The Course of Love

by Alain De Botton

  And inside the narrow room crammed with books about architecture, the oversized toddler turns over on the sofa bed and can think of nothing beyond the fact that he will not relent—that and, irrelevantly, how strange seem the words stamped in silver foil along the spine of a book on a nearby shelf: MIES VAN DER ROHE.

  It’s an unusual situation for him to be in. He always tried very hard, in past relationships, to be the one who cared a little less, but Kirsten’s buoyancy and steeliness have cast him in the opposite role. It’s his turn now to lie awake and fret. Why did all her friends hate him? What does she see in them? Why didn’t she step in to help and defend him?

  Sulking pays homage to a beautiful, dangerous ideal that can be traced back to our earliest childhoods: the promise of wordless understanding. In the womb, we never had to explain. Our every requirement was catered to. The right sort of comfort simply happened. Some of this idyll continued in our first years. 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.

  When he can’t bear it any longer, he tiptoes into their bedroom and sits on her side of the bed. He is planning to wake her up but thinks better of it when he sees her intelligent, kind face at rest. Her mouth is slightly open and he can hear the faintest sound of her breathing; the fine hairs on her arm are visible in the light from the street.

  It’s cool but sunny the next morning. Kirsten gets up before Rabih and prepares two boiled eggs, one for each of them, along with a basket of neatly cut soldiers. She looks down at the willow tree in the garden and feels grateful for the dependable, modest, everyday things. When Rabih enters the kitchen, sheepish and disheveled, they start off in silence, then end up by smiling at each other. At lunchtime he sends her an e-mail: “I’m a bit mad, forgive me.” Although she’s waiting to go into a council meeting, she replies swiftly: “It would be v. boring if you weren’t. And lonely.” The sulk is not mentioned again.

  We would ideally remain able to laugh, in the gentlest way, when we are made the special target of a sulker’s fury. We would recognize the touching paradox. The sulker may be six foot one and holding down adult employment, but the real message is poignantly retrogressive: “Deep inside, I remain an infant, and right now I need you to be my parent. I need you correctly to guess what is truly ailing me, as people did when I was a baby, when my ideas of love were first formed.”

  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.

  Sex and Censorship

  They’re in a café they sometimes go to on a Saturday, ordering scrambled eggs, catching up on the week and reading the papers. Today Kirsten is telling Rabih about the dilemma faced by her friend Shona, whose boyfriend, Alasdair, has abruptly been relocated to Singapore for work. Should she follow him there, Shona wonders—they’ve been together two years—or stay in the dental surgery in Inverness, where she’s only just been promoted? It’s a pretty weighty decision by any measure. But Kirsten’s exegesis is proceeding rather slowly and not always linearly, so Rabih also keeps an eye on the events covered by the Daily Record. Some peculiar and macabre situations have been unfolding recently in venues with highly lyrical place names: a history teacher has beheaded his wife with an ancient sword in a house outside Lochgelly, while in Auchtermuchty police are searching for a fifty-four-year-old man who fathered a child with his sixteen-year-old daughter.

  “Mr. Khan, if you don’t stop thinking that everything I tell you is merely background noise which you can shut out at will, I promise you that what happened to that poor woman in Lochgelly will come to seem to you like a day at Disneyland,” says Kirsten, who then jabs him hard in the ribs with a (blunt) knife.

  But it isn’t just the case of incest in Fife and Shona’s predicament that are preoccupying Rabih. There’s a third claim on his attention as well. Angelo and Maria have owned their café for thirty years. Angelo’s father, originally from Sicily, was a detainee in the Orkney Islands during World War II. The couple have a twenty-one-year-old daughter, Antonella, who has lately graduated with distinction from her course in catering and hospitality at North East Scotland College in Aberdeen. Until something more substantial turns up, she’s helping out in the café, rushing back and forth between the kitchen and the seating area, carrying as many as four orders at a time, issuing constant warnings that the plates are very hot as she maneuvers gracefully among the tables. She’s tall, strong, good-natured—and extremely beautiful. She chats easily with the patrons about the weather and, with some of the regulars who have known her since she was a girl, about the newest developments in her life. She’s single right now, she informs a couple of animated elderly ladies at the table opposite, adding that she genuinely doesn’t mind—and saying no, she’d never try one of those Internet dating things; that’s not her style. She is wearing a surprisingly large crucifix on a chain around her neck.

  As Rabih watches her, and without quite meaning for it to happen, one part of his mind leaves behind its normal responsibilities and starts to conjure a sequence of wayward images: the narrow stairs behind the espresso machine which lead up to the flat above; Antonella’s small room, cluttered with still-unpacked boxes from college; a shaft of morning light catching her jet-black hair and throwing her pale skin into relief; her clothes discarded in a pile by the chair and Antonella herself lying on the bed with her long, muscular legs spread wide open, wholly naked apart from the crucifix.

  In the West, we owe to Christianity the view that sex should only ever rightly occur in the presence of love. The religion insists that two people who care for each other must reserve their bodies, and their gaze, for each other alone. To think sexually about strangers is to abandon the true spirit of love and to betray God and one’s own humanity.

  Such precepts, at once touching and forbidding, have not entirely evaporated along with the decline of the faith that once supported them. Shorn of their explicitly theistic rationale, they seem to have been absorbed into the ideology of Romanticism, which accords a similarly prestigious place to the concept of sexual fidelity within the idea of love. In the secular world, too, monogamy has been declared a necessary and crowning expression of emotional commitment and virtue. Our age has strikingly maintained the essential drift of an earlier religious position: the belief that true love must entail wholehearted fidelity.

  Rabih and Kirsten head home, walking slowly, hand in hand, occasionally stopping to browse in a shop. It’s going to be a remarkably warm day, and the sea looks turquoise, almost tropical. It’s Kirsten’s turn to go first in the shower, and when they’re both done, they go back to bed feeling that, after a long and hard week, they deserve to indulge themselves.

  They love to make up stories during sex. One of them will kick off, then the other will take it forward and pass it back for further elaboration. The scenarios can get extreme. “It’s after school, and the classroom is empty,” Kirsten begins one time. “You’ve asked me to stay behind so we can go over my essay. I’m shy and blush easily, a legacy of my strict Catholic upbringing. . . .” Rabih adds details: “I’m the geography teacher, specializing in glaciers. My hands are shaking. I touch your left knee, hardly daring to believe that . . .”

  So far, they h
ave coauthored stories featuring a lost male mountaineer and a resourceful female doctor, their friends Mike and Bel, and a pilot and her reserved but curious passenger. There is nothing structurally unusual, therefore, in Rabih’s impulse, this morning, to initiate a narrative involving a waitress, a crucifix, and a leather strap.

  Although it often struggles to be heard in respectable circles, there is an alternative to the Christian-Romantic tenet that sex and love should always be inseparable. The libertine position denies any inherent or logical link between loving someone and needing to be unfailingly sexually loyal to them. It proposes that it can be entirely natural and even healthy for partners in a couple occasionally to have sex with strangers for whom they have little feeling but to whom they nonetheless feel strongly attracted. Sex doesn’t always have to be bound up with love. It can sometimes, this philosophy holds, be a purely physical, aerobic activity engaged in without substantive emotional meaning. It is, so its adherents conclude, just as absurd to suppose that one should only ever have sex with the person one loves as it would be to require that only those in committed couples ever be permitted to play table tennis or go jogging together.

  This remains, in the current age, the minority view by a very wide margin.

  Rabih sets the scene: “So we’re in this little seaside town in Italy, maybe Rimini, and we’ve had some ice cream, maybe pistachio, when you notice the waitress, who is shy but really friendly in a natural way that’s at once maternal and fascinatingly virginal.”

  “You mean Antonella.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Rabih Khan, shut up!” Kirsten scoffs.

  “Okay, then: Antonella. So we suggest to Antonella that after she’s finished her shift, she might want to come back to our hotel for some grappa. She’s flattered but a bit embarrassed. You see, she’s got a boyfriend, Marco, a mechanic at the local garage, who’s very jealous but at the same time remarkably incompetent sexually. There are certain things that she’s been wanting to have a go at for ages but that he flat-out refuses to try. She can’t get them out of her head, which is in part why she takes us up on our unusual offer.”

  Kirsten is silent.

  “Now we’re in the hotel, in the room, which has a big bed with an old-fashioned brass headboard. Her skin is so soft. There’s a trace of moisture on the down of her upper lip. You lick it off, and then your hand moves gently down her body.” Rabih continues: “She’s still wearing her apron, which you help her out of. You find her sweet, but you also want to use her in a rather mercenary way. That’s where the strap comes in. You slide her bra up—it’s black, or no, maybe grey—and lean over to take one of her breasts in your mouth. Her nipples are hard.”

  Still Kirsten says nothing.

  “You reach down and slip your hand inside her particularly lacy Italian panties,” he goes on. “Suddenly you feel you want to lick her between her legs, so you get her up on all fours and begin to explore her from behind.”

  By now the silence from Rabih’s usual storytelling partner has grown oppressive.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “I’m fine, it’s just . . . I don’t know . . . it feels weird for you to be thinking about Antonella that way—a bit perverted, really. She’s such a lovely person; I’ve known her since she was sitting her Highers, and now her parents are so proud of the distinction she got. I don’t like the old chestnut of the man sitting there, getting off on watching two women licking each other out. Sfouf, it feels, frankly, sort of stupid and porno. As for the anal thing, to be honest—”

  “I’m sorry, you’re right, it’s ridiculous,” interrupts Rabih, suddenly feeling utterly daft. “Let’s forget I ever said anything. We shouldn’t let something like this come between us and the Brioschi Café.”

  Romanticism hasn’t only increased the prestige of monogamous sex; along the way it has also made any extraneous sexual interest seem unvaryingly foolish and unkind. It has powerfully redefined the meaning of the urge to sleep with someone other than one’s regular partner. It has turned every extramarital interest into a threat and, often, something close to an emotional catastrophe.

  In the fantasy in Rabih’s mind, it could have been such a tender and easy transaction. He and Kirsten would have chatted with Antonella in the café, all three of them would have recognized the tension and the appeal, and then in short order they would have ended up back at Merchiston Avenue. Antonella and Kirsten would have made out for a while as he looked on from an armchair, then he would have taken Kirsten’s place and had sex with Antonella. It would have felt warm, exciting, and wholly meaningless in terms of the marriage and of Rabih’s essential love for Kirsten. Afterwards he would have walked Antonella back to the café, and none of them would ever mention the interlude again. There would have been no melodrama, no possessiveness and no guilt. At Christmas they might have bought her a panettone and a card by way of thanks for the orgy.

  Despite the liberal atmosphere of our time, it would be naive to assume that the distinction between “weird” and “normal” has disappeared. It stands as secure as ever, waiting to intimidate and herd back into line those who would question the normative limits of love and sex. It may now be deemed “normal” to wear cutoff shorts, expose belly buttons, marry someone of either gender, and watch a little porn for fun, but it also remains indispensably “normal” to believe that true love should be monogamous and that one’s desire should be focused exclusively on one person. To be in dispute with this founding principle is to risk being dismissed, in public or private, with that most dispiriting, caustic and shameful of all epithets: pervert.

  Rabih belongs firmly outside the category of the good communicators. For all that he nurses some strongly held views, he has long found the journey towards expressing these fraught with obstacles and inhibitions. When his boss, Ewen, announces a new corporate strategy of concentrating more on the oil sector and less on local government contracts, Rabih doesn’t—as someone else might do—request a meeting and sit down with him for half an hour in the top-floor conference room with its view over Calton Hill to explain why this policy shift could prove not only mistaken but possibly dangerous. Instead he remains largely quiet, making only a few gnomic remarks and fantasizing that others will somehow magically deduce his opinion. Similarly, when he realizes that Gemma, an entry-level staffer who has been taken on to assist him with his workload, has been getting many of her measurements wrong, he feels inwardly frustrated but never raises the issue with her and simply does the work himself, leaving the young woman amazed by how little there is for her to do in her new job. He’s not secretive, controlling, or withdrawn for malicious reasons; he just gives up on other people—and on his ability to persuade them of anything—with unhelpful ease.

  For the rest of the day, after their visit to the Brioschi Café and the humiliating business about Antonella, there’s the kind of tension between Rabih and Kirsten that often follows on from aborted sex. Somewhere in his mind Rabih feels a disappointment and irritation that he doesn’t know what to do with. After all, it isn’t right to start making a fuss when your partner isn’t wild at the idea of having a threesome with a recent graduate who knows her way around a plate of eggs and happens to look nice in an apron.

  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.

  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 agreeabl
e 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.

  Rabih’s father was taciturn and severe. Only one generation removed from a life of extreme poverty and agricultural labor in a small village near Baalbek, he had been the first in his family to escape and go to university, though he would continue to preserve a long ancestral legacy of being careful around authority. Speaking up and volunteering one’s opinions were not standard practices among the Khans.

  The education in communication imparted by Rabih’s mother was no more encouraging. She loved him fiercely, but she needed him to be a certain way. Whenever she returned from her airline work to the anxious atmosphere of Beirut and of her marriage, her son would see the strain around her eyes and feel that he mustn’t add to her problems. He wanted more than anything to put her at ease and make her laugh. Whatever anxieties he felt, he would reflexively conceal. His job was to help keep her intact. He could not afford to tell her too many tricky but true things about himself.

  Rabih thereby grew up to understand the love of others as a reward for being good, not for being transparent. As an adult and as a husband, he lacks any idea of how to make something coherent out of the nonnormative parts of himself. It is neither arrogance nor a sense that his wife has no right to know who he really is that makes him secretive and hesitant; rather, it is sheer terror that his tendencies towards self-loathing will be intensified to an unbearable degree by the presence of a witness.

  Were Rabih less afraid of his own mind, he might be able to square up to Kirsten with his desires, like a natural scientist holding up for a colleague’s inspection some newly discovered, peculiar-looking species which both of them might strive to understand and accommodate themselves to. But he instinctively feels that there is quite a lot about himself that it would be wiser for him not to share. He is too dependent on Kirsten’s love to map out for her all the places to which his libido regularly takes him. She thus never learns about the woman her husband daily admires behind the till at the newsagent in Waverley Station, or his curiosity about her friend Rachel on the night of her birthday, or the dress that turns him on in a shop on Hanover Street, or some of his thoughts about stockings, or some of the faces that, unbidden, occasionally pass through his mind while he is in bed with her.