A Year in Books #2- Alain de Botton's ‘The Course of Love’
What they didn’t teach us in schools.
Huge fan of Alain de Botton (even bigger fan of his voice). If you aren’t already familiar, please check out his YouTube channel ‘The School of Life,’ where he uses beautifully animated illustrations to explain everyday emotional and psychological problems.
And it really is fascinating this channel. It’s almost like they’ve figured out the SEO keywords for all your anxieties:
Need help knowing why you’re so lost and broken?
School of Life will figure it out for you with a video essay that goes all the way to your past and unearths deep pertaining daddy issues.
Want to know if he really likes you or is merely using you for sex?
Here’s a video telling you how you haven’t been loved enough in your childhood and have trouble maintaining self-worth.
In this book, Alain talks about something 90% of the content on his channel already covers- romanticism and the role it plays in our lives.
And boy is the guy an expert on the subject! As somebody pointed in a review on Goodreads- it’s almost as if he overanalyses ‘everything’.
Every conversation; every lack of conversation; Fights as small as something over what temperature the air-conditioner should be set on could be traced all the way back to a time in the past- when one of the lovers in the story, somebody who grew up in military occupied Beirut, always had to keep their windows closed so as to block noises from dropping bombshells.
The book really is what the title makes it sound like: ‘The Course of Love’ is almost like a guidebook on how one could become a better lover.
(Spoiler alert: It’s not by writing ‘Reshma I love you’ on the walls of historical monuments.
The book does this using a fictional backdrop. The premise revolves around two lovers, Rabih and Kirsten: a Half-Lebanese, Half German architect, and a Scottish surveyor, and in a familiar fashion of lab rats under observation, dissects their relationship through all its stages- from courtship to marriage to kids to the middle-age.
In his work, Alain has been widely regarded as somewhat of a ‘romantic pessimist.’ He absolutely hates the fictional fairy-tale trope of romances that govern most of our pop-culture, therefore covering our understanding of love. As he puts it:
“Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments…. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.”
In retrospect, the book feels like the story of what would happen after Raj (a privileged undergrad dropout with little understanding of the real world) and Simran (a fiercely independent, ambitious young woman with underlying daddy issues) decide to elope and get married and start a life together in the extremely expensive city of London:
Alain believes most romantic films or novels refuse to cover this part of love. In most of them, either the couple lives happily ever after, or die a sacrificial death in a dramatic fashion. Nobody wishes to talk about the mundanity of everyday lives, because it’s simply too ‘normal’ to make for good content. But accordingly to Alain, this Normalcore trope of narrative, is where the real story lies.
This is the reason why the book dedicates only a handful of pages to the hormone-fueled love affair of the couple. When Rabih and Kirsten are faced with the cyclical ‘normalcy’ of everyday lives, a lot of the passion dies out. As Alain puts it:
“He (Rabih) and Kirsten will marry, they will suffer, they will frequently worry about money, they will have a girl first, then a boy, one of them will have an affair, there will be passages of boredom, they’ll sometimes want to kill themselves. This will be the real love story.”
During the entire book, de Botton picks out bits and pieces of their lives- a fight over money that ended in silence; a repressed sexual desire that was shamed by the other person; a decision to buy an IKEA furniture that ends in a compromise. And to these events, he adds an italicized commentary of his own. Their lives are treated almost like a case study, each event carrying with it a conclusion on what might’ve gone wrong.
This isn’t an ideal example of a regular relationship, but more like an intermingling of different dramatic events in a single one. De Botton tries to cover as many topics as possible- from parental issues to childcare to financial stress- leaving each reader to find something that they can relate to.
Although what I found extremely fascinating is how honest Alaine’s deductions of a marriage were, to the point where it was both refreshing and repulsive.
He describes Rabih’s attraction to Kirsten as one based an affliction for personal tragedies. He writes,
“(Rabih) identifies her as a suitable candidate for marriage because he is instinctively suspicious of people for whom things have always gone well. Around cheerful and sociable others he feels isolated and peculiar. He dislikes carefree types with a vengeance.”
The sentence definitely hits a spot, almost feeling like a form of a personal revelation.
But then on another instance, commenting on a character’s infidelity, he writes-
“Never having been betrayed sets up poor preconditions for remaining faithful. Evolving into genuinely more loyal people requires us to suffer through some properly innoculative episodes, in which we feel for a time limitlessly panicked, violated and on the edge of collapse. Only then can the injunction not to betray our spouses evolve from a bland bromide into a permanently vivid moral imperative.”
And…I don’t know. Something about the take almost borders on condoning.
But all in all the book is definitely worth picking up, simply because of how reassuring Alain’s analysis of a relationship feels. His stance on how ‘love isn’t just an emotion, but a skill to better’ is one that comes from extreme rationale. And for somebody who has always had a cynical and immature take on love, the book is like a sit-down lesson from a wise teacher on stuff they never taught you in school.
(Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go wipe something from the wall of a nearby historic monument. Until next time.)
