The Course of Love by Alain de Botton Read Free Book Online Page A

knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited tojust tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes.
    How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.
    He asks her to marry him in order to break the all-consuming grip that the thought of relationships has for too long had on his psyche. He is exhausted by seventeen years’ worth of melodrama and excitements that have led nowhere. He is thirty-two and restless for other challenges. It’s neither cynical nor callous of Rabih to feel immense love for Kirsten and yet at the same time to hope that marriage may conclusively end love’s mostly painful dominion over his life.
    As for Kirsten, suffice to say (for we will be traveling mostly in his mind) that we shouldn’t underestimate the appeal, to someone who has often and painfully doubted many things, not least herself, of a proposal from an ostensibly kind and interesting person who seems unequivocally and emphatically convinced that she is right for him.
    They are married by an official, in a salmon-pink room at the Inverness registry office on a rainy morning in November, in the presence of her mother, his father and stepmother, and eight of theirfriends. They read out a set of vows supplied by the government of Scotland, promising that they will love and care for each other, that they will be patient and show compassion, that they will trust and forgive, and that they will remain best friends and loyal companions until death.
    Uninclined to sound didactic (or perhaps simply at a loss as to how to be so), the government offers no further suggestions of how to concretize these vows—although it does present the couple with some information on the tax discounts available to those adding insulation to their first homes.
    After the ceremony, the members of the wedding party repair to a nearby restaurant for lunch, and by late that same evening the new husband and wife are ensconced in a small hotel near Saint-Germain, in Paris.
    Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omittedto investigate.

Ever After

Silly Things
    In the City of Love, the Scottish wife and her Middle Eastern husband visit the dead at the cemetery of Père Lachaise. They search in vain for the bones of Jean de Brunhoff and end up sharing a croque-monsieur on top of Édith Piaf. Back in their room, they pull off what Kirsten calls the “spermy bedcover,” spread a towel out, and—on paper plates and with the help of plastic forks—eat a dressed lobster from Brittany which called to them from the window of a deli in the rue du Cherche-Midi.
    Opposite their hotel, a chichi children’s boutique sells overpriced cardigans and dungarees. While Rabih is soaking in the bath one afternoon, Kirsten pops in and returns with Dobbie, a small furry monster with one horn and three deliberately ill-matched eyes who, in six years’ time, will become their daughter’s favorite possession.
    On their return to Scotland, they start to look for a flat. Rabih has married a rich woman, he jokes, which is true only in