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A marriage doesn’t begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting. It begins far earlier, when the idea of love is born, and more specifically the dream of a soul mate.
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 has, without knowing how, richly succeeded at the three central challenges underpinning the Romantic idea of love: he has found the right person; he has opened his heart to her; and he has been accepted. But he is, of course, nowhere yet. 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.
returning unity to their previously divided and shamed selves.
To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone.
He asks her to marry him in order to break the all-consuming grip that the thought of relationships has for too long had on his psyche. He is exhausted by seventeen years’ worth of melodrama and excitements that have led nowhere. He is thirty-two and restless for other challenges. It’s neither cynical nor callous of Rabih to feel immense love for Kirsten and yet at the same time to hope that marriage may conclusively end love’s mostly painful dominion over his life.
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.
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: 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.
Rabih thereby grew up to understand the love of others as a reward for being good, not for being transparent.
Kirsten’s words act like an immediate balm. Rabih is flooded with love for his slightly inarticulate and very unself-righteous wife. Her insight is the best welcome-home present she could have given him, and the greatest guarantee of the solidity of their love. Neither he nor she have to be perfect, he reflects; they only need to give each other the odd sign they know they can sometimes be quite hard to live with. 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
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Identical qualities produce both amazing house deals and insecurities around status. In her occasional worries about the relative wealth of her friends, Kirsten is, Rabih can now see, exhibiting nothing more or less than the weaknesses of her strengths.
It happens much as he remembers it from before, that first span with someone new. If he could collect every such scene from across his past and put them together on a single loop, the total running time might be no more than half an hour, yet these would in many ways be the finest moments of his life. It feels as if he had been granted access to a version of himself which he had long thought dead.
Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.
love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.
He once fantasized that his worries would be stilled if he lived elsewhere, if he attained a few professional goals, if he had a family. But nothing has ever made a difference: he is, he can see, anxious to the core, in his most basic makeup—a frightened, ill-adjusted creature.
Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love.
But once we realize that the larger dreams are always compromised in some way, with what gratitude we may turn to these minuscule islands of serene perfection and delight.
Choosing a person to marry is hence just a matter of deciding exactly what kind of suffering we want to endure rather than of assuming we have found a way to skirt the rules of emotional existence. We will all by definition end up with that stock character of our nightmares, “the wrong person.”
Enlightened romantic pessimism simply assumes that one person can’t be everything to another.
It’s profoundly counterintuitive for us to think of ourselves as mad. We seem so normal and mostly so good—to ourselves. It’s everyone else who is out of step . . . and yet, maturity begins with the capacity to sense and, in good time and without defensiveness, admit to our own craziness. If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun.
There is no such person over the long term. We are too varied and peculiar. There cannot be lasting congruence. 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.
He knows full well that he has no right to call himself a happy man; he is simply an ordinary human being passing through a small phase of contentment.
Very little can be made perfect; he knows that now. He has a sense of the bravery it takes to live even an utterly mediocre life like his own.
