The Course of Love by Alain de Botton
I was recommended this book in the summer of 2018 by a friend who I met in New York. Telling me that it is her favorite book, she lent me her copy while she was away for a couple of weeks. I started but never finished the book that summer. It didn’t resonate with me for some reason. Maybe I was too preoccupied with the job hunt.
Fast forward to 2021 summer in Montreal. I don’t remember why but I pick up the book again. This time, I am fully immersed. I can relate to the stories and empathize with the characters. I even tear up a bit. I finish the book at a bar near the office after work.
“I think with books, there’s really something around reader book fit and the particulars of that moment.” - Patrick Collison on Tim Ferriss Podcast
Quotes
Romanticism
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.
We call things a turn-on but what we might really be alluding to is delight at finally having been allowed to reveal our secret selves—and at discovering that, far from being horrified by who we are, our lovers have opted to respond with only encouragement and approval.
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.
Ever After
We allow for complexity, and therefore make accommodations for disagreement and its patient resolution, in most of the big areas of life: international trade, immigration, oncology … But when it comes to domestic existence, we tend to make a fateful presumption of ease, which in turn inspires in us a tense aversion to protracted negotiation.
Ideally, art would give us the answers that other people don’t. This might even be one of the main points of literature: to tell us what society at large is too prudish to explore. The important books should be those that leave us wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known so much about our lives.
We didn’t have to make our every requirement known: large, kind people guessed for us. They saw past our tears, our inarticulacy, our confusions: they found the explanations for discomforts which we lacked the ability to verbalize. That may be why, in relationships, even the most eloquent among us may instinctively prefer not to spell things out when our partners are at risk of failing to read us properly. Only wordless and accurate mind reading can feel like a true sign that our partner is someone to be trusted; only when we don’t have to explain can we feel certain that we are genuinely understood.
We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favor when we are able to regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant. We are so alive to the idea that it’s patronizing to be thought of as younger than we are; we forget that it is also, at times, the greatest privilege for someone to look beyond our adult self in order to engage with—and forgive—the disappointed, furious, inarticulate child within.
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. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of, and can win, the goodwill of others if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination.
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.
The very concept of trying to “teach” a lover things feels patronizing, incongruous, and plain sinister. If we truly loved someone, there could be no talk of wanting him or her to change. Romanticism is clear on this score: true love should involve an acceptance of a partner’s whole being. It is this fundamental commitment to benevolence that makes the early months of love so moving. Within the new relationship, our vulnerabilities are treated with generosity. Our shyness, awkwardness, and confusion endear (as they did when we were children) rather than generate sarcasm or complaint; the trickier sides of us are interpreted solely through the filter of compassion. From these moments, a beautiful yet challenging and even reckless conviction develops: that to be properly loved must always mean being endorsed for all that one is.
Children
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.
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. Because it is always tempting to overemphasize autonomy and independence, 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, quite literally, on our capacity for love.
A well-loved child is set a challenging precedent. By its very nature, parental love works to conceal the effort which went into generating it. It shields the recipient from the donor’s complexity and sadness—and from an awareness of how many other interests, friends, and concerns the parent has sacrificed in the name of love. With infinite generosity, it places the small person at the very center of the cosmos for a time—to give it strength for the day he or she will, with agonizing surprise, have to grasp the true scale, and awkward solitude, of the grown-up world.
It’s not just children who are childlike. 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. It would be even better if we lived in one where we were a little nicer to the childlike sides of one another.
Yet what niggles Kirsten most of all is the sentimentality of Rabih’s performance. She knows at first hand that the kindness he displays with their daughter is available from him only in his role as a father, not as a husband. She has plenty of experience with his drastic change in tone once the two of them are out of earshot of the children. He is unwittingly planting an image in Esther’s mind of how a man might ideally behave with a woman—notwithstanding that the ideal in no way reflects the truth of who he, Rabih, really is.
He thinks: I earn two-thirds of our income, possibly even more depending on how the total is calculated, but it seems I also do more than my fair share of everything else. I’m made to feel as though my work were solely something I was doing for me. In fact, it’s rarely satisfying and invariably stressful. I can’t be expected, on top of it all, to take on the duvets. I do my bit: I took the children swimming last weekend, and just now I loaded the dishwasher. Deep down, I want to be nurtured and protected. I’m furious. And she thinks: Everyone seems to believe my two days at home are all about “relaxing” and that I’m lucky to have this time. But this family wouldn’t hold together for five minutes without all the things I get done in the background. Everything is my responsibility. I long to take a break, but whenever I bring up some chore I want to pass on, I’m made to feel I’m being unfair—so, in the end, it seems easier to be quiet. There’s something wrong with the lights again, and I will have to chase the electrician tomorrow. Deep down, I want to be nurtured and protected. I’m furious.
The modern expectation is that there will be equality in all things in the couple—which means, at heart, an equality of suffering. But calibrating grief to ensure an equal dosage is no easy task: misery is experienced subjectively, and there is always a temptation for each party to form a sincere yet competitive conviction that, in truth, his or her life really is more cursed—in ways that the partner seems uninclined to acknowledge or atone for. It takes a superhuman wisdom to avoid the consoling conclusion that one has the harder life.
Adultery
Our romantic lives are fated to be sad and incomplete, because we are creatures driven by two essential desires which point powerfully in entirely opposing directions. Yet what is worse is our utopian refusal to countenance the divergence, our naive hope that a cost-free synchronization might somehow be found: that the libertine might live for adventure while avoiding loneliness and chaos. Or that the married Romantic might unite sex with tenderness, and passion with routine.
The error of the infatuation is more subtle: a failure to keep in mind the central truth of human nature: that everyone—not merely our current partners, in whose multiple failings we are such experts—but everyone will have something substantially and maddeningly wrong with them 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.
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. We are so impressed by honesty that we forget the virtues of politeness; a desire not always to confront people we care about with the full, hurtful aspects of our nature. 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. And if we suspect (as we should regularly if our relationship is a worthy one) that our partner is also lying (about what she’s thinking of, how he judges our work, where she was last night, etc.), then we would do well not to act the sharp and relentless inquisitor. It may be kinder, wiser, and closer to the true spirit of love to pretend we simply didn’t notice.
Beyond Romanticism
An avoidant attachment style is marked by a strong desire to avoid conflict and to reduce exposure to the other when emotional needs have not been met. The avoidant person quickly presumes that others are keen to attack them and that they cannot be reasoned with. One just has to escape, pull up the drawbridge, and go cold. Regrettably, the avoidant party cannot normally explain their fearful and defensive pattern to their partner, so that the reasons behind their distant and absent behavior remain clouded and are easy to mistake for being uncaring and unengaged—when in fact the opposite is true: the avoidant party cares very deeply indeed, it is just that loving has come to feel far too risky.
At this point he is beyond self-pity, the shallow belief that what has happened to him is rare or undeserved. He has lost faith in his own innocence and uniqueness. This isn’t a midlife crisis; it’s more that he is finally, some thirty years too late, leaving adolescence behind. He sees he is a man with an exaggerated longing for Romantic love who nevertheless understands little about kindness and even less about communication. He is someone afraid of openly striving for happiness who takes shelter in a stance of preemptive disappointment and cynicism.
His dreams were once very grand indeed: he would be another Louis Kahn or Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe or Geoffrey Bawa. He was going to bring a new kind of architecture into being: locally specific, elegant, harmonious, technologically cutting-edge, progressive. Instead he is the almost-broke deputy director of a second-rate urban-design firm, with a single building—more of a shed, really—to his name. Nature embeds in us insistent dreams of success. For the species, there must be an evolutionary advantage in being hardwired for such striving; restlessness has given us cities, libraries, spaceships. But this impulse doesn’t leave much opportunity for individual equilibrium. The price of a few works of genius throughout history is a substantial portion of the human race being daily sickened by anxiety and disappointment.