The Course of Love

by Alain De Botton

  They are serious people. Kirsten is currently at work on a presentation titled “Procurement Methods in District Services” which she will be traveling to Dundee next month to deliver in front of an audience of local government officials. Rabih meanwhile is the author of a thesis called “The Tectonics of Space in the Work of Christopher Alexander.” Nevertheless, an odd number of “silly things” are constantly cropping up between them. What, for example, is the ideal temperature for a bedroom? Kirsten is convinced that she needs a lot of fresh air at night to keep her head clear and energy levels up the next day. She’d rather the room be a bit cold (and if necessary that she put on an extra jumper or thermal pajamas) than stuffy and contaminated. The window must stay open. But winters were bitter during Rabih’s childhood in Beirut, and combating gusts of wind was always taken very seriously. (Even in a war, his family continued to feel strongly about drafts.) He feels safe somehow, snug and luxurious, when the blinds are down, the curtains are tightly drawn, and there’s some condensation on the inside of the windowpanes.

  Or, to consider another point of contention, at what time should they leave the house to go for dinner—a special treat—together on a weeknight? Kirsten thinks: The reservation is for eight. Origano is approximately 3.2 miles away, the journey is normally a short one, but what if there were a hold up at the main roundabout, she reminds Rabih, like there was last time (when they went to see James and Mairi)? In any event, it wouldn’t be a problem to get there a bit early. They could have drinks at the bar next door or even take a stroll in the park; they have a lot to catch up on. It would be best to have the cab come by for them at seven. And Rabih thinks: An eight o’clock booking means we can arrive at the restaurant at eight fifteen or eight twenty. There are five long e-mails to deal with before leaving the office and I can’t be intimate if there are practical things on my mind. The roads will be clear by then anyway. And taxis always come early. We should book the cab for eight.

  Or, again: What’s the best strategy for telling a story at, let’s say, a rather swanky party at the Museum of Scotland, to which they’ve been invited by a client whom Rabih needs to impress? He believes there are clear rules in force: First establish where the action takes place, then introduce the key participants and sketch out their dilemmas before moving in a quick and direct narrative line to a conclusion (after which it’s polite to give a turn to someone else—ideally the CEO, who has been waiting patiently). Kirsten, on the contrary, maintains that it’s more engaging to start a story midway through and then track back to the beginning. That way, she feels, the audience gets a more solid sense of what’s at stake for the characters. Details add local color. Not everyone wants to cut right to the chase. And then if the first anecdote seems to go down well, why not throw in a second?

  Were their listeners (standing next to a display of a giant stegosaurus whose bones were found in a quarry near Glasgow in the late nineteenth century) to be polled for their opinions, they probably wouldn’t express any great objections to either approach; both could be fine, they would affirm. Yet, for Kirsten and Rabih themselves—testily recapping the performance as they make their way down to the cloakroom—the divergence feels a great deal more critical and more personal: How, each wonders, can the other understand anything—the world, themselves, their partner—if they are always so random or, at the opposite extreme, always so regimented? But what really adds to the intensity is a new thought that arises whenever a tension comes to light: How can this be endured over a lifetime?

  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. We would think it peculiar indeed to devote a two-day summit to the management of a bathroom, and positively absurd to hire a professional mediator to help us identify the right time to leave the house to go out for dinner.

  I’ve married a lunatic, he thinks, at once scared and self-pitying, as their taxi makes its way at speed through the deserted suburban streets. His partner, no less incensed, sits as far away from him as it is possible to do in the backseat of a taxi. There is no space in Rabih’s imagination for the sort of marital discord in which he is presently involved. He is in theory amply prepared for disagreement, dialogue, and compromise, but not over such utter stupidity. He’s never read or heard of squabbling this bad over such a minor detail. Knowing that Kirsten will be haughty and distant with him possibly until the second course only adds to his agitation. He looks over at the imperturbable driver—an Afghan, to judge from the small plastic flag glued to the dashboard. What must he think of such bickering between two people without poverty or tribal genocide to contend with? Rabih is, in his own eyes, a very kind man who has unfortunately not been allotted the right sort of issues upon which to exercise his kindness. He would find it so much easier to give blood to an injured child in Badakhshan or to carry water to a family in Kandahar than to lean across and say sorry to his wife.

  Not all domestic concerns carry equivalent prestige. One can quickly be made to look a fool for caring a lot about how much noise the other person makes while eating cereal or how long they want to keep magazines beyond their publication dates. It’s not difficult to humiliate someone who cleaves to a strict policy on how to stack a dishwasher or how quickly the butter ought to be returned to the fridge after use. When the tensions which bedevil us lack glamour, we are at the mercy of those who might wish to label our concerns petty and odd. We can end up frustrated and at the same time too doubtful of the dignity of our frustrations to have the confidence to outline them calmly for our dubious or impatient audiences.

  In reality, there are rarely squabbles over “nothing” in Rabih and Kirsten’s marriage. The small issues are really just large ones that haven’t been accorded the requisite attention. Their everyday disputes are the loose threads that catch on fundamental contrasts in their personalities.

  Were he a keener student of his commitments and disappointments, Rabih might, in relation to the air temperature, have explained from under the duvet: “When you say you want a window open in the middle of winter, it scares and upsets me—emotionally rather than physically. It seems to me to speak of a future in which precious things will be trampled upon. It reminds me of a certain sadistic stoicism and cheerful bravery in you which I am generally in flight from. On some subconscious level, I feel afraid that it’s not really fresh air you want but that, instead, you’d ideally like to push me out of the window in your charming but brusque, sensible, daunting way.”

  And were Kirsten similarly keen to examine her position on punctuality, she might have delivered her own touching oration to Rabih (and the Afghan driver) on the way to the restaurant: “My insistence on leaving so early is in the end a symptom of fear. In a world of randomness and surprises, it’s a technique I’ve developed to ward off anxiety and an unholy, unnameable sense of dread. I want to be on time the same way others lust for power and from a similar drive for security; it makes a little sense, though only a little, in light of the fact that I spent my childhood waiting for a father who never showed up. It’s my own crazy way of trying to stay sane.”

  With their respective needs contextualized like this, with each side appreciating the sources of the other’s beliefs, a new flexibility might have ensued. Rabih could have suggested setting out for Origano not much past six thirty, and Kirsten might have arranged an airlock for their bedroom.

  Without patience for negotiation, there is bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from. There is a nagger who wants it done now and can’t be bothered to explain why. And there is a naggee who no longer has the heart to explain that his or her resistance is grounded in some sensible counterarguments or, alternatively, in some touching and perhaps even forgivable flaws of character.

  The two parties just hope th
e problems—so boring to them both—will simply go away.

  As it happens, it’s in the middle of yet another stand-off about the window and the air temperature that Kirsten’s friend Hannah calls from Poland where she lives with her partner and asks how “it”—by which she means the marriage (a year old now)—is going.

  Kirsten’s husband has donned an overcoat and woollen hat to maximize the force of his objection to his wife’s demands for fresh air and is sitting huddled in childish self-pity in a corner of the room with the duvet over him. She has just referred to him, and not for the first time, as a big Jessie.

  “Just great,” answers Kirsten.

  However fashionable an openness around relationships might be, it remains not a little shameful to have to admit that one just may, despite so many opportunities for reflection and experiment, have gone ahead and married the wrong person.

  “I’m here with Rabih, having a quiet night in, catching up on some reading.”

  There is in reality no ultimate truth in either Rabih’s or Kirsten’s mind as to how things actually are between them. Their lives involve a constant rotation of moods. Over a single weekend they might spin from claustrophobia to admiration, desire to boredom, indifference to ecstasy, irritation to tenderness. To arrest the wheel at any one point in order to share a candid verdict with a third party would be to risk being held forever to a confession which might, with hindsight, turn out to reflect only a momentary state of mind—gloomy pronouncements always commanding an authority that happier ones can’t trump.

  So long as they keep making sure there are no witnesses to their struggles, Kirsten and Rabih are free not to have to decide quite how well or how badly things are going between them.

  The ordinary challenging relationship remains a strangely and unhelpfully neglected topic. It’s the extremes that repeatedly grab the spotlight—the entirely blissful partnerships or the murderous catastrophes—and so it is hard to know what we should make of, and how lonely we should feel about, such things as immature rages, late-night threats of divorce, sullen silences, slammed doors, and everyday acts of thoughtlessness and cruelty.

  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.

  But too often a realistic sense of what an endurable relationship is ends up weakened by silence, societal or artistic. We hence imagine that things are far worse for us than they are for other couples. Not only are we are unhappy, we misunderstand how freakish and rare our particular form of unhappiness might be. 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.

  They are spared continuous bitterness by two reliable curatives. The first is poor memory. It is hard, by four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, to remember quite what the fury in the taxi the previous evening was really about. Rabih knows it had something to do with Kirsten’s slightly contemptuous tone, combined with the flippant, ungrateful way she responded to his remark about having to leave work early for no good reason. But the precise contours of the offense have now lost their focus, thanks to the sunlight that came through the curtains at six in the morning, the chatter on the radio about ski resorts, a full in-box, the jokes over lunch, the preparations for the conference, and the two-hour meeting about the Web site’s design, which together have gone almost as far towards patching things up between them as a mature, direct discussion would have done.

  The second remedy is more abstract: it can be difficult to remain furious for very long, given quite how large the universe happens to be. A few hours after the Ikea incident, around mid-afternoon, Rabih and Kirsten set off on a long-planned walk in the Lammermuir Hills to the southeast of Edinburgh. They start out silent and cross, but nature gradually releases them from the grip of their mutual indignation, not through its sympathy but through its sublime indifference. Stretching interminably far into the distance, created through the compression of sedimentary rocks in the Ordovician and Silurian periods (some four hundred fifty million years before Ikea was founded), the hills strongly suggest that the struggle which has lately loomed so large in their minds does not in fact occupy such a significant place in the cosmic order and is as nothing when set against the aeons of time to which the landscape attests. Clouds drift across the horizon without pausing to take stock of their injured sense of pride. Nothing and no one seem to care: not the family of common sandpipers circling up ahead nor the curlew, the snipe, the golden plover or the meadow pipit. Not the honeysuckle, the foxgloves, or the harebells nor the three sheep near Fellcleugh Wood who are grazing on a rare patch of clover with grave intent. Having felt belittled by each other for most of the day, Rabih and Kirsten are now relieved from feeling small by an apprehension of the vastness within which their lives unfold. They become readier to laugh off their own insignificance as it is pointed out to them by forces indomitably more powerful and impressive than they are.

  So helpful are the limitless horizon and ancient hills that, by the time they reach a café in the village of Duns, they have even forgotten what they are meant to be furious with each other about. Two cups of tea later, they have agreed to drive back to Ikea, where they eventually manage to pick out some glasses that they will both succeed in tolerating for the rest of their lives: twelve tumblers from the Svalka line.

  Sulks

  For a good while, everyone else feels superfluous to them. They don’t want to see any of the friends on whom they each depended in the long years before their meeting. But then guilt and a renewed curiosity gradually get the better of them. In practice this means seeing more of Kirsten’s friends, as Rabih’s are scattered around the world. Kirsten’s Aberdeen University gang congregate in the Bow Bar on Fridays. It’s way across town from their flat but it offers a great range of whiskies and craft beers—although, on the night Kirsten persuades Rabih to visit, he settles for a sparkling water. It’s not because of his religion specifically, he has to explain (five times); he’s just not really in the mood for a drink.

  “ ‘Husband and wife’! Wow!” says Catherine, a trace of mockery in her voice. She is against marriage and responds best to people who confirm her bias. Of course, the phrase husband and wife still sounds a bit odd to Rabih and Kirsten as well. They likewise often place the titles in ironic quotation marks to mitigate their weight and incongruity, for they don’t feel anything like the sort of people they tend to associate with the words, which evoke characters far older, more established, and more miserable than they take themselves to be. “Mrs. Khan is here!” Kirsten likes to call out when she comes home, playing with a concept that remains only distantly believable to either of them.

  “So, Rabih, where do you work?” asks Murray, who is gruff, bearded, in the oil industry, and a onetime admirer of Kirsten’s at university.

  “At an urban-design firm,” Rabih tells him, and feels distinctly like a girl, as he does sometimes in the presence of more solid males. “We do civic spaces and spatial zoning.”

  “Hang on, mate,” says Murray, “you’ve lost me already.”

  “He’s an architect,” Kirsten clarifies. “He’s done houses and offices as well. And hopefully he’ll do more when the economy picks up again.”

  “I see: Sitting out the recession in these dark parts of the kingdom, are we, before bursting back into the limelight to put up the next Great Pyramid of Giza?”

  Murray chortles a bit too loudly at his own unfunny jibe, but it’s not this that bothers Rabih; rather, it’s the way Kirsten joins in, cradling in her hand what remains of her pint, inclining her head towards her old college buddy and laughing heartily along with him, as though something quite amusing really has been said.

  Rabih s
tays quiet on the way home, then claims he’s tired, answers with the famous “Nothing” when asked what’s wrong, and—once they are inside the flat, which still smells of fresh paint—heads into the den with the sofa bed in it and slams the door shut behind him.

  “Oh, come on!” she says, raising her voice to be heard. “At least tell me what’s going on.”

  To which he replies, “Fuck you, leave me alone.” Which is sometimes how fear can sound.

  Kirsten brews herself some tea, then goes to the bedroom, insisting to herself—not entirely truthfully—that she has no idea what her new husband (who truly did look an odd sight in the Bow Bar) can possibly be so upset about.

  At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one. 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.

  Eventually she gets out of bed and knocks at the door of the den. Her mother always said one should never go to bed on an argument. She is still telling herself that she does not understand what’s up. “Darling, you’re behaving as if you were two years old. I’m on your side, remember? At least explain what’s wrong.”