The Course of Love

by Alain De Botton

  All animals are distinctive, because they have evolved to thrive in very particular environments, the leaflet goes on. That’s why the Malagasy giant jumping rat has such big ears and strong hindlegs and the redtail catfish of the Amazon sports a camouflaging sandy band across its midriff.

  “Of course,” Kirsten interjects, “but these adaptations aren’t much use when your new habitat is actually the Prague Zoo, where you’re living in a concrete hotel room with a meal delivered to you three times through a hatch and there’s no entertainment except for the tourists. You just grow fat and tetchy, like the poor sweet melancholic orangutan, designed for a life in the forests of Borneo—and not holding up too well here.”

  “But perhaps humans are no different,” adds Rabih, a little put out that a hominid should be receiving so much of his wife’s sympathy. “We’re also saddled with impulses which were probably sensible when they evolved in the plains of Africa, yet which give us nothing but trouble now.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Being super alert to noises in the night, which now just stops us sleeping when a car alarm goes off. Or being primed to eat anything sweet, which only makes us fat, given how many temptations there are. Or feeling almost compelled to look at the legs of strangers in the streets of Prague, which annoys and hurts our partners. . . .”

  “Mr. Khan! Using Darwin to get me to feel sorry for you for not having seven wives and yet another ice cream . . .”

  It’s late on Sunday evening by the time they finally land, exhausted, at Edinburgh Airport. Kirsten’s bag is second off the carousel. Rabih has no such luck, so while they wait, they sit on a bench next to a shuttered sandwich shop. It’s unusually warm for the time of year, and Kirsten idly wonders what the weather will be like tomorrow. Rabih gets out his phone and checks. A high of 19 degrees Celsius and sunny the entire day: remarkable. Just then he spots his bag on the carousel, goes over to collect it, and adds it to their trolley. They board the bus back into the center of town just before midnight. All around them, similarly worn-out passengers are lost in thought or dozing. Suddenly remembering that he has to send a text to a colleague, Rabih reaches into the right pocket of his jacket for his phone, then looks in the left pocket, then stands up a little in his seat to check the pockets of his trousers.

  “Have you got my phone?” he asks Kirsten in an agitated voice. She’s sleeping and wakes up with a start.

  “Of course not, darling. Why would I take your phone?”

  He squeezes past her and reaches up into the overhead rack, takes down his bag, and fumbles in the outer compartment. An unfortunate reality gradually becomes clear: the phone has gone missing, and with it his communications system with the world.

  “It must have been stolen somewhere in the baggage reclaim,” observes Kirsten. “Or perhaps you left it behind somehow. Poor you! We can call up the airport first thing tomorrow and find out if anyone has handed it in. But the insurance will cover it anyway. It’s sort of amazing this hasn’t happened to one of us before.”

  But Rabih fails to see the wonder of it.

  “You can use my phone if there’s anything you want to look at,” adds Kirsten brightly.

  Rabih is furious. This is the beginning of an administrative nightmare. He’ll be made to wait for hours by a series of operators, then have to dig up paperwork and fill out forms. Oddly enough, though, his fury isn’t directed only at his loss; some of it also appears to have found its way to his wife. After all, she was the one who first mentioned the weather, which in turn prompted him to check the forecast, without which the phone might still be safely in his possession. Furthermore, Kirsten’s calm and sympathetic manner merely serves to underscore how carefree and lucky she is in comparison. As the bus makes its way towards Waverley Bridge, an important piece of logic falls into place for Rabih: somehow all the pain and bother and hassle, every bit of it, is her fault. She is to blame for the lot, including the headache that is right now clasping itself like a vise around his temples. He turns away from her and mutters, “I knew all along we shouldn’t have gone on this crazy, unnecessary trip”—which seems a sad and rather unfair way to précis the celebration of an important anniversary.

  Not everyone would follow or sympathize with the connection Rabih has just made. Kirsten never signed up to the job of guardian of her husband’s mobile phone and is far from responsible for every aspect of this grown primate’s life. But to Rabih it makes a curious sort of sense. Not for the first time, everything is, somehow, his wife’s doing.

  The most superficially irrational, immature, lamentable, but nonetheless common of all the presumptions of love is that the person to whom we have pledged ourselves is not just the center of our emotional existence but is also, as a result—and yet in a very strange, objectively insane and profoundly unjust way—responsible for everything that happens to us, for good or ill. Therein lies the peculiar and sick privilege of love.

  It has also, over the years, been her “fault” that he slipped in the snow, that he lost his keys, that the Glasgow train broke down, that he got a speeding fine, that there is an itchy label in his new shirt, that the washing machine isn’t draining properly, that he isn’t practicing architecture to the standard he’d dreamt of, that the new neighbors play their music loudly late in the evening, and that they hardly ever have much fun anymore. And, it should be emphasized, Kirsten’s own list is, in this same category, neither any shorter nor more reasonable: it’s all down to Rabih that she doesn’t see her mother enough, that her tights constantly ladder, that her friend Gina never gets in touch with her, that she’s tired all the time, that the nail clippers have gone missing, and that they hardly ever have much fun anymore. . . .

  The world upsets, disappoints, frustrates, and hurts us in countless ways at every turn. It delays us, rejects our creative endeavors, overlooks us for promotions, rewards idiots, and smashes our ambitions on its bleak, relentless shoals. And almost invariably we can’t complain about any of it. It’s too difficult to tease out who may really be to blame—and too dangerous to complain even when we know for certain (lest we be fired or laughed at).

  There is only one person to whom we can expose our catalogue of grievances, one person who can be the recipient of all our accumulated rage at the injustices and imperfections of our lives. It is of course the height of absurdity to blame them. But this is to misunderstand the rules under which love operates. It is because we cannot scream at the forces who are really responsible that we get angry with those we are sure will best tolerate us for blaming them. We take it out on the very nicest, most sympathetic, most loyal people in the vicinity, the ones least likely to have harmed us, but the ones most likely to stick around while we pitilessly rant at them.

  The accusations we make of our lovers make no particular sense. We would utter such unfair things to no one else on earth. But our wild charges are a peculiar proof of intimacy and trust, a symptom of love itself—and in their own way a perverted manifestation of commitment. Whereas we can say something sensible and polite to any stranger, it is only in the presence of the lover we wholeheartedly believe in that can we dare to be extravagantly and boundlessly unreasonable.

  A few weeks after their return from Prague, a new and far larger problem arises. Rabih’s boss, Ewen, calls a team meeting. After a decent last eight months, the work pipeline is again looking barren, he confides. Not everyone currently employed by the firm will be able to stay on board unless an amazing project turns up soon. In the corridor afterwards, Ewen takes Rabih aside.

  “You’ll understand, of course,” he says. “It won’t be anything personal. You’re a good man, Rabih!” People who are planning to sack you should really have the decency and courage not also to want you to like them, reflects Rabih.

  The threat of unemployment plunges him into gloom and anxiety. It would be hell to try to find another job in this city, he knows. He’d probably have to move, and then what would Kirsten do? He is threatening to fail in his mos
t basic responsibilities as a husband. What madness it was, all those years ago, to think he could have a career that would combine financial stability with creative fulfillment. It was a mix of childishness and petulance, as his father always hinted.

  Today his walk home takes him past St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral. He’s never been inside before—the façade has always seemed gothically gloomy and uninviting—but, in his perturbed and panic-stricken mood, he decides to have a look around and ends up in a niche off the nave, in front of a large painting of the Virgin Mary, who gazes down at him with sorrowful and kindly eyes. Something in her sympathetic expression touches him, as if she knew a little about Ewen Frank and the shortfall of work and wanted to reassure him of her own ongoing faith in him. He can feel tears coming to his eyes at the contrast between the challenging facts of his adult life and the kindness and tenderness in this woman’s expression. She seems to understand and yet not condemn. He is surprised when he looks at his watch and realizes that it’s been a quarter of an hour. It’s a sort of madness, he concedes, for an atheist of Muslim descent to find himself in a candlelit hall at the foot of a portrait of a foreign deity to whom he wants to offer his tears and confusion. Still, he has few alternatives, there not being many people left who still believe in him. The main burden of responsibility has fallen on his wife, and that means asking rather a lot of an ordinary, non-canonized mortal.

  At home, Kirsten has made a zucchini, basil, and feta salad for dinner from a recipe of his. She wants to know all the details about the work crisis. When did Ewen tell them this? How did he put it? How did the others react? Will there be another meeting soon? Rabih starts to answer, then snaps:

  “Why do you care about these incidental facts? It just is what it is: a big mess.”

  He throws down his napkin and starts pacing.

  Kirsten wants a blow-by-blow account because that’s how she copes with anxiety: she hangs on to and arranges the facts. She doesn’t want to let on directly quite how worried she is. Her style is to be reserved and focus on the administrative side. Rabih wants to scream or break something. He observes his beautiful, kindly wife, on whom he has become a constant burden. Eight times a year at least they have scenes a little like this, when disasters happen out in the world and Rabih brings them back to the hearth and lays them before Kirsten in a muddled heap.

  She joins him where he is standing by the fireplace, takes his hand in hers, and says with warmth and sincerity, “It will be okay”—which they both know isn’t necessarily true.

  We place such demands on our partners, and become so unreasonable around them, because we have faith that someone who understands obscure parts of us, whose presence solves so many of our woes, must somehow also be able to fix everything about our lives. We exaggerate the other’s powers in a curious sort of homage—heard in adult life decades down the line—to a small child’s awe at their own parents’ apparently miraculous capacities.

  To a six-year-old Rabih, his mother seemed almost godlike; she could find his stuffed bear when it was lost, she always made sure that his favorite chocolate milk was in the fridge, she produced fresh clothes for him every morning, she would lie in bed with him and explain why his father had been screaming, she knew how to keep the earth tilted on its correct axis. . . .

  Both Rabih and Kirsten have learnt how to reassure the anxious child selves concealed within their adult partners. That’s why they love each other. But they have in the process also unknowingly inherited a little of that dangerous, unfair, beautifully naive trust which little children place in their parents. Some primitive part of the grown-up Rabih and Kirsten insists that the beloved must control far more of the world than any human being in an adult relationship possibly could, which is what generates such anger and frustration when problems nevertheless arise.

  Kirsten takes Rabih into her arms. “If only I could do something, I would,” she says, and Rabih looks sadly and kindly at her, recognizing as if for the first time an essential solitude he is faced with that remains utterly impervious to love. He isn’t angry with her; he is panicked and battered by events. To be a better husband, he recognizes, he will have to learn to place a little less of the wrong, destructive sort of hope in the woman who loves him. He must be readier to expect to be, where it counts, all alone.

  Teaching and Learning

  Rabih’s job carries on, though proper security remains elusive. Most of his and Kirsten’s friends get married and start to have children, and their social life evolves to become ever more concentrated around other couples. There are half a dozen or so that they see on a regular rotating basis, usually at one another’s houses over supper or for lunch (with babies) on the weekend.

  There is warmth and companionship among them but also, beneath the surface, a fair amount of comparison and boasting. There are frequent competitive allusions to jobs, holidays, house-improvement plans, and the first children’s milestones.

  Rabih affects a defiant, thick-skinned stance with regard to the jostling and the scorekeeping. He frankly concedes to Kirsten that they aren’t the highest-status couple, but then quickly adds that it doesn’t matter in the least: they should be pleased with what they have. They don’t live in a small gossipy village; they can go their own way.

  It’s almost one in the morning on a Saturday, and they’re in the kitchen, clearing up the dishes, when Kirsten remarks that she learnt over pudding that Clare and her husband, Christopher, are going to be renting a place in Greece for the whole summer: a villa with its own pool and a garden with a sort of private olive grove. She’ll be there the whole time, he’ll commute down. It sounds out of this world, she says, but it must cost a bloody fortune—unimaginable, really; it’s astonishing what a surgeon can earn these days.

  For Rabih, the comment niggles. Why does his wife care? Why aren’t their own holidays (in a small cottage in the Western Isles) enough? How could they ever afford anything even approaching the cost of a villa rental on their salaries? This isn’t the first such statement she’s made in this vein. There was something a week or so ago about a new coat she’d reluctantly had to renounce; then an admiring account of a weekend in Rome that James had invited Mairi on; and, only yesterday, an awestruck report about two friends’ sending their children to private school.

  Rabih would love for her to relinquish this tendency. He wants her to take pride in herself without reference to her place in a meaningless pecking order, and to appreciate the nonmaterial richness of their life together. He wants her to prize what she has rather than ache for what is missing. But because it’s well past his bedtime and this is an inflammatory topic around which he has plenty of his own anxieties, his proposal comes out in a less nuanced and less persuasive form than he might have wished.

  “Well, darling, I’m so sorry I’m not a high-rolling surgeon with a villa.” He can hear the sarcasm in his voice—he knows at once the effect it will have, but he cannot stop himself. “Shame you’re stuck here in the slums with me.”

  “Why are you having a go at me? And so late as well,” retorts Kirsten. “I was just saying they’re going on holiday, you dober, and immediately, out of nowhere, in the middle of the night, you switch to attacking me—as if you’d been waiting to pounce on me. I remember a time when you weren’t always so critical of things I said.”

  “I’m not critical. I just care about you.”

  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 comp
assion.

  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.

  Marriage lends Rabih and Kirsten an opportunity to study each other’s characters in exceptional detail. No one in their adult lives has ever had as much time to examine their behavior in such a constrained habitat and under the influence of so many variable and demanding conditions: late at night and dazed in the morning; despondent and panicked over work, frustrated with friends, in a rage over lost household items.

  To this knowledge they bring ambition for the other’s potential. They can at points see important qualities that are lacking but which they believe could be developed if only they were pointed out. They know better than anyone else some of what is wrong—and how it might change. Their relationship is, secretly yet mutually, marked by a project of improvement.

  Contrary to appearances, after the dinner party, Rabih is sincerely trying to bring about an evolution in the personality of the wife he loves. But his chosen technique is distinctive: to call Kirsten materialistic, to shout at her, and then, later, to slam two doors.

  “All you seem to care about is how much our friends are earning and how little we have,” he exclaims bitterly to Kirsten, who is by now standing by the sink, brushing her teeth. “Hearing you talk, anyone would think you were living in a hovel with only bearskin pelts for clothes. I don’t want you to have this anxiety about money anymore. You’ve become maddeningly materialistic.”