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 soul mate been allowed to take on the status of something close to the purpose of life. An idealism previously directed at gods and spirits has been rerouted towards human subjects—an ostensibly generous gesture nevertheless freighted with forbidding and brittle consequences, for it is no simple thing for any human being to honor over a lifetime the perfections he or she might have hinted at to an imaginative observer in the street, the office, or the adjoining airplane seat.

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.

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.

He and Kirsten will marry, they will suffer, they will frequently worry about money, they will have a girl first, then a boy, one of them will have an affair, there will be passages of boredom, they’ll sometimes want to murder one another and on a few occasions to kill themselves. This will be the real love story.

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

Rabih’s love is a logical response to the discovery of complementary strengths and a range of attributes to which he aspires. He loves from a feeling of incompleteness—and from a desire to be made whole.

He feeds her his worlds.

Love is also, and equally, about weakness, about being touched by another’s fragilities and sorrows, especially when—as happens in the early days—we ourselves are in no danger of being held responsible for them. Seeing our lover despondent and in crisis, in tears and unable to cope, can reassure us that, for all their virtues, they are not alienatingly invincible. They, too, are at points confused and at sea, a realization which lends us a new supportive role, reduces our sense of shame about our own inadequacies, and draws us closer to them around a shared experience of pain.

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.

There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled, or as “normal” as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile, and multiple; all of this our lover can understand and accept us for.

They are in revolt against the hypocrisies of their usual lives. They free each other from compromise. They have a sense of having no more secrets.

It’s more than mere coyness to refer to what they have done as “making love.” They haven’t just had sex; they have translated their feelings—appreciation, tenderness, gratitude, and surrender—into a physical act.

The particulars of what arouses us may sound odd and illogical, but—seen from close up—they carry echoes of qualities we long for in other, purportedly saner areas of existence: understanding, sympathy, trust, unity, generosity, and kindness. Beneath many erotic triggers lie symbolic solutions to some of our greatest fears, and poignant allusions to our yearnings for friendship and understanding.

In bed, violence—normally such a danger—no longer has to be a risk; a degree of force can be expended safely and won’t make either of them unhappy.

As children they were both often physical with their friends. It could be fun to hit. Kirsten would whack her cousins hard with the sofa pillows, while Rabih would wrestle with his friends on the grass at the swimming club. In adulthood, however, violence of any kind has been prohibited: no grown person is ever supposed to use force against another. And yet, within the boundaries of the couple’s games, it can feel strangely pleasing to take a swipe, to hit a little and be hit; they can be rough and insistent; there can be a savage edge. Within the protective circle of their love, neither of them has to feel in any danger of being hurt or left bereft.

in bed with Rabih, she now discovers that she’d like to assume a different role, as a form of escape from the wearying demands of the rest of her life. Her being submissive to him means allowing a loving person to tell her exactly what to do, letting him take responsibility and choice away from her.

The games of submission and domination, the rule-breaking scenarios, the fetishistic interest in particular words or parts of the body—all offer opportunities to investigate wishes that are far from being simply peculiar, pointless, or slightly demented. They offer brief utopian interludes in which we can, with a rare and real friend, safely cast off our normal defenses and share and satisfy our longings for extreme closeness and mutual acceptance—which are the real psychologically rooted reasons why games are, in the end, so exciting.

They’ve discovered an enthusiasm for having a go at it in semipublic places, which seems to bring into sudden, risky, but electrifying alignment both their sexual sides and the more formal public personae they normally have to present. They feel as though they are challenging responsibility, anonymity, and restraint with their uninhibited and heated moments. Their pleasure becomes somehow the more intense for the presence of 240 oblivious passengers only one thin door panel away.

What he has instead of a rationale is feelings, and plenty of them: the feeling of never wanting to let her go because of her broad, open forehead and the way her upper lip protrudes ever so slightly over her lower one; the feeling that he loves her because of her furtive, slightly surprised, quick-witted air which inspires him to call her his “Rat” and his “Mole” (and which also, because her looks are unconventional, makes him feel clever for finding her attractive); the feeling that he needs to marry her because of the diligent concentration on her face when she prepares a cod and spinach pie; because of her sweetness when she buttons up her duffel coat; and because of the cunning intelligence she displays when she unpacks the psyches of people they know.

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 that it 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.”

He asks her to marry him because it feels like an extremely dangerous thing to do: if the marriage were to fail, it would ruin both their lives. Those voices which hint that marriage is no longer necessary, that it is far safer simply to cohabit, are right from a practical point of view, concedes Rabih; but they miss the emotional appeal of danger, of putting oneself and one’s beloved through an experience which could, with only a few twists of the plotline, result in mutual destruction. Rabih takes his very willingness to be ruined in love’s name as proof of his commitment. That it is “unnecessary” in the practical sense to marry serves only to render the idea more compelling emotionally.

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.

Life on his own had become, he realized then, untenable. He had had enough of solitary walks home at the end of desultory parties; of entire Sundays passed without speaking a word to another human; of holidays spent tagging along with harassed couples whose children left them no energy for conversation; of the knowledge that he occupied no important place in anyone’s heart. 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: once the freewheeling days of school and university are over, company and warmth become dispiritingly hard to find; social life starts to revolve oppressively around couples; there’s no one left to call or hang out with. It’s hardly surprising, then, if when we find someone halfway decent, we might cling.

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.

A few centuries from now, the level of self-knowledge that our own age judges necessary to get married might be thought puzzling if not outright barbaric. By then, a standard, wholly nonjudgmental line of inquiry—appropriate even on a first date—to which everyone would be expected to have a tolerant, good-natured and nondefensive answer, would simply be: “So, in what ways are you mad?”

he is positively drawn to Kirsten because of her troubles. He identifies her as a suitable candidate for marriage because he is instinctively suspicious of people for whom things have always gone well.

In the past he has described certain women he has been out on dates with as “boring” when anyone else might more generously and accurately have labeled them “healthy.” Taking trauma to be a primary route to growth and depth, Rabih wants his own sadness to find an echo in his partner’s character.

He interprets her damaged aspects in the most obvious and most lyrical way: as a chance for him to play a useful role.

We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes.

How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmoni...

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.