The Course of Love

by Alain De Botton

  Then comes the pivotal challenge of knowing whether the feeling is mutual, a topic of almost childlike simplicity nonetheless capable of sustaining endless semiotic study and detailed conjecture. She complimented him on his grey raincoat. She let him pay for their tea and papadums. She was encouraging when he mentioned his ambition to return to architecture. Yet she seemed ill at ease, even a little irritated, on the three occasions when he tried to bring the conversation around to her past relationships. Nor did she pick up on his hint about catching a film.

  Such doubts only inflame desire. For Rabih, the most attractive people aren’t those who accept him right away (he doubts their judgment) or those who never give him a chance (he grows to resent their indifference) but rather those who, for unfathomable reasons—perhaps a competing romantic entanglement or a cautious nature, a physical predicament or a psychological inhibition, a religious commitment or a political objection—leave him turning for a little while in the wind.

  The longing proves, in its own way, exquisite.

  Eventually, Rabih looks up her phone number in the council paperwork and, one Saturday morning, texts his opinion that it might be sunny later. “I know,” comes the almost instantaneous reply. “On for a trip to the Botanics? Kx”

  Which is how they end up, three hours later, touring some of the world’s most unusual tree and plant species in Edinburgh’s botanical gardens. They see a Chilean orchid, they are struck by the complexity of a rhododendron, and they pause between a fir tree from Switzerland and an immense redwood from Canada whose fronds stir in a light wind coming in off the sea.

  Rabih has run out of energy to formulate the meaningless comments which typically precede such events. It is thus out of a sense of impatient despair rather than arrogance or entitlement that he cuts Kirsten off in mid-sentence as she reads from an information plaque, “Alpine trees should never be confused with—” and takes her face in his hands, pressing his lips gently against hers, to which she responds by shutting her eyes and wrapping her arms tightly around his lower back.

  An ice cream van in Inverleith Terrace emits an eerie jingle, a jackdaw screeches on the branch of a tree transplanted from New Zealand, and no one notices two people, partly hidden by nonnative trees, in one of the more tender and consequential moments of both of their lives.

  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.

  At the gates to the botanical gardens, Kirsten tells Rabih to call her and admits—with a smile in which he suddenly sees what she must have looked like when she was ten years old—that she’ll be free any evening the following week.

  On his walk home to Quartermile, wending through the Saturday crowds, Rabih is thrilled enough to want to stop random strangers in order to share his good fortune with them. 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.

  In Love

  Kirsten suggests a trip to Portobello Beach, half an hour away by bicycle on the Firth of Forth. Rabih is unsteady on his bike, rented from a shop that Kirsten knows off Princes Street. She has her own, a cherry-red model with twelve gears and advanced brake calipers. He does his best to keep up. Halfway down the hill he activates a new gear, but the chain protests, jumps, and spins impotently against the hub. Frustration and a familiar rage surge up within him. It’ll be a long walk back up to the shop. But this isn’t Kirsten’s way. “Look at you,” she says, “you big cross numpty, you.” She turns the bike upside down, reverses the gears, and adjusts the rear derailleur. Her hands are soon smudged with oil, a streak of which ends up on her cheek.

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

  He has fallen in love with her calm; her faith that it will be OK; her lack of a sense of persecution, her absence of fatalism—these are the virtues of his unusual new Scottish friend who speaks in an accent so hard to understand that he has to ask three times for clarification on her use of the word temporary. Rabih’s love is a logical response to the discovery of complementary strengths and a range of attributes to which he aspires. He loves from a feeling of incompleteness—and from a desire to be made whole.

  He isn’t alone in this. Albeit in different areas, Kirsten is likewise seeking to make up for deficiencies. She didn’t travel outside Scotland until after university. Her relatives all come from the same small part of the country. Spirits are narrow there, the colors grey, the atmosphere provincial, the values self-denying. She is, in response, powerfully drawn to what she associates with the south. She wants light, hope, people who live through their bodies with passion and emotion. She reveres the sun while hating her own paleness and discomfort in its rays. There is a poster of the medina in Fez hanging on her wall.

  She is excited by what she has learnt about Rabih’s background. She finds it intriguing that he is the son of a Lebanese civil-engineer father and a German air-hostess mother. He tells her stories about a childhood spent in Beirut, Athens, and Barcelona, in which there were moments of brightness and beauty and, now and then, extreme danger. He speaks Arabic, French, German, and Spanish; his endearments, playfully delivered, come in many flavors. His skin is olive to her rosy white. He crosses his long legs when he sits and his surprisingly delicate hands know how to prepare her makdous, tabbouleh, and Kartoffelsalat. He feeds her his worlds.

  She, too, is looking for love to rebalance and complete her.

  Love is also, and equally, about weakness, about being touched by another’s fragilities and sorrows, especially when—as happens in the early days—we ourselves are in no danger of being held responsible for them. Seeing our lover despondent and in crisis, in tears and unable to cope, can reassure us that, for all their virtues, they are not alienatingly invincible. They, too, are at points confused and at sea, a realization which lends us a new supportive role, reduces our sense of shame about our own inadequacies, and draws us closer to them around a shared experience of pain.

  They take the train to Inverness to visit Kirsten’s mother. She insists on coming to meet them at the station, though it means a bus journey from the opposite side of town. She calls Kirsten her “Lambie” and hugs her tightly on the platform, her eyes closed achingly. She extends a hand formally to Rabih and apologizes for the conditions at this time of year: it is two thirty in the afternoon and already nearly dark. She has the same vivacious eyes as her daughter, though hers have an additional, unflinching quality that causes him to feel rather uncomfortable when they settle on him—as they are to do repeatedly, and without apparent occasion, during their stay.

  Home is a narrow, one-storey grey-terraced house located directly opposite the primary school where the mother has been teaching for three decades. All around Inverness there are grown-ups—now running shops, drafting contracts, and drawing blood samples—who can remember their introduction to basic arithmetic and the Bible stories at Mrs. McLelland’s knee. More specifically, most recall her distinctive way of letting them know not only
how much she liked them but also how easily they might disappoint her.

  The three of them eat supper together in the living room while watching a quiz show on TV. Drawings that Kirsten made in nursery school march up the wall along the staircase in neat gilt frames. In the hall there is a photograph of her baptism; in the kitchen a portrait of her in her school uniform, sensible looking and gap-toothed at age seven; and on the bookshelf a snapshot from when she was eleven, bone-thin, tousled, and intrepid in shorts and a T-shirt at the beach.

  In her bedroom, more or less untouched since she went to Aberdeen to take a degree in law and accountancy, there are black clothes in the wardrobe and shelves packed with creased school paperbacks. Inside the Penguin edition of Mansfield Park, an adolescent version of Kirsten has written, “Fanny Price: the virtue of the exceptional ordinary.” A photo album under the bed offers up a candid shot of her with her father standing in front of an ice cream van at Cruden Bay. She is six and will have him in her life for one more year.

  Family folklore has it that Kirsten’s father upped and left one morning, having packed a small suitcase while his wife of ten years was off teaching. The sole explanation he provided was a slip of paper on the hallway table with “Sorry” scrawled on it. Thereafter he drifted around Scotland, taking up odd jobs on farms, keeping in touch with Kirsten only through an annual card and a gift on her birthday. When she turned twelve, a package arrived containing a cardigan fit for a nine-year-old. Kirsten sent it back to an address in Cammachmore, along with a note advising the sender of her frank hope that he would die soon. There has been no word from him since.

  Had he left for another woman, he would merely have betrayed his wedding vows. But to leave his wife and child simply to be by himself, to have more of his own company, without ever furnishing a satisfactory account of his motives—this was rejection on an altogether deeper, more abstract, and more devastating scale.

  Kirsten lies in Rabih’s arms while explaining. Her eyes are red. This is another part of her he loves: the weakness of the deeply able and competent person.

  On her side, she feels much the same about him—and in his own history there are no less sorrowful circumstances to recount. When Rabih was twelve, after a childhood marked by sectarian violence, roadblocks, and nights spent in air-raid shelters, he and his parents quit Beirut for Barcelona. But only half a year after they arrived there and settled into a flat near the old docks, his mother began to complain of a pain near her abdomen. She went to the doctor and, with an unexpectedness that would deal an irremediable blow to her son’s faith in the solidity of pretty much anything, received a diagnosis of advanced liver cancer. She was dead three months later. Within a year his father was remarried, to an emotionally distant Englishwoman with whom he now lives in retirement in an apartment in Cádiz.

  Kirsten wants, with an intensity that surprises her, to comfort the twelve-year-old boy across the decades. Her mind keeps returning to a picture of Rabih and his mother, taken two years before her death, on the tarmac at Beirut Airport with a Lufthansa jet behind them. Rabih’s mother worked on flights to Asia and America, serving meals at the front of the aircraft to wealthy businessmen, making sure seat belts were fastened, pouring drinks, and smiling at strangers while her son waited for her at home. Rabih remembers the overexcited near nausea he felt on the days she was due to return. From Japan she once brought him some notebooks made of fiber from mulberry trees, and from Mexico a painted figurine of an Aztec chief. She looked like a film actress—Romy Schneider, people said.

  At the center of Kirsten’s love is a desire to heal the wound of Rabih’s long-buried, largely unmentioned loss.

  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.

  “You’re in your ‘angry-and-humiliated-yet-strangely-quiet’ mode again,” she diagnoses one evening when the car rental Web site Rabih has used to book himself and four colleagues a minibus freezes on him at the very last screen, leaving him in doubt whether it has properly understood his intentions and debited his card. “I think you should scream, say something rude, then come to bed. I wouldn’t mind. I might even call the rental place for you in the morning.” She somehow sees right into his inability to express his anger; she recognizes the process whereby he converts difficulty into numbness and self-disgust. Without shaming him, she can identify and name the forms his madness sometimes takes.

  With similar accuracy, she grasps his fear of seeming unworthy in his father’s eyes and, by extension, in the eyes of other male figures of authority. On their way in to a first meeting with his father at the George Hotel, she whispers to Rabih without preamble: “Just imagine if it didn’t matter what he thought of me—or, come to think of it, of you.” To Rabih, it feels as if he were returning with a friend in broad daylight to a forest he’d only ever been in alone and at night and could see that the malevolent figures which had once terrified him were really, all along, just boulders that had caught the shadows at the wrong angles.

  There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled, or as “normal” as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile, and multiple; all of this our lover can understand and accept us for.

  At eleven at night, with one supper already behind them, they go out for another, fetching barbecued ribs from Los Argentinos, in Preston Street, which they then eat by moonlight on a bench in the Meadows. They speak to each other in funny accents: she is a lost tourist from Hamburg looking for the Museum of Modern Art; he can’t be of much help because, as a lobsterman from Aberdeen, he can’t understand her unusual intonation.

  They are back in the playful spirit of childhood. They bounce on the bed. They swap piggyback rides. They gossip. After attending a party, they inevitably end up finding fault with all the other guests, their loyalty to each other deepened by their ever-increasing disloyalty towards everyone else.

  They are in revolt against the hypocrisies of their usual lives. They free each other from compromise. They have a sense of having no more secrets.

  They normally have to answer to names imposed on them by the rest of the world, used on official documents and by government bureaucracies, but love inspires them to cast around for nicknames that will more precisely accord with the respective sources of their tenderness. Kirsten thus becomes “Teckle,” the Scottish colloquialism for great, which to Rabih sounds impish and ingenuous, nimble and determined. He, meanwhile, becomes “Sfouf,” after the dry Lebanese cake flavored with aniseed and turmeric that he introduces her to in a delicatessen in Nicolson Square, and which perfectly captures for her the reserved sweetness and Levantine exoticism of the sad-eyed boy from Beirut.

  Sex and Love

  For their second date, after the kiss in the botanical garden, Rabih has suggested dinner at a Thai restaurant on Howe Street. He arrives there first and is shown to a table in the basement, next to an aquarium alarmingly crowded with lobsters. She’s a few minutes late, dressed very casually in an old pair of jeans and trainers, wearing no makeup and glasses rather than her usual contact lenses. The conversation starts off awkwardly. To Rabih there seems no way to reconnect with the greater intimacy of the last time they were together. It’s as if they were back to being only acquaintances again. They talk about his mother and her father and some books and films they both know. But he doesn’t dare to touch her hands, which she keeps mostly in her lap anyway. It seems natural to imagine she may have changed her mind.


  Yet, once they’re out in the street afterwards, the tension dissipates. “Do you fancy a tea at mine—something herbal?” she asks. “It’s not far from here.”

  So they walk a few streets over to a block of flats and climb up to the top floor, where she has a tiny yet beautiful one-bedroom place with views onto the sea and, along the walls, photographs she has taken of different parts of the Highlands. Rabih gets a glimpse of the bedroom, where there’s a huge pile of clothes in a mess on the bed.

  “I tried on pretty much everything I own and then I thought, ‘To hell with that,’” she calls out, “as one does!”

  She’s in the kitchen brewing tea. He wanders in, picks up the box, and remarks how odd the word chamomile looks written down. “You notice all the most important things,” she jokes warmly. It feels like an invitation of sorts, so he moves towards her and gently kisses her. The kiss goes on for a long time. In the background they hear the kettle boil, then subside. Rabih wonders how much further he might go. He strokes the back of Kirsten’s neck, then her shoulders. He braves a tentative caress over her chest and waits in vain for a reaction. His right hand makes a foray over her jeans, very lightly, and traces a line down both her thighs. He knows he may now be at the outer limits of what would be fitting on a second date. Still, he risks venturing down with his hand once again, this time moving a bit more purposefully against the jeans, pressing in rhythm between her legs.

  That begins one of the most erotic moments of Rabih’s life, for when Kirsten feels his hand pressing against her through her jeans, she thrusts forwards ever so slightly to greet it, and then a bit more. She opens her eyes and smiles at him, as he does back at her.

  “Just there,” she says, focusing his hand on one very specific area just to the side of the lower part of her zip.

  This goes on for another minute or so, and then she reaches down and takes his wrist, moves the hand up a little, and guides him to undo her button. Together they open her jeans, and she takes his hand and invites it inside the black elastic of her panties. He feels her warmth and, a second later, a wetness that symbolizes an unambiguous welcome and excitement.