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. He will surmise that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling opening ambitions, and that, 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.

cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards.

Rabih feels certain that he has discovered someone endowed with the most extraordinary combination of inner and outer qualities: intelligence and kindness, humor and beauty, sincerity and courage; someone whom he would miss if she left the room even though she had been entirely unknown to him but two hours before; someone whose fingers—currently drawing faint lines with a toothpick across the tablecloth—he longs to caress and squeeze between his own; someone with whom he wants to spend the rest of his life.

And yet, we should insist, none of this has anything much yet to do with a love story. Love stories begin not when we fear someone may be unwilling to see us again but when they decide they would have no objection to seeing us all the time; not when they have every opportunity to run away but when they have exchanged solemn vows promising to hold us, and be held captive by us, for life. 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 means admiration for qualities in the lover that promise to correct our weaknesses and imbalances; love is a search for completion.

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.

As children, these good communicators must have been blessed with caregivers who knew how to love their charges without demanding that every last thing about them be agreeable and perfect. Such parents would have been able to live with the idea that their offspring might sometimes—for a while, at least—be odd, violent, angry, mean, peculiar, or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love. The parents would thus have created an invaluable wellspring of courage from which those children would eventually be able to draw to sustain the confessions and direct conversations of adult life.

Whatever anxieties he felt, he would reflexively conceal. His job was to help keep her intact. He could not afford to tell her too many tricky but true things about himself. Rabih thereby grew up to understand the love of others as a reward for being good, not for being transparent. As an adult and as a husband, he lacks any idea of how to make something coherent out of the nonnormative parts of himself.

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.

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.”

But she’s not even remotely coping inside: it takes a certain strength to cry, the confidence that one will eventually be able to staunch the tears. She doesn’t have the luxury of feeling just a little sad. The danger is that she might fall apart and never know how to put the pieces back together. To prevent the possibility, she cauterizes her wounds as best she can, aged seven.

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.

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 serious discomfiture, 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.

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,...

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 be...

Neither Kirsten nor Rabih has ever known such a mixture of love and boredom. They are used to basing their friendships on shared temperaments and interests. But Esther is, confusingly, simultaneously the most boring person they have ever met and the one they find themselves loving the most. Rarely have love and psychological compatibility drifted so far apart—and yet it doesn’t matter in the slightest.

The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behavior.

How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships—if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion, and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love.

As parents, we learn another thing about love: how much power we have over people who depend on us and, therefore, what responsibilities we have to tread carefully around those who have been placed at our mercy. We learn of an unexpected capacity to hurt without meaning to: to frighten through eccentricity or unpredictability, anxiety or momentary irritation. We must train ourselves to be as others need us to be rather than as our own first reflexes might dictate. The barbarian must will himself to hold the crystal goblet lightly, in a meaty fist that could otherwise crush it like a dry autumn leaf.

The effort of love has exhausted them. They have nothing left to give to one another. The tired child inside each of them is furious at how long it has been neglected and is in pieces.

We

may rage and blame others for their inability to intuit our needs, we may fitfully move from one relationship to another, we may blame an entire sex for its shallowness—until the day we end our quixotic searches and reach a semblance of mature detachment, realizing that the only release from our longing may be to stop demanding a perfect love and noting its many absences at every turn, and instead

start to give love away (perhaps to a small person) with oblivious abandon without jealously calculating the chance...

It can’t be coincidental that the sweetness of children should be especially easy to identify and cherish at this point in history. Societies become sensitive to the qualities they are missing.

Adults, too, are—beneath the bluster—intermittently playful, silly, fanciful, vulnerable, hysterical, terrified, pitiful, and in search of consolation and forgiveness. We’re well versed at seeing the sweet and the fragile in children and offering them help and comfort accordingly. Around them, we know how to put aside the worst of our compulsions, vindictiveness, and fury. We can recalibrate our expectations and demand a little less than we normally do; we’re slower to anger and a bit more aware of unrealized potential. 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.

would be even better if we lived in one where we were a little nicer to the childlike sides of one another.

A person has to feel rather safe around someone else in order to be this difficult. Before a child can throw a tantrum, the background atmosphere needs to be profoundly benevolent.

The dream is to save the child time; to pass on in one go insights that required arduous and lengthy experience to accumulate. 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 reexploring entire chapters in the back catalogue of our species’ idiocies—and to wasting a good part of

out for ourselves what has already been extensively and painfully charted by others.

Whatever modest denials parents may offer—however much they may downplay their ambitions in front of strangers—to have a child is, at the outset, at least, to make an assault on perfection, to attempt to create not just another average human being but an exemplar of distinctive perfection.

the sacrifices required to get a child to adulthood are simply too great.

If parental kindness were enough, the human race would stagnate and in time die off. The survival of the species hinges on children eventually getting fed up and heading off into the world armed with hopes of finding more satisfying sources of excitement.

are never through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn’t a curse limited to the inadequate and the weak. Insecurity may even be a peculiar 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.

At the close of many a day, Kirsten is reluctant even to be touched by Rabih, not because she no longer cares for him, but because she doesn’t feel as if there is enough of her left to risk giving more away to another person. One

We seem unwilling to allow for the possibility that the glory of our species may lie not only in the launching of satellites, the founding of companies, and the manufacturing of miraculously thin semiconductors but also in an ability—even if it is widely distributed among billions—to spoon yogurt into small mouths, find missing socks, clean toilets, deal with tantrums, and wipe congealed things off tables. Here, too, there are trials worthy not of condemnation or sarcastic ridicule but also of a degree of glamour, so that they may be endured with greater sympathy and fortitude.

“You think it’s funny for me, all this, do you?” she says eventually, still without looking at him. “Throwing the best parts of my career away in order to manage two constantly exhausting, maddening, beautiful children and an oh-so-interesting on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown husband? Do you think this is what I dreamt of when I was fifteen and read Germaine Greer’s bloody Female Eunuch? Do you know how much nonsense I have to fill my head with every day of the week just so this household can function?

when we spend more time around them, something so wrong as to make a mockery of those initially rapturous feelings. 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.

Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.

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. He doesn’t downplay the loss either way.

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.

Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.”

have surveyed the different options for unhappiness, and it is to each other we have chosen to bind ourselves.”

No relationship could start without a commitment to wholehearted intimacy. But in order for love to keep going, it also seems impossible to imagine partners not learning to keep a great many of their thoughts to themselves.

Repression, a degree of restraint, and a little dedication to self-editing belong to love just as surely as a capacity for explicit confession. The person who can’t tolerate secrets, who in the name of “being honest” shares information so wounding to the other that it can never be forgotten—this person is no friend of love.

She is the champion of a truth that Rabih and Kirsten are now intimate with, but which they know is woefully prone to get lost in the surrounding noise: that love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.

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

Aging is a bit like looking tired, but in a way that no amount of sleep will repair. Every year it will get a little worse. Today’s so-called bad photograph will be next year’s good one. Nature’s kind trick is to make everything happen so slowly that we don’t get as scared as we should.

No one among us has come through unscathed. We were all (necessarily) less than ideally parented: we fight rather than explain, we nag rather than teach, we fret instead of analyzing our worries, we lie and scatter blame where it doesn’t belong.

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.