The Course of Love

by Alain de Botton

It will take Rabih many years and frequent essays in love to reach a few different conclusions, to recognize that the very things he once considered romantic—wordless intuitions, instantaneous longings, a trust in soul mates—are what stand in the way of learning how to be with someone.

Still, Rabih doesn’t give up. He is a Romantic. And eventually, after many empty Sundays, it happens at last, almost as he has been taught—largely by art—to expect that it will.

The longing proves, in its own way, exquisite.

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 reaches a pitch at those moments when our beloved turns out to understand, more clearly than others have ever been able to, and perhaps even better than we do ourselves, the chaotic, embarrassing, and shameful parts of us. That someone else gets who we are and both sympathizes with us and forgives us for what they see underpins our whole capacity to trust and to give. Love is a dividend of gratitude for our lover’s insight into our own confused and troubled psyche.

We call things a turn-on but what we might really be alluding to is delight at finally having been allowed to reveal our secret selves—and at discovering that, far from being horrified by who we are, our lovers have opted to respond with only encouragement and approval.

That it is “unnecessary” in the practical sense to marry serves only to render the idea more compelling emotionally. 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.

He proposes because he wants to preserve, to “freeze,” what he and Kirsten feel for each other. He hopes through the act of marrying to make an ecstatic sensation perpetual.

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

But what really adds to the intensity is a new thought that arises whenever a tension comes to light: How can this be endured over a lifetime?

To which he replies, “Fuck you, leave me alone.” Which is sometimes how fear can sound.

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 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.

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