The Course of Love

by Alain de Botton

He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.

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

This is another part of her he loves: the weakness of the deeply able and competent person.

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.

Without patience for negotiation, there is bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

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.

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.

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.

In the event, Rabih didn’t speak, and Kirsten didn’t listen. Instead they went to the cinema and had a thoroughly nice evening together. In the engine room of their relationship, however, a warning light had come on.

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.

Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might only constitute 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.

For in the place of the soft, indulgent language Rabih and Kirsten have been using with their child for many hours, there is often just bitterness, vengeance, and carping. 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.

They are warm towards and considerate of each other. Neither will have a chance to let the other down. They can both appear competent, generous, trustworthy, and believable, as strangers will.

An impure conscience is a useful spur to being a bit nicer.

In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the altar, a couple would speak thus: “We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.”

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.

We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.

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.

Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.