The Course of Love

by Alain De Botton

  Sexiness might at first appear to be a merely physiological phenomenon, the result of awakened hormones and stimulated nerve endings. But in truth it is not so much about sensations as it is about ideas—foremost among them the idea of acceptance and the promise of an end to loneliness and shame.

  Her jeans are wide-open now, and both of their faces are flushed. From Rabih’s perspective, the excitement springs in part from the fact that Kirsten gave so little indication over so long that she really had such things on her mind.

  She leads him into the bedroom and kicks the pile of clothes onto the floor. On the bedside table is the novel she’s been reading by George Sand, whom Rabih has never heard of. There are some earrings, too, and a picture of Kirsten in a uniform standing outside her primary school, holding her mother’s hand.

  “I didn’t have a chance to hide all my secrets,” she says. “But don’t let that hold you back from snooping.”

  There’s an almost full moon out, and they leave the curtains open. As they lie entwined on the bed, he strokes her hair and squeezes her hand. Their smiles suggest they’re not completely past shyness yet. He pauses in mid-caress and asks when she first decided she might want this, prompted in his inquiry not by vanity but by a mixture of gratitude and liberation, now that desires which might have seemed simply obscene, predatory, or pitiful in their unanswered form have proved to be redemptively mutual.

  “Pretty early on, actually, Mr. Khan,” she says. “Is there anything more I can help you with?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “Go on.”

  “OK, so at what point did you first feel, you know, that you might . . . how can I say . . . well, that you’d perhaps be on for . . .”

  “Fucking you?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Now I see what you mean,” she teases. “To tell you the truth, it started that very first time we walked over to the restaurant. I noticed you had a nice bum, and I kept thinking about it all the while you were boring on about the work we had to do. And then later that night I was imagining, stretched out on this very bed that we’re on right now, what it would be like to get hold of your . . . well, okay, I’m going to get shy now, too, so that may have to be it for the moment.”

  The idea that respectable-looking people might be inwardly harboring some beautifully carnal and explicit fantasies while outwardly seeming to care only about a friendly banter—this strikes Rabih as an entirely surprising and deeply delightful concept, with an immediate power to soothe a raft of his own underlying guilty feelings about his sexuality. That Kirsten’s late-night fantasies might have been about him when she had simultaneously seemed so reserved and so upright at the time, and yet was now so eager and so direct—these revelations mark out the moment as among the very best of Rabih’s life.

  For all the talk of sexual liberation, the truth is that secrecy and a degree of embarrassment around sex continue as much as they have always done. We still can’t generally say what we want to do and with whom. Shame and repression of impulse aren’t just things that our ancestors and certain buttoned-up religions latched onto for obscure and unnecessary reasons: they are fated to be constants in all eras—which is what lends such power to those rare moments (there might be only a few in a lifetime) when a stranger invites us to drop our guard and admits to wanting pretty much exactly what we had once privately and guiltily craved.

  It is two in the morning by the time they finish. An owl is hooting somewhere in the darkness.

  Kirsten falls asleep in Rabih’s arms. She seems trustful and at ease, slipping gracefully into the current of sleep while he stands at the shore, protesting against the end of this miraculous day, rehearsing its pivotal moments. He watches her lips tremble slightly, as though she were reading a book to herself in some foreign language of the night. Occasionally she seems to wake for an instant and, looking startled and scared, appeals for help: “The train!” she exclaims, or, with even greater alarm, “It’s tomorrow; they moved it!” He reassures her (they have enough time to get to the station; she’s done all the necessary revision for the exam) and takes her hand, like a parent preparing to lead a child across a busy road.

  It’s more than mere coyness to refer to what they have done as “making love.” They haven’t just had sex; they have translated their feelings—appreciation, tenderness, gratitude, and surrender—into a physical act.

  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.

  A degree of shame and a habit of secrecy surrounding sex began for Rabih when he was twelve. Before that there were, of course, a few minor lies told and transgressions committed: he stole some coins from his father’s wallet; he merely pretended to like his aunt Ottilie; and one afternoon in her stuffy, cramped apartment by the Corniche, he copied a whole section of his algebra homework from his brilliant classmate Michel. But none of those infractions caused him to feel any primal self-disgust.

  For his mother, he had always been the sweet, thoughtful child she called by the diminutive nickname “Maus.” Maus liked to cuddle with her under the large cashmere blanket in the living room and to have his hair stroked away from his smooth forehead. Then one term, all of a sudden, the only thing Maus could think about was a group of girls a couple of years above him at school, five or six feet tall, articulate Spaniards who walked around at break time in a conspiratorial gang and giggled together with a cruel, confident, and enticing air. On weekends he would slip into the little blue bathroom at home every few hours and visualize scenes that he’d will himself to forget again the moment he was finished. A chasm opened up between who he had to be for his family and who he knew he was inside. The disjuncture was perhaps most painful in relation to his mother. It didn’t help that the onset of puberty coincided for him almost exactly with the diagnosis of her cancer. Deep in his unconscious, in some dark recess immune to logic, he nursed the impression that his discovery of sex might have helped to kill her.

  Things weren’t completely straightforward for Kirsten at that age, either. For her, too, there were oppressive ideas at play about what it meant to be a good person. At fourteen she liked walking the dog, volunteering at the old people’s home, doing extra geography homework about rivers—but also, alone in her bedroom, lying on the floor with her skirt hiked up, watching herself in the mirror and imagining that she was putting on a show for an older boy at school. Much like Rabih, she wanted certain things which didn’t seem to fit in with the dominant, socially prescribed notions of normality.

  These past histories of self-division are part of what makes the beginning of their relationship so satisfying. There is no more need for subterfuge or furtiveness between them. Although they have both had a number of partners in the past, they find each other exceptionally open-minded and reassuring. Kirsten’s bedroom becomes the headquarters for nightly explorations during which they are at last able to disclose, without fear of being judged, the many unusual and improbable things that their sexuality compels them to crave.

  The particulars of what arouses us may sound odd and illogical, but—seen from close up—they carry echoes of qualities we long for in other, purportedly saner areas of existence: understanding, sympathy, trust, unity, generosity, and kindness. Beneath many erotic triggers lie symbolic solutions to some of our greatest fears, and poignant allusions to our yearnings for friendship and understanding.

  It’s three weeks now since their first time. Rabih runs his fingers roughly through Kirsten’s hair. She indicates, by a movement of her head and a little sigh, that she would like rather more of that—and harder, too, please. She wants her lover to bunch her hair in his hand and pull it with some violence. For Rabih it’s a tricky development. He has been taught to treat women with great respect, to hold the two genders as equal, and to belie
ve that neither person in a relationship should ever wield power over the other. But right now his partner appears to have scant interest in equality nor much concern for the ordinary rules of gender balance, either.

  She’s no less keen on a range of problematic words. She invites him to address her as though he cared nothing for her, and they both find this exciting precisely because the very opposite is true. The epithets bastard, bitch, and cunt become shared tokens of their mutual loyalty and trust.

  In bed, violence—normally such a danger—no longer has to be a risk; a degree of force can be expended safely and won’t make either of them unhappy. Rabih’s momentary fury can remain entirely within his control even as Kirsten draws from it an empowering sense of her own resilience.

  As children they were both often physical with their friends. It could be fun to hit. Kirsten would whack her cousins hard with the sofa pillows, while Rabih would wrestle with his friends on the grass at the swimming club. In adulthood, however, violence of any kind has been prohibited: no grown person is ever supposed to use force against another. And yet, within the boundaries of the couple’s games, it can feel strangely pleasing to take a swipe, to hit a little and be hit; they can be rough and insistent; there can be a savage edge. Within the protective circle of their love, neither of them has to feel in any danger of being hurt or left bereft.

  Kirsten is a woman of considerable steeliness and authority. She manages a department at work, she earns more than her lover, she is confident and a leader. She has known from a young age that she must be able to take care of herself.

  However, in bed with Rabih, she now discovers that she’d like to assume a different role, as a form of escape from the wearying demands of the rest of her life. Her being submissive to him means allowing a loving person to tell her exactly what to do, letting him take responsibility and choice away from her.

  The idea has never appealed to her before, but only because she believed that most bossy people were not to be trusted; they didn’t seem, as Rabih does, truly kind and utterly nonviolent by nature (she playfully calls him “Sultan Khan”). She’s craved independence in part by default, because there have been no Ottoman potentates around who were nice enough to deserve her weaker self.

  For his part, Rabih has all his adult life had to keep his bossiness sharply in check, and yet, in his deeper self, he’s aware of having a sterner side to his nature. He is sometimes sure he knows what’s best for other people and what they rightly have coming to them. In the real world he may be a powerless minor associate in a provincial urban-design firm, with strong inhibitions around expressing what he really thinks; but in bed with Kirsten he can feel the appeal of casting aside his customary reserve and enforcing absolute obedience, just as Suleiman the Magnificent might have done in his harem in the marble and jade palace on the shores of the Bosphorus.

  The games of submission and domination, the rule-breaking scenarios, the fetishistic interest in particular words or parts of the body—all offer opportunities to investigate wishes that are far from being simply peculiar, pointless, or slightly demented. They offer brief utopian interludes in which we can, with a rare and real friend, safely cast off our normal defenses and share and satisfy our longings for extreme closeness and mutual acceptance—which are the real psychologically rooted reasons why games are, in the end, so exciting.

  They fly to Amsterdam for a weekend and, midway there, over the North Sea, elope to the toilet. They’ve discovered an enthusiasm for having a go at it in semipublic places, which seems to bring into sudden, risky, but electrifying alignment both their sexual sides and the more formal public personae they normally have to present. They feel as though they are challenging responsibility, anonymity, and restraint with their uninhibited and heated moments. Their pleasure becomes somehow the more intense for the presence of 240 oblivious passengers only one thin door panel away.

  It’s cramped in the bathroom, but Kirsten manages to unzip Rabih and take him into her mouth. She has mostly resisted doing this with other men in the past, but with him the act has become a constant and compelling extension of her love. To receive the apparently dirtiest, most private, guiltiest part of her lover into the most public, most respectable part of herself is symbolically to free them both from the punishing dichotomy between dirty and clean, bad and good—in the process, as they fly through the glacial lower atmosphere towards Scheveningen at 400 kilometers an hour, returning unity to their previously divided and shamed selves.

  The Proposal

  Over Christmas, their first spent together, they return to Kirsten’s mother’s house in Inverness. Mrs. McLelland shows him maternal kindness (new socks, a book on Scottish birds, a hot-water bottle for his single bed) and, although it is skillfully concealed, constant curiosity. Her inquiries, beside the kitchen sink after a meal or on a walk around the ruins of St. Andrews Cathedral, have a surface casualness to them, but Rabih is under no illusion. He is being interviewed. She wants to understand his family, his previous relationships, how his work in London came to an end, and what his responsibilities are in Edinburgh. He is being assessed as much as he can be in an age which doesn’t allow for parental vetting and which insists that relationships will work best if no outside arbiters are awarded authority, for romantic unions should be the unique prerogative of the individuals concerned—excluding even those who may have, not so many years ago, given one of the pair her bath every evening and, on weekends, taken her to Bught Park in a pram to throw bread to the pigeons.

  Having no say does not mean, however, that Mrs. McLelland has no questions. She wonders if Rabih will prove to be a philanderer or a spendthrift, a weakling or a drunk, a bore or the sort to resolve an argument with a little force—and she is curious because she knows, better than most, that there is no one more likely to destroy us than the person we marry.

  When, on their last day together, Mrs. McLelland remarks to Rabih over lunch what a pity it is that Kirsten never sang another note after her father left home, because she had a particularly promising voice and a place in the treble section of the choir, she isn’t just sharing a detail of her daughter’s former extracurricular activities; she is—as much as the rules allow—asking Rabih not to ruin Kirsten’s life.

  They take the train back to Edinburgh the evening before New Year’s Eve, a four-hour ride across the Highlands in harness to an aging diesel. Kirsten, a veteran of the journey, has known to bring along a blanket, in which they wrap themselves in the empty rear carriage. Seen from distant farms, the train must look like an illuminated line, no larger than a millipede, making its way across a pane of blackness.

  Kirsten seems preoccupied.

  “No, nothing at all,” she replies when he asks, but no sooner has she uttered her denial than a tear wells up, more rapidly followed by a second and a third. Still, it really is nothing, she stresses. She is being silly. A dunderhead. She doesn’t mean to embarrass him, all men hate this kind of thing, and she doesn’t plan to make it a habit. Most importantly, it has nothing to do with him. It is her mother. She is crying because, for the first time in her adult life, she feels properly happy—a happiness which her own mother, with whom she has an almost symbiotic connection, has so seldom known. Mrs. McLelland worries that Rabih might make her sad; Kirsten cries with guilt at how happy her lover has helped her to become.

  He holds her close to him. They don’t speak. They have known each other for a little over six months. It wasn’t his plan to bring this up now. But just past the village of Killiecrankie, after the ticket collector’s visit, Rabih turns to face Kirsten and asks, without preamble, if she will marry him—not necessarily right away, he adds, but whenever she feels it is right, and not necessarily with any fuss, either. It could be a tiny occasion—just them and her mother and a few friends—but of course it could be bigger too if that’s what she prefers; the key thing is that he loves her without reservation and wants, more than anything he’s ever wanted before, to be with her as long as he lives.
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br />   She turns away and is, for a few moments, perfectly silent. She isn’t very good at these sorts of moments, she confesses, not that they often happen, or indeed ever. She doesn’t have a speech ready—this has come like a bolt from the blue—but how different it is from what ordinarily happens to her; how deeply kind and mad and courageous of him to come out with something like this now. And yet, despite her cynical character and her firm belief that she doesn’t care for these things—so long as he has truly understood what he wants and has noted what a monster she is—she can’t really see why she wouldn’t say, with all her heart and with immense fear and gratitude, yes, yes, yes.

  It tells us something about the relative status of rigorous analysis in the nuptial process that it would be considered un-Romantic, and even mean, to ask an engaged couple to explain in any depth, with patience and self-awareness, what exactly had led them to make and accept a proposal. But we’re keen, of course, always to ask where and how the proposal took place.

  It isn’t disrespectful to Rabih to suggest that he doesn’t really know why he has asked her to marry him, know in the sense of being in command of a rationally founded, coherent set of motives which could be shared with a skeptical or probing third party. What he has instead of a rationale is feelings, and plenty of them: the feeling of never wanting to let her go because of her broad, open forehead and the way her upper lip protrudes ever so slightly over her lower one; the feeling that he loves her because of her furtive, slightly surprised, quick-witted air which inspires him to call her his “Rat” and his “Mole” (and which also, because her looks are unconventional, makes him feel clever for finding her attractive); the feeling that he needs to marry her because of the diligent concentration on her face when she prepares a cod and spinach pie; because of her sweetness when she buttons up her duffel coat; and because of the cunning intelligence she displays when she unpacks the psyches of people they know.