do or be everything you want, nor vice versa, but I’d like to think we can be the sort of people who will dare to tell each other who we really are. The alternative is silence and lies, which are the real enemies of love.’

We too often act from scripts generated by the crises of long ago that we’ve all but consciously forgotten.

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.

We would accept that in responsible hands, both projects – teaching and being taught, calling attention to another’s faults and letting ourselves be critiqued – might after all be loyal to the true purpose of love.

Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might constitute only a narrow, and perhaps rather mean-minded, aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it; to be loved rather than to love.

Children teach us that love is, in its purest form, a kind of service. The word has grown freighted with negative connotations. An individualistic, self-gratifying culture cannot easily equate contentment with being at someone else’s call. We are used to loving others in return for what they can do for us, for their capacity to entertain, charm or soothe us. Yet babies can do precisely nothing. There is, as slightly older children sometimes conclude with a sense of serious discomfort, no ‘point’ to them; that is their point. They teach us to give without expecting anything in return, simply because they need help badly – and we are in a position to provide it. We are inducted into a love based not on an admiration for strength, but on a compassion for weakness, a vulnerability common to every member of the species and one which has been and will eventually again be our own. Because it is always tempting to overemphasize autonomy and independence, 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. We learn, too, that being another’s servant is not humiliating, quite the opposite, for it sets us free from the wearying responsibility of continuously catering to our own twisted, insatiable natures. We learn the relief and privilege of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves.

Part of the reassuring aspect of being new to the earth stems from the failure to understand the tenuous nature of everything.

The sweetness of children reminds us of how much we have had to sacrifice on the path to maturity; the sweet is a vital part of ourselves – in exile.

It’s not just children who are childlike. Adults, too, are – beneath the bluster – intermittently playful, silly, fanciful, vulnerable, hysterical, terrified, pitiful and in search of consolation and forgiveness.

In their moments of cosiness, when the whole family is piled together on the big bed and the mood is one of tolerance and good humour, Rabih is aware that some day, in the not too distant future, all of this will end, according to an edict of nature enacted by a most natural means: the tantrums and fury of adolescence. The continuation of families down the generations depends on the young ones eventually losing patience with their elders.

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.

It’s a well-known thesis: the people we are attracted to as adults bear a marked resemblance to the people we most loved as children. It might be a certain sense of humour or a kind of expression, a temperament or an emotional disposition.

Arousal seems, in the end, to have very little to do with a state of undress; it draws its energy from the possibility of being granted permission to possess a deeply desirable, once forbidden yet now miraculously available and accessible other. It is an expression of grateful wonder, verging on disbelief, that in a world of isolation and disconnection, the wrists, thighs, earlobes and napes of necks are all there, finally, for us to behold: an extraordinary concept that we want to keep checking up on, perhaps as often as every few hours, once more joyfully touching, inserting, revealing and unclothing, so lonely have we been, so independent and remote have our lovers seemed. 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.

But fantasies are often the best thing we can make of our multiple and contradictory wishes; they allow us to inhabit one reality without destroying the other. Fantasizing spares those we care about from the full irresponsibility and scary strangeness of our urges.

The word ‘prestige’ sounds wholly inappropriate when applied to the school run and the laundry because we have been perniciously trained to think of this quality as naturally belonging elsewhere, in high politics or scientific research, the movies or fashion. But stripped to its essence, prestige merely refers to whatever is most noble and important in life.

The forthrightness of the middle-aged seducer is rarely a matter of confidence or arrogance; it is instead a species of impatient despair born of a pitiful awareness of the ever-increasing proximity of death.

The stupidity of jealousy makes it a tempting target for those in a moralizing mood. They should spare their breath. However unedifying and plain silly attacks of jealousy may be, they cannot be skirted: we should accept that we simply cannot stay sane on hearing that the person we love and rely on has touched the lips, or even so much as the hand, of another party. This makes no sense, of course – and runs directly counter to the often quite sober and loyal thoughts we may have had when we happened to betray someone in the past. But we are not amenable to reason here. To be wise is to recognize when wisdom will simply not be an option.

He is starting to learn about ‘being good’, but not in the normal, second-hand kind of way, by listening to a sermon or dutifully following social mores from a lack of choice or out of a passive, cowed respect for tradition. He is becoming a slightly nicer person by the most authentic and effective means possible: through having a chance to explore the long-term consequences of bad behaviour from within.

Our romantic lives are fated to be sad and incomplete, because we are creatures driven by two essential desires which point powerfully in entirely opposing directions. Yet what is worse is our utopian refusal to countenance the divergence, our naive hope that a cost-free synchronization might somehow be found: that the libertine might live for adventure while avoiding loneliness and chaos. Or that the married Romantic might unite sex with tenderness, and passion with routine.

The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. The best cure for love is to get to know them better.

Real generosity, he recognizes, means admiring, seeing through the urge for permanence and walking away.

Adventure and security are irreconcilable, he sees. 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.

Melancholy isn’t, of course, a disorder that needs to be cured. It’s a species of intelligent grief which arises when we come face to face with the certainty that disappointment is written into the script from the start. 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.

In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the altar, a couple would speak thus: ‘We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.’ After the solemn repetition of the last sentence by the congregation, the couple would continue: ‘We will endeavour to be faithful. At the same time, we are certain that never being allowed to sleep with anyone else is one of the tragedies of existence. We apologize that our jealousies have made this peculiar but sound and non-negotiable restriction very necessary. We promise to make each other the sole repository of our regrets, rather than distribute them through a life of sexual Don Juanism. We have surveyed the different options for unhappiness and it is to each other we have chosen to bind ourselves.’ Spouses who had been cheated on would no longer be at liberty furiously to complain that they had expected their partner to be content with them alone. Instead they could more poignantly and justly cry, ‘I was relying on you to be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness which our hard-won marriage represents.’ Thereafter, an affair would be a betrayal not of intimate joy, but of a reciprocal pledge to endure the disappointments of marriage with bravery and stoic reserve.

Rabih keeps in mind the contradictory, sentimental and hormonal forces which constantly pull him in a hundred crazed and inconclusive directions. To honour every one of these would be to annul any chance of leading a coherent life.

Everything begins with small humiliations and let-downs.

But Mrs Fairbairn doesn’t like being pressed to take sides. This is part of her genius. She doesn’t care for anyone being ‘in the right’. She wants to sort out what each side is feeling, and then make sure the other side hears it sympathetically.

At the heart of their struggles, there is an issue of trust – a virtue which comes easily to neither of them.

Rabih anxiously attacks; Kirsten avoidantly withdraws. They are two people who need one another badly and yet are simultaneously terrified of letting on just how much they do so.

love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.

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.

We start off in childhood believing parents might have access to a superior kind of knowledge and experience. They look, for a while, astonishingly competent. Our exaggerated esteem is touching, but also intensely problematic, for it sets them up as the ultimate objects of blame when we gradually discover that they are flawed, sometimes unkind, in areas ignorant and utterly unable to save us from certain troubles. It can take a while, until the fourth decade or the final hospital scenes, for a more forgiving stance to emerge. Their new condition, frail and frightened, reveals in a compellingly physical way something which has always been true psychologically: that they are uncertain vulnerable creatures motivated more by anxiety, fear, a clumsy love and unconscious compulsions than by godlike wisdom and moral clarity – and cannot, therefore, forever be held responsible for either their own shortcomings or our many disappointments.

Held up against certain ideals of success, his life has been a deep disappointment. But he can also see that it is, in the end, no great achievement simply to fixate on failure. There is valour in being able to identify a forgiving, hopeful perspective on one’s life, in knowing how to be a friend to oneself, because one has a responsibility to others to endure.

We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.

We should look for ways to accommodate ourselves as gently and as kindly as we can to the awkward realities of living alongside another fallen creature. There can only ever be a ‘good enough’ marriage.