The Course of Love

by Alain De Botton

  An avoidant attachment style is marked by a strong desire to avoid conflict and to reduce exposure to the other when emotional needs have not been met. The avoidant person quickly presumes that others are keen to attack them and that they cannot be reasoned with. One just has to escape, pull up the drawbridge, and go cold. Regrettably, the avoidant party cannot normally explain their fearful and defensive pattern to their partner, so that the reasons behind their distant and absent behavior remain clouded and are easy to mistake for being uncaring and unengaged—when in fact the opposite is true: the avoidant party cares very deeply indeed, it is just that loving has come to feel far too risky.

  While never forcing conclusions, Mrs. Fairbairn nonetheless holds up a figurative mirror so that Kirsten can start to see the impact she has on others. She helps her become aware of her tendency to flee and to respond to stress through silence, and encourages her to consider how these strategies might affect those who depend upon her. Much like Rabih, Kirsten has a habit of expressing her disappointments in such a way that they are guaranteed not to draw sympathy from those whose love she needs most urgently.

  Rabih never brings up his night with Lauren directly. He sees that the priority is to understand why it happened rather than to confess that it did, in a way that might unleash the sort of insecurities that would forever destroy trust between Kirsten and himself. He wonders, between sessions with Mrs. Fairbairn, what could have rendered him so apparently blithe and indifferent about hurting his wife and sees that there could really only have been one explanation: that he must have felt so hurt by things in the relationship that he had reached a point of not caring too much that he might severely wound Kirsten. He slept with Lauren not out of desire but out of anger, the sort of anger that doesn’t admit to its own existence, a sullen, repressed, proud fury. Explaining to Kirsten, in a way she can understand, that he has felt let down will be central to saving his marriage.

  At the heart of their struggles, there is an issue of trust, a virtue which comes easily to neither of them. They are wounded creatures who had to cope with undue disappointments as children and have consequently grown into powerfully defended adults, awkward about all emotional undress. They are experts in attack strategy and fortress construction; what they are rather less good at, like fighters adjusting badly to civilian life after an armistice, is tolerating the anxieties that come with letting down their guard and admitting to their own fragilities and sorrows.

  Rabih anxiously attacks; Kirsten avoidantly withdraws. They are two people who need one another badly and yet are simultaneously terrified of letting on just how much they do so. Neither stays with an injury long enough truly to acknowledge or feel it, or to explain it to the person who inflicted it. It takes reserves of confidence they don’t possess to keep faith with the one who has offended them. They would need to trust the other sufficiently to make it clear that they aren’t really “angry” or “cold” but are instead, and always, something far more basic, touching, and deserving of affection: hurt. They cannot offer each other that most romantically necessary of gifts: a guide to their own vulnerabilities.

  A questionnaire originally devised by Hazan and Shaver (1987) has been widely used to measure attachment styles. To ascertain what type they might be, respondents are asked to report which of the following three statements they can most closely relate to:

  1. “I want emotionally close relationships, but I find that other people are often disappointing or mean without good reason. I worry that I will be hurt if I allow myself to become too close to others. I don’t mind spending time on my own.” (avoidant attachment)

  2. “I want to be emotionally intimate with others, but I often find that they are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I worry that others don’t value me as much as I value them. It can make me feel very upset and annoyed.” (anxious attachment)

  3. “It is relatively easy for me to become emotionally close to others. I feel comfortable depending on others and having them depend on me. I don’t worry about being alone or not being accepted by others.” (secure attachment)

  The labels themselves certainly lack glamour. It’s rather a blow to the ego to be forced to conceive of oneself, not as some kind of infinitely nuanced character whom a novelist might struggle to capture in eight hundred pages, but rather as a generic type who could easily fit within the parameters of a few paragraphs in a psychoanalytic textbook. The terms avoidant and anxious are hardly typical in a love story, but if Romantic is taken to mean “helpful to the progress of love,” then they turn out to be among the most romantic words Kirsten and Rabih will ever stumble upon, for they enable them to grasp patterns that have been destructively at work between them every day of their married lives.

  They come to appreciate the strange and special psychotherapeutic diplomatic back channel which has made a new mode of discourse possible for them, a sanctuary where weekly they can confess to being furious or sad under the benevolent watch of a referee who is guaranteed to contain the other’s reaction long enough to secure a necessary degree of understanding and perhaps empathy. Thousands of years of halting steps towards civilization have at last led to a forum where two people can painstakingly discuss how hurtful one of them has been to the other about laying a table or saying something at a party or arranging a holiday, with neither side being permitted simply to get up, storm out, or swear. Therapy is, Kirsten and Rabih conclude, in some ways the greatest invention of the age.

  The conversations they have in Mrs. Fairbairn’s presence start to color how they talk to one another at home. They begin to internalize the therapist’s benign, judicious voice. “What would Joanna [a name they never use in her presence] say?” becomes a ritual, playful question between them—much as Catholics might once have tried to imagine Jesus’s response to a trial of life.

  “If you carry on getting annoyed with me, I’m going to end up avoidant,” Kirsten might warn in response to a stand-off with Rabih.

  They still joke about therapy, just no longer at its expense.

  It is a pity, therefore, that the insights on offer in the consulting room are so negligible in the wider culture. Their conversations feel like a small laboratory of maturity in a world besotted by the idea of love as an instinct and a feeling beyond examination. That Mrs. Fairbairn’s room is tucked up some tenement stairs seems symbolic of the marginalized nature of her occupation. She is the champion of a truth that Rabih and Kirsten are now intimate with, but which they know is woefully prone to get lost in the surrounding noise: that love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.

  Maturity

  Throughout the winter Rabih works on designs for a gymnasium. He meets a dozen times with the members of the local education authority who are commissioning it. It promises to be an exceptional building, with a system of skylights which will make it bright inside even on the dullest days. Professionally speaking, it may be the beginning of something very substantial for him. And then, in the spring, they call him back in and, in that aggressive manner sometimes adopted by people who feel so guilty about letting someone down that they become offensive, bluntly tell him it’s off—and that they’ve decided to go with another practice with more experience. That’s when the not-sleeping begins.

  Insomnia can, when it goes on for weeks, be hell. But in smaller doses—a night here and there—it doesn’t always need a cure. It may even be an asset, a help with some key troubles of the soul. Crucial insights that we need to convey to ourselves can often be received only at night, like city church bells that have to wait until dark to be heard.

  During the day he has to be dutiful towards others. Alone in the den, past midnight, he can return to a bigger, more private duty. His thought processes would no doubt sound weird to Kirsten, Esther, and William. They need him to be a certain way, and he doesn’t want to let them down or scare them with the strangeness of his perceptions; they have a right to benefit from his predictability. But there are now other, inner demands on his attention. Insomn
ia is his mind’s revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours.

  Ordinary life rewards a practical, unintrospective outlook. There’s too little time and too much fear for anything else. We let ourselves be guided by an instinct for self-preservation: we push ourselves forwards, strike back when we’re hit, turn the blame onto others, quell stray questions, and cleave closely to a flattering image of where we’re headed. We have little option but to be relentlessly on our own side.

  Only at those rare moments when the stars are out and nothing further will be needed from us until dawn can we loosen our hold on our ego for the sake of a more honest and less parochial perspective.

  He looks at the familiar facts in a new way: he is a coward, a dreamer, an unfaithful husband, and an overly possessive, clingy father. His life is held together by string. He is over halfway through his career, and he has achieved next to nothing in comparison with the hopes that were once placed on him.

  He can, at three a.m., be oddly unsentimental in listing his faults: a willful streak that provokes distrust in his superiors, a tendency to get offended too easily, a preference for caution based on a terror of rejection. He has not had the self-confidence to stick with things. By his age, others have gone ahead and set up their own architectural practices instead of waiting to be asked and then blaming the world for not begging hard enough. There is precisely one building—a data-storage facility in Hertfordshire—with his name on it. He is on track to die with the largest parts of his talent still unexploited, registering as mere flashes of inspiration that he occasionally perceives out of the corner of his mind’s eye while he’s in the shower or driving alone down the motorway.

  At this point he is beyond self-pity, the shallow belief that what has happened to him is rare or undeserved. He has lost faith in his own innocence and uniqueness. This isn’t a midlife crisis; it’s more that he is finally, some thirty years too late, leaving adolescence behind.

  He sees he is a man with an exaggerated longing for Romantic love who nevertheless understands little about kindness and even less about communication. He is someone afraid of openly striving for happiness who takes shelter in a stance of preemptive disappointment and cynicism.

  So this is what it is to be a failure. The chief characteristic may be silence: the phone doesn’t ring, he isn’t asked out, nothing new happens. For most of his adult life he has conceived of failure in the form of a spectacular catastrophe, only to recognize at last that it has in fact crept up on him imperceptibly through cowardly inaction.

  Yet, surprisingly, it’s okay. One gets used to everything, even humiliation. The apparently unendurable has a habit of coming to seem, eventually, not so bad.

  He has already sucked too much of life’s bounty, without particular profit and to no good effect. He has been on the earth for too many decades; he has never had to till the soil or go to bed hungry, yet he has left his privileges largely untouched, like a spoilt child.

  His dreams were once very grand indeed: he would be another Louis Kahn or Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe or Geoffrey Bawa. He was going to bring a new kind of architecture into being: locally specific, elegant, harmonious, technologically cutting-edge, progressive.

  Instead he is the almost-broke deputy director of a second-rate urban-design firm, with a single building—more of a shed, really—to his name.

  Nature embeds in us insistent dreams of success. For the species, there must be an evolutionary advantage in being hardwired for such striving; restlessness has given us cities, libraries, spaceships.

  But this impulse doesn’t leave much opportunity for individual equilibrium. The price of a few works of genius throughout history is a substantial portion of the human race being daily sickened by anxiety and disappointment.

  Rabih used to assume that only the flawless version of anything was worth having. He was a perfectionist. If the car was scratched, he couldn’t enjoy driving it; if the room was untidy, he couldn’t rest; if his lover didn’t understand parts of him, the entire relationship was a charade. Now “good enough” is becoming good enough.

  He notes a developing interest in certain sorts of news stories about middle-aged men. There was a guy from Glasgow who threw himself under a train, having amassed large debts and been caught out in an affair by his wife. Another drove his car into the sea near Aberdeen following some online scandal. It doesn’t, in the end, take very much, Rabih can see: just a few mistakes, and suddenly one is in the realm of catastrophe. With a few twists of the dial, with enough outside pressure, he, too, would be capable of anything. What enables him to think of himself as sane is only a certain fragile chemical good fortune, but he knows he would be very much in the market for a tragedy if ever life chose to test him properly.

  At those times when he is neither fully awake nor quite asleep but traveling through the interstitial zones of consciousness, at two or three a.m., he feels how many images and stray memories his mind holds, all waiting to come to his attention when the rest of the static has receded: glimpses of a trip to Bangkok eight years before, the surreal view of villages in India after a night squashed against an airplane window; the cold tiled bathroom floor in the house his family lived in in Athens; the first snowfall he ever experienced, on a holiday in eastern Switzerland; the low grey sky observed on a walk across fields in Norfolk; a corridor leading towards a swimming pool at university; the night spent with Esther in hospital when they operated on her finger. . . . The logic of some things may fade, but none of the images ever really go away.

  During his sleepless nights, he occasionally thinks about and misses his mother. He wishes with embarrassing intensity that he might be eight again and curled up under a blanket with a slight fever and that she could bring him food and read to him. He longs for her to reassure him about the future, absolve him of his sins, and comb his hair neatly into a left-sided parting. He is at least mature enough to know there is something important which ought to resist immediate censorship in these regressive states. He can see that he hasn’t, despite the outward signs, come very far.

  He realizes that anxiety will always dog him. It may appear that each new wave of it is about this or that particular thing—the party where he won’t know many people, the complicated journey he has to make to an unfamiliar country, a dilemma at work—but, considered from a broader perspective, the problem is always larger, more damning, and more fundamental.

  He once fantasized that his worries would be stilled if he lived elsewhere, if he attained a few professional goals, if he had a family. But nothing has ever made a difference: he is, he can see, anxious to the core, in his most basic makeup—a frightened, ill-adjusted creature.

  There is a photograph he loves in the kitchen, of Kirsten, William, Esther, and himself in a park on an autumn day, throwing leaves at one another from a pile blown together by the wind. Joy and abandon are evident in all their faces, a delight in being able to make a mess without consequence. But he recalls, also, how inwardly troubled he was on that day; there was something at work with an engineering company, he was keen to get home and make some calls to an English client, his credit card was far above its limit. Only when events are over is there really any chance for Rabih to enjoy them.

  He is aware that his strong, capable wife is not the best person around whom to have a nervous breakdown. There was a time when he would have felt bitter about this. “Insomnia isn’t glamorous; now just come to bed”—is all Kirsten would say if she woke up now and saw the light on in the den. He’s learnt, over many painful episodes, that his beautiful, intelligent wife doesn’t do reassurance.

  But, better than that, he’s started to understand why. She isn’t mean; it’s her experience of men and her defenses against being let down kicking in. It’s just how she processes challenges. It helps to see these things; he is accruing alternatives to vengeance and anger.

  Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriat
e response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love.

  Kirsten’s mother is in hospital. She has been there for two weeks. It started off as something innocuous having to do with her kidneys; now the prognosis is suddenly far graver. Normally so strong, Kirsten is ashen and lost.

  They went up to see her on Sunday. She was extremely frail and spoke softly and only to make simple requests: a glass of water, the lamp tilted so there would be a little less light in her eyes. At one point she took Rabih’s hand in hers and gave him a smile: “Look after her, will you,” she said, and then, with the old sharpness, “If she lets you.” A forgiveness, of sorts.

  He knows that he never found favor in Mrs. McLelland’s eyes. At first he resented it; now, as a parent himself, he can sympathize. He isn’t looking forward to Esther’s husband, either. How could a parent ever truly approve? How could they possibly be expected, after eighteen or so years of answering to a child’s every need, to react enthusiastically to a new and competing source of love? How could anyone sincerely perform the requisite emotional somersault and not suspect in their heart—and let on as much, through a succession of more or less sour remarks—that their child had mistakenly fallen into the clutches of someone fundamentally unsuited to the complex and unique task of administering to them?

  Kirsten cries uncontrollably after their visit in Raigmore Hospital. She sends the children to play with their friends; right now she can’t be a parent—the one who tries never to frighten others by revealing their pain; she needs to be a child again for a while. She can’t overcome the horror of her mother looking sallow and emaciated against the institutional blue sheets. How could this be happening? She is at some level still deeply attached to her impressions, formed in her fifth or sixth year, of her mother as someone strong, capable, and in charge. Kirsten was the little one who could be scooped up into the air and told what needed to happen next. She craved this authority in the years after her father left. The two McLelland women knew how to stick together; they were a team, involved in the best kind of sedition. Now Kirsten is in the corridor quizzing an alarmingly young doctor about how many months there will be left. The world has been upended.