The Course of Love

by Alain De Botton

  Their faith in the power of parental kindness reaches a pitch in Esther and William’s earliest years, particularly at those moments when they are finally asleep in their cots, defenseless before the world, their breaths coming light and steady and their finely formed fingers clenched around their favorite blankets.

  But by the time each of them turns five, a more complicated and troubling reality comes into view: Rabih and Kirsten are, to their surprise, brought up against certain stubborn limits of kindness.

  One rainy weekend in February, Rabih buys William an orange remote-controlled helicopter. Father and son spotted it on the Internet a few weeks before, and since then they have talked to each other of little else. Eventually Rabih caved in, even though there’s no impending birthday or gratifying school mark to justify the gift. Still, it will surely provide them with hours of fun. But after only six minutes’ use, as the toy is hovering over the dining table with Rabih at the controls, something goes wrong with the steering, the machine collides with the fridge, and the back rotor snaps into pieces. The fault lies squarely with the manufacturers but, sadly, they are not present in the kitchen—so, at once and not for the first time, it is Rabih who becomes the target of his child’s acute disappointment.

  “What have you done?” shrieks William, whose sweetness is now very much in abeyance.

  “Nothing,” replies Rabih. “The thing just went berserk.”

  “It didn’t. You did something. You have to fix it now!”

  “Of course, I’d love to do that. But it’s complicated. We’ll have to get in touch with the shop on Monday.”

  “Dada!” This comes out as a scream.

  “Darling, I know you must be disappointed, but—”

  “It’s your fault!”

  Tears start to flow, and a moment later William attempts to kick the incompetent pilot in the shins. The boy’s behavior is appalling, of course, and a little surprising—Dada meant so well!—but on this occasion as on more than a few others, it also stands as a perverse sort of tribute to Rabih as a father. A person has to feel rather safe around someone else in order to be this difficult. Before a child can throw a tantrum, the background atmosphere needs to be profoundly benevolent. Rabih himself wasn’t anything like this tricky with his own father when he was young, but then again, neither did he ever feel quite so loved by him. All the assurances he and Kirsten have offered over the years—“I will always be on your side”; “You can tell us whatever you’re feeling”—have paid off brilliantly: they have encouraged William and his sister to direct their frustrations and disappointments powerfully towards the two loving adults who have signaled that they can, and will, take the heat.

  Witnessing their children’s rages, Rabih and Kirsten have a chance to note how much restraint and patience they themselves have, without fully realizing it, developed over the years. Their somewhat more equable temperaments are the legacy of decades of minor and more major disappointments; the patient courses of their thought processes have been carved out, like canyons by the flow of water, by all the many things that have gone wrong for them. Rabih doesn’t throw a tantrum when he makes a stray mark on a sheet of paper he’s writing on—because, among other things, he has in the past lost his job and seen his mother die.

  The role of being a good parent brings with it one large and very tricky requirement: to be the constant bearer of deeply unfortunate news. The good parent must be the defender of a range of the child’s long-term interests, which are by nature entirely impossible for him or her to envisage, let alone assent to cheerfully. Out of love, parents must gird themselves to speak of clean teeth, homework, tidy rooms, bedtimes, generosity, and limits to computer usage. Out of love, they must adopt the guise of bores with a hateful and maddening habit of bringing up unwelcome facts about existence just when the fun is really starting. And, as a result of these subterranean loving acts, good parents must, if things have gone well, end up as the special targets of intense resentment and indignation.

  However difficult the messages may be, Rabih and Kirsten begin with a commitment to imparting them gently: “Just five more minutes of playtime and then the game is over, OK?”; “Time for Princess E.’s bath now”; “That must have been annoying for you, but we don’t hit people who disagree with us, remember?”

  They want to coax and wheedle and, most importantly, never impose a conclusion through force or the use of basic psychological weapons, such as reminders about who is the older, bigger, and wealthier party and, ergo, who is in charge of the remote control and the laptop.

  “Because I am your mother”; “Because your father said so”: there was a time when these relational titles alone commanded obedience. But the meaning of such words has been transformed by our era of kindness. A mother and father are now merely “people who will make it nice for me” or “people whose suggestions I may go along with if—and only if—I see the point of what they’re saying.”

  Unhappily, there are situations in which coaxing won’t work anymore—for example, on the occasion when Esther starts to tease William about his body, and a gentle maternal caution goes unheard. His penis is an “ugly sausage,” Esther yells repeatedly at home, and then, even less kindly, she whispers the same metaphor to a band of her girlfriends at school.

  Her parents try tactfully to explain that her taunting him now to the point of humiliation might make it harder for him to relate to women when he gets older. But this of course sounds weird to his sister. She replies that they don’t understand anything, that William really has got an ugly sausage between his legs, and that this is why everyone is laughing at school.

  It isn’t their daughter’s fault that, at nine years old, she can’t begin to appreciate the nature of her parents’ alarm (and, offstage, a little laughter, too). But it’s still galling when Esther, having been told firmly to stop it, accuses them of interfering in her life and writes the words Fun Spoilers on little pieces of paper that she leaves like a trail of bread crumbs around the house.

  The dispute ends in a shouting match between Rabih and this incensed small person who is, somewhere in her brain, simply lacking in the particular neuronal connections which would allow her to grasp what is at stake here.

  “Because I say so,” says Rabih. “Because you are nine, and I am considerably older and know a few things you don’t—and I’m not going to stand here all day and have an argument with you about it.”

  “That’s so unfair! Then I’m just going to shout and shout,” threatens Esther.

  “You’ll do no such thing, young lady. You’ll go up to your room and stay there until you’re ready to come down again and rejoin the family for dinner and behave in a civilized way and show me you’ve got some manners.”

  It’s a strange thing indeed for Rabih, congenitally intent as he is on avoiding confrontation of any sort, to have to deliver such an apparently unloving message to someone he loves beyond measure.

  The dream is to save the child time; to pass on in one go insights that required arduous and lengthy experience to accumulate. But the progress of the human race is at every turn stymied by an ingrained resistance to being rushed to conclusions. We are held back by an inherent interest in reexploring entire chapters in the back catalogue of our species’ idiocies—and to wasting a good part of life finding out for ourselves what has already been extensively and painfully charted by others.

  Romanticism has traditionally been suspicious of rules in child rearing, regarding them as a fake hypocritical bunting unnecessarily draped over children’s endearing natural goodness. However, after closer acquaintance with a few flesh-and-blood youngsters, we might gradually change our minds and come to the view that manners are in truth an incontrovertible defense against an ever-present danger of something close to barbarism. Manners don’t have to be an instrument of coldness and sadism, just a way of teaching us to keep the beast-like bit locked up inside, so that the evening meal does not invariably have to descend into anarchy.

  Rabih
wonders sometimes where all the immensely hard parental work is really leading them—what the hours they have spent picking up the children from school, talking to them and coaxing and reasoning with them, have been for. He began by hoping, naively and selfishly, that he and Kirsten were raising better versions of themselves. It’s taken him a while to realize that he has instead helped to put on earth two people with an in-built mission to challenge him, individuals who will inflict upon him repeated frustrations, frequent bewilderment, and a forced, unsettling, and occasionally beautiful expansion of his interests—far beyond anything he could ever have imagined—into hitherto alien realms of ice-skating, TV sitcoms, pink dresses, space exploration, and the Hearts’ standing in the Scottish football league.

  At the children’s school, a well-meaning small establishment nearby, watching from some remove as the other parents drop off their precious charges, Rabih reflects that life can never reward on a large enough scale all the hopes which one generation places on the narrow shoulders of another. There aren’t sufficient glorious destinies to hand, and the traps are too many and too easy to fall into, even if a golden star and an ovation may be in the offing for a well-delivered reading, in assembly, of a poem about ravens.

  At times the protective veil of paternal sentimentality slips, and Rabih sees that he has given over a very substantial share of the best days of his life to a pair of human beings who, if they weren’t his own children, would almost surely strike him as being fundamentally unremarkable—so much so, in fact, that were he to meet them in a pub in thirty years’ time, he might prefer not even to talk to them. The insight is unendurable.

  Whatever modest denials parents may offer—however much they may downplay their ambitions in front of strangers—to have a child is, at the outset, at least, to make an assault on perfection, to attempt to create not just another average human being but an exemplar of distinctive perfection. Mediocrity, albeit the statistical norm, can never be the initial goal; the sacrifices required to get a child to adulthood are simply too great.

  It’s a Saturday afternoon, and William is out playing football with a friend. Esther has stayed at home to put together the electronic circuit board she got for her birthday a few months back. She has enlisted Rabih’s help, and together they’re going through the instruction manual, wiring up bulbs and little motors and delighting in those moments when the whole system whirs into action. Rabih likes to tell his daughter that she would make a great electrical engineer. He can’t quite let go of his fantasy of her as an adult woman who will somehow manage to be at once entirely practical and yet also lyrically sensitive (a version of every woman he has loved). Esther adores the attention. She looks forward to the rare occasions when William is away and she has her dad all to herself. He calls her Besti; she sits on his lap and, when he hasn’t shaved for a day, complains about how strange and rough his skin feels. He brushes her hair back and covers her forehead with kisses. Kirsten watches them from across the room. Once, when Esther was four, she said to both her parents, with great seriousness, “I wish Mummy would die so I could marry Daddy.” Kirsten understands. She herself might have liked to have a kindly and reliable father to cuddle and build circuits with, and no one else around to bother them. She can see what a bewitching and glamorous figure Rabih could seem to someone under ten. He’s happy to get on the floor and play with Esther’s dolls; he takes her rock climbing, buys her dresses, goes cycling with her and talks to her about the brilliant engineers who built Scotland’s tunnels and bridges.

  The relationship nevertheless makes Kirsten worry a little for her daughter’s future. She wonders how other men will be able to measure up to such standards of tenderness and focused attention—and whether Besti may end up rejecting a range of candidates based on nothing more than the fact that they don’t come close to offering her the sort of friendship she once enjoyed with her dad. Yet what niggles Kirsten most of all is the sentimentality of Rabih’s performance. She knows at first hand that the kindness he displays with their daughter is available from him only in his role as a father, not as a husband. She has plenty of experience with his drastic change in tone once the two of them are out of earshot of the children. He is unwittingly planting an image in Esther’s mind of how a man might ideally behave with a woman—notwithstanding that the ideal in no way reflects the truth of who he, Rabih, really is. Thus Esther may, in later life, ask a man who is acting in a selfish, distracted, and severe manner why he can’t be more like her father, little realizing that he is actually remarkably like Rabih—just not the only version of him that she ever got to see.

  In the circumstances, it’s perhaps helpful that kindness has its limits and that these two parents, despite their best efforts, still manage (like all parents) regularly and deeply to annoy their children. Being outright cold, frightening, and cruel turns out to be only the first of many different means of ensuring alienation. Another quite effective strategy combines overprotectiveness, overinvolvement, and overcuddling, a trio of neurotic behaviors with which Rabih and Kirsten are deeply familiar. Rabih, the Beirut boy, frets about Esther and William every time they cross a road; he seeks a potentially vexing degree of closeness to them, asks them too often how their day was, always wants them to put on another layer of clothing, and imagines them as being more fragile than they really are—which is partly why Esther more than once snaps “Get off my case” at him, and not without cause.

  Nor, indeed, can it be all that easy to have Kirsten as their mother, for this entails having to do a lot of extra spelling tests, being encouraged to play several musical instruments, and hearing continual reminders to eat healthful foods—a not entirely surprising set of priorities from someone who was the only student in her secondary-school class to go to university, and one of a minority not now living on benefits.

  In certain moods Rabih can pity the children for having to deal with the two of them. He can understand their complaints about and resentment of the power that he and Kirsten wield over them, their thirty-odd-year head start, and the droning sound of their voices in the kitchen every morning. He has sufficient trouble coping with himself that it isn’t too much of a leap for him to sympathize with two young people who may have one or two issues with him. Their irritation, he also knows, has its own important role to play: it’s what will guarantee that the children will one day leave home.

  If parental kindness were enough, the human race would stagnate and in time die off. The survival of the species hinges on children eventually getting fed up and heading off into the world armed with hopes of finding more satisfying sources of excitement.

  In their moments of coziness, when the whole family is piled together on the big bed and the mood is one of tolerance and good humor, Rabih is aware that someday, in the not too distant future, all of this will end according to an edict of nature enacted by a most natural means: the tantrums and fury of adolescence. The continuation of families down the generations depends on the young ones’ eventually losing patience with their elders. It would be a tragedy if the four of them still wanted to lie here with their limbs enlaced in another twenty-five years’ time. Esther and William will ultimately have to begin finding him and Kirsten ridiculous, boring, and old-fashioned in order to develop the impetus to move out of the house.

  Their daughter has recently assumed a leadership role in the resistance to parental rule. As she approaches her eleventh birthday, she starts to take exception to her father’s clothes, his accent, and his way of cooking, and rolls her eyes at her mother’s concern with reading good literature and her absurd habit of keeping lemon halves in the fridge rather than more carelessly tossing the unused bits away. The taller and stronger Esther grows, the more she is irritated by her parents’ behavior and habits. William is still too little to cast such a caustic eye at his carers. Nature is gentle with children in this regard, making them sensitive to the full array of their forebears’ flaws only at an age when they are big enough to flee them.

  In order
to let the separation take its course, Rabih and Kirsten know not to become too strict, distant, or intimidating. They understand how easy it is for children to get hung up on a mum or dad who is hard to read, scary-seeming, or just not around all that much. Such parents can hook in their offspring more tightly than the responsive and stable ones will ever do. Rabih and Kirsten have no wish to be the sort of self-centered, volatile figures with whom a child can become obsessed for life, and so take care to be natural, approachable, and even, sometimes, theatrically daft. They want to be unintimidating enough that Esther and William will be able, when the time comes, to park them cleanly to one side and get on with their lives. Being taken a bit for granted is, they implicitly feel, the best possible indication of the quality of their love.

  Sex and Parenthood

  “Let’s do it tonight; what do you think?” says Kirsten as she puts on her makeup in the bathroom before heading downstairs to prepare the children’s breakfast.

  “You’re on,” says Rabih with a smile, adding, “I’ll put it in my diary now.” He’s not joking. Friday night is a favored slot and it’s been a while.

  On his way to work, he thinks of Kirsten’s dark, wet hair, which beautifully offset her pale skin when she stepped out of the shower. He takes a moment to appreciate his extraordinary good fortune that this elegant, determined Scottish woman has agreed to spend her life beside him.

  The day turns out to be rather stressful and it’s not till seven that he reaches home again. He’s longing for Kirsten now, but he has to be diplomatic. There can be no rush and certainly no demands. He is going to try to tell her with particular honesty what he feels beneath the everyday turbulence. The plan is hazy, but he is hopeful.