The Course of Love

by Alain de Botton

He will continue to trust in the possibility of rapid, wholehearted understanding and empathy between two human beings and in the chance of a definitive end to loneliness.

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.

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.

Rabih takes his very willingness to be ruined in love’s name as proof of his commitment.

Marriage, to Rabih, feels like the high point of a daring path to total intimacy; proposing has all the passionate allure of shutting one’s eyes and jumping off a steep cliff, wishing and trusting that the other will be there to catch one.

He proposes because he wants to preserve, to ‘freeze’, what he and Kirsten feel for each other.

He loves Kirsten deeply, but he hates the idea of being on his own with almost equal force.

To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone. This isn’t necessarily our fault as individuals. Society as a whole appears determined to render the single state as nettlesome and depressing as possible:

Loneliness can provoke an unhelpful rush and repression of doubt and ambivalence about a potential spouse.

The success of any relationship should be determined not just by how happy a couple are to be together, but by how worried each partner would be about not being in a relationship at all.

Without witnesses, he can operate under the benign illusion that he may just, with the right person, prove no particular challenge to be around.

described certain women he has been out on dates with as ‘boring’, when anyone else might more generously and accurately have labelled them ‘healthy’.

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.

when it comes to domestic existence, we tend to make a fateful presumption of ease, which in turn inspires in us a tense aversion to protracted negotiation.

When the tensions which bedevil us lack glamour, we are at the mercy of those who might wish to label our concerns petty and odd. We can end up frustrated and at the same time too doubtful of the dignity of our frustrations to have the confidence to outline them calmly for our dubious or impatient audience.

But too often a realistic sense of what an endurable relationship is ends up weakened by silence, societal or artistic. We hence imagine that things are far worse for us than they are for other couples.

Not only are we unhappy; we misunderstand how freakish and rare our particular form of unhappiness might be. We end up believing that our struggles are indications of having made some unusual and fundamental error, rather than evidence that our marriages are essentially going entirely according to plan.

They are spared continuous bitterness by two reliable curatives. The ...

The second remedy is more abstract: it can be difficult to remain furious for very long given quite how large the universe happens to be.

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.

Sulking pays homage to a beautiful, dangerous ideal that can be traced back to our earliest childhoods: the promise of wordless understanding.

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.

They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality and their unpopular, awkward or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust.

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

Rabih thereby grew up to understand the love of others as a reward for being good, not for being transparent.

countenance

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

Both Rabih and Kirsten have learned how to reassure the anxious child selves concealed within their adult partners. That’s why they love each other. But they have in the process also unknowingly inherited a little of that dangerous, unfair, beautifully naive trust which little children place in their parents.

But calm is precisely what is absent from love’s classroom. There is simply too much on the line. The ‘student’ isn’t merely a passing responsibility, he or she is a lifelong commitment. Failure will ruin existence. No wonder we may be prone to lose control and deliver cack-handed, hasty speeches which imply a lack of faith in the legitimacy or even the nobility of the act of imparting advice. And no wonder, too, if we end up achieving

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.

An individualistic, self-gratifying culture cannot easily equate contentment with being at someone else’s call.

Parents are apt to proceed from the assumption that their children, though they may be troubled or in pain, are fundamentally good. As soon as the particular pin that is jabbing them is correctly identified, they will be restored to native innocence. When children cry, we don’t accuse them of being mean or self-pitying; we wonder what has upset them.

He loves Esther far too much to dare impose his anxious reality upon her. Loving her means striving to have the courage not to be entirely himself.

We readily treat children with a degree of kindness that we are oddly and woefully reluctant to show to our peers.

It is a wonderful thing to live in a world where so many people are nice to children. It would be even better if we lived in one where we were a little nicer to the childlike sides of one another.

The role of being a good parent brings with it one large and very tricky requirement: to be the constant bearer of deeply unfortunate news.

But the meaning of the words has been transformed by our era of kindness, so that a mother and father are now merely ‘people who will make it nice for me’ or ‘people whose suggestions I may go along with if – and only if – I see the point of what they’re saying’.

But the progress of the human race is at every turn stymied by an ingrained resistance to being rushed to conclusions. We are held back by an inherent interest in re-exploring entire chapters in the back catalogue of our species’ idiocies

It’s not that he doesn’t respect his wife, nor even that he doesn’t desire her any more. No, the truth of his situation is more peculiar and more humiliating. He is in love with a woman who too often appears not to need love at all; a fighter so capable and strong that there are few opportunities afforded to nurture her; someone with a problematic relationship to anyone inclined to help her, and who sometimes seems most comfortable when she feels disappointed by those to whom she has entrusted herself.

But this impulse doesn’t leave much opportunity for individual equilibrium. 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.

But better than that, he’s started to understand why. She isn’t mean; it’s her experience of men and her defences against being let down kicking in. It’s just how she processes challenges. It helps to see these things; he is accruing alternatives to vengeance and anger.

Nature’s kind trick is to make everything happen so slowly that we don’t get as scared as we should.

What has conveniently looked like a single relationship in fact sits across so many evolutions, disconnections, renegotiations, intervals of distance and emotional homecomings that he has in truth gone through at least a dozen divorces and remarriages – just to the same person.

Once, you were deemed ready for matrimony when you’d reached certain financial and social milestones: when you had a home to your name, a trousseau full of linen, a set of qualifications on the mantelpiece or a few cows and a parcel of land in your possession. Then, under the influence of Romantic ideology, such practicalities grew to seem altogether too mercenary and calculating, and the focus shifted to emotional qualities. It came to be thought important to have the right feelings; among these, a sense of having hit upon a soulmate, a faith in being perfectly understood, a certainty of never wanting to sleep with anyone else again.

Choosing a person to marry is hence just a matter of deciding exactly what kind of suffering we want to endure, rather than of imagining we have found a way to skirt round the rules of emotional existence.

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.

When we run up against the reasonable limits of our lovers’ capacities for understanding, we mustn’t blame them for dereliction. They were not tragically inept. They couldn’t fully fathom who we were – and we could do no better. Which is normal. No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else.

In a secret corner of our mind, we picture a lover who will anticipate our needs, read our hearts, act selflessly and make everything better. It sounds ‘romantic’; yet it is a blueprint for disaster.

The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste, but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and good grace. 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.