The Course of Love

by Alain de Botton

What we typically call love is only the start of love.

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.

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.

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.

It is a wonderful thing to live in a world where so many people are nice to children. It 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. Rabih himself wasn’t anything like this tricky with his own father when he was young, but then again, neither did he ever feel quite so loved by him. All the assurances he and Kirsten have offered over the years—“I will always be on your side”; “You can tell us whatever you’re feeling”—have paid off brilliantly: they have encouraged William and his sister to direct their frustrations and disappointments powerfully towards the two loving adults who have signaled that they can, and will, take the heat.

it’s a mere sleight of language that allows him to maintain that he has been married only once. What has conveniently looked like a single relationship in fact sits across so many evolutions, disconnections, renegotiations, intervals of distance, and emotional homecomings that he has in truth gone through at least a dozen divorces and remarriages—just to the same person.