The Course of Love

by Alain De Botton

  Kirsten gets up and goes to fetch a glass of water.

  Ben McGuire. The name rings a bell. She’s mentioned him before. She went to Dundee for the afternoon once. When was that? Three months ago, perhaps? There was some sort of council get-together, she said. How dare this McGuire fellow invite his wife to lunch? Is he entirely out of his mind? And without even asking Rabih’s permission, which he would certainly never have given?

  He begins his inquisition at once: “Kirsten, have you done anything with Ben McGuire, or has he otherwise indicated that he would like in some way to do something to—or should I say with—you?”

  “Don’t adopt that strange, detached, lawyerly tone with me, Rabih. Do you think I’d be talking like this with you if I had something to hide? Just because somebody finds me attractive, I’m not the narcissistic type who feels immediately forced to strip off. But if someone does actually think I am rather terrific, and if he notices that I’ve had my hair cut or admires what I’m wearing, I don’t hold it against him, either. Surprisingly, I am not a virgin. You’ll find that very few women my age are, these days. It’s probably even time you came to terms with the fact that your mother wasn’t the Madonna she lives on as in your imagination. What do you think she was doing with her evenings when she flew around the world—reading selected passages of the Gideons’ Bible in her hotel room? Whatever it was, I hope for her sake that it was wonderful and that her lovers adored her—and I’m glad she had the decency never to involve you in any of it. Bless her. Except that she gave you, through no fault of her own, some very skewed views about women. Yes, women do in fact have needs of their own, and sometimes—even if they have husbands they love and are good mothers—they would like for someone new and unknown to notice them and want them desperately. Which doesn’t mean they won’t also be the picture of sensible concern every day and think about what kinds of healthy snacks to pack inside their children’s lunch boxes. Sometimes you seem to believe you’re the only one around here who has an inner life. But all of your very subtle feelings are in the end very normal and no sign of genius. This is what marriage is and what we signed up for, both of us, for life, with our eyes open. I intend to be loyal to that, as much as I can, and I hope you will be, too.”

  With that, she falls silent. On the counter next to where she’s standing there’s a large pack of flour, brought out from the pantry in anticipation of a cake she’ll make with the children the next day. She stares at it for a moment.

  “And as for your complaint that I never do anything crazy . . .” The pack of flour is across the room before he can say a word, striking the wall with such vehemence that it explodes into a white cloud, which takes a surprisingly long time to settle across the dining table and chairs.

  “You stupid, hurtful, inadequate man—was that crazy enough for you? Perhaps while you’re cleaning it up you’ll have time to remember how much fun housework can be. And please don’t ever, ever call me boring again.”

  She goes back upstairs, and Rabih gets down on his knees with the dustpan and brush. There’s flour everywhere: it takes nearly a whole roll of paper towels, carefully dampened, to get the bulk of it off the table, off the chairs, and out of the crevices in the tiles, and even then he knows that reminders of this event will remain visible for weeks to come. As he works he also recalls, in a way he hasn’t done for a while, that he had good reason to marry this particular woman.

  It seems especially painful, therefore, to think that Rabih may have lost her to a fellow surveyor from the Dundee Council—and, what’s worse, just when he has no leg to stand on and no moral authority to exert. Yes, he knows he’s being ridiculous, but the thoughts crowd in nevertheless. How long has the adultery been going on? How many times have they met? Where do they do it? In the car? He’ll have to check it thoroughly in the morning. He feels nauseous. She is by her very nature so secretive and discreet that she could be carrying on a whole second life, he reflects, without his having a clue. He wouldn’t begin to know how to intercept her e-mails or bug her phone. Does she really even belong to a book club? When she said she was visiting her mother last month, was she actually off for a weekend with her lover? What about the “coffee” she sometimes has on a Saturday? There might be a tracker he can slip into her coat. He is at once beyond outraged and entirely terrified. His wife is about to leave him, or else she plans to stay but to treat him coldly and angrily for eternity. He misses their past life so much, when all they knew was (he manages to convince himself) calmness, loyalty, and stability. He wants to be cradled in her arms like an infant and to turn back the clock. He thought they were going to have a quiet evening, and now everything has come to an end.

  To be mature is, we’re told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone. It’s what wise people have taught us since our earliest days: Let Jack play with your fire engine; it won’t stop being yours if he has a turn. Stop throwing yourself on the floor and thumping your small clenched fists on the carpet in rage. Your little sister may be Daddy’s darling. But you’re Daddy’s darling, too. Love isn’t like a cake: if you give love to one person, it doesn’t mean there is less for anyone else. Love just keeps growing every time there’s a new baby in the family.

  Later on, the argument makes even more sense around sex. Why would you think ill of a partner if they left you for an hour to go and rub a limited area of their body against that of a stranger? After all, you wouldn’t get enraged if they played chess with someone you didn’t know or joined a meditation group where they talked intimately of their lives by candlelight, would you?

  Rabih can’t stop asking certain questions: Where was Kirsten last Thursday evening when he called her and got no answer? Whom is she trying to impress with her new black shoes? Why, when he types “Ben McGuire” into the search box on her laptop (which he has fired up in secret in the bathroom), does he get only boring work-related e-mails between the two of them? How and where else are they communicating? Have they set up hidden e-mail accounts? Is it Skype? Or some new encrypted service? And the most important and stupidest question of all: What’s he like in bed?

  The stupidity of jealousy makes it a tempting target for those in a moralizing mood. They should spare their breath. However unedifying and plain silly attacks of jealousy may be, they cannot be skirted: we should accept that we simply cannot stay sane on hearing that the person we love and rely on has touched the lips, or even so much as the hand, of another party. This makes no sense, of course—and runs directly counter to the often quite sober and loyal thoughts we may have had when we happened to betray someone in the past. But we are not amenable to reason here. To be wise is to recognize when wisdom will simply not be an option.

  He tries consciously to slow down his breathing. It seems as if he might be angry, but at heart he’s merely terrified. He tries a technique he once heard described in a magazine: “Let’s imagine what Kirsten, if she did have a few experiences with Ben, might have meant by them. What did it mean when I was with Lauren? Did I want to abandon Kirsten? Emphatically no. So in all likelihood, when she was with Ben, she didn’t want to run off, either. She was probably just feeling ignored and vulnerable and wanted an affirmation of her sexuality—things she’s already told me she needs and that I need, too. Whatever she may have done was probably no worse than what happened in Berlin, which itself wasn’t really so bad. To forgive her would be to come to terms with some of the very same impulses I myself have had, and to see that they were no more the enemies of our marriage and our love for having been hers rather than mine.”

  It sounds very logical and high-minded. Yet it makes no sliver of difference. He is starting to learn about “being good” but not in the normal, secondhand kind of way, by listening to a sermon or dutifully following social mores from a lack of choice or out of a passive, cowed respect for tradition. He is becoming a slightly nicer person by the most authentic and effective means possible: through having a chance to explo
re the long-term consequences of bad behavior from within.

  So long as we have been the unconscious beneficiaries of the loyalty of others, sangfroid around adultery comes easily. Never having been betrayed sets up poor preconditions for remaining faithful. Evolving into genuinely more loyal people requires us to suffer through some properly inoculative 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.

  Irreconcilable Desires

  He longs, firstly, for safety. Sunday nights in winter often feel particularly cozy somehow, with the four of them seated around the table eating Kirsten’s pasta, William giggling, Esther singing. It’s dark outside. Rabih has his favorite German pumpernickel bread. Afterwards there’s a game of Monopoly, a pillow fight, then a bath, a story, and bedtime for the children. Kirsten and Rabih climb into bed, too, to watch a film; they hold hands under the duvet, just as they did at the start, though now the rest is down to an almost embarrassed peck on the lips as the end credits roll, and both are asleep ten minutes later, secure and cocooned.

  But he yearns, also, for adventure. Six thirty on those rare, perfect summer evenings in Edinburgh, when the streets smell of diesel, coffee, fried foods, hot tarmac, and sex. The pavements are crowded with people in cotton print dresses and loose-fitting jeans. Everyone sensible is heading home, but for those sticking around, the night promises warmth, intrigue and mischief. A young person in a tight top—perhaps a student or a tourist—passes by and confides the briefest of conspirational smiles, and in an instant everything seems within reach. In the coming hours, people will enter bars and discos, shout to make themselves heard over the throb of the music, and—buoyed by alcohol and adrenaline—end up entwined with strangers in the shadows. Rabih is expected back at the house to begin the children’s bath time in fifteen minutes.

  Our romantic lives are fated to be sad and incomplete, because we are creatures driven by two essential desires which point powerfully in entirely opposing directions. Yet what is worse is our utopian refusal to countenance the divergence, our naive hope that a cost-free synchronization might somehow be found: that the libertine might live for adventure while avoiding loneliness and chaos. Or that the married Romantic might unite sex with tenderness, and passion with routine.

  Lauren texts Rabih to ask if they might speak online sometime. She would like to hear and ideally see him again: words just aren’t enough.

  There’s a wait of ten days before Kirsten has something planned that will take her out of the house at night. The children keep him busy until it’s nearly time, and then, due to a weak Wi-Fi signal, he’s confined to the kitchen for the duration of the call. He has already checked to make sure, repeatedly, that neither Esther nor William is in need of a glass of water, but he turns to look at the door every few minutes anyway, just in case.

  He’s never used FaceTime before, and it takes a while for him to get it set up. Two women are now in different ways relying on him. A few minutes and three passwords later, Lauren is suddenly there, as if she were waiting inside the computer all along.

  “I miss you,” she says right away. It’s a sunny morning in Southern California.

  She’s sitting in her kitchen—living room, wearing a casual blue striped top. She’s just washed her hair. Her eyes are playful and alive.

  “I made coffee; do you want some?” she asks.

  “Sure, and some toast.”

  “You like it with butter, I seem to remember? Coming right up.”

  The screen flickers for an instant. This is how love affairs will be conducted when we’ve colonized Mars, he thinks.

  Infatuations aren’t delusions. That way they have of holding their head may truly indicate someone confident, wry, and sensitive; they really may have the humor and intelligence implied by their eyes and the tenderness suggested by their mouth. The error of the infatuation is more subtle: a failure to keep in mind the central truth of human nature: that everyone—not merely our current partners, in whose multiple failings we are such experts—but everyone will have something substantially and maddeningly wrong with them when we spend more time around them, something so wrong as to make a mockery of those initially rapturous feelings.

  The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. The best cure for love is to get to know them better.

  When the image returns, he can just make out, in a far corner, what looks to be a drying rack with a few pairs of socks hung on it.

  “By the way, where’s the reach-over-and-touch-your-lover button on this thing?” she wonders aloud.

  He’s very much at her mercy. All she would need to do was look up his wife’s e-mail on the Edinburgh Council Web site and drop her a line.

  “It’s right here on mine,” he replies.

  In an instant his mind shoots forward to a possible future with Lauren. He imagines living with her in L.A. in that apartment, after the divorce. They would make love on the couch, he would cradle her in his arms, they’d stay up late talking about their vulnerabilities and longings and would drive over to Malibu to eat shrimp at a little place she’d know by the ocean. But they’d also need to put out the laundry, wonder who would fix the fuses, and get cross because the milk ran out.

  It’s in part because he likes her a lot that he really doesn’t want this to go any further. He knows himself well enough to realize how unhappy he would ultimately make her. In light of all he understands about himself and the course of love, he can see that the kindest thing he can do to someone he truly likes is to get out of the way fast.

  Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.

  “I miss you,” she says again.

  “Likewise. I’m also intently staring at your laundry back there over your shoulder. It’s very pretty.”

  “You mean and perverted man!”

  To develop this love story—one logical consequence of his enthusiasm—would in reality end up being the most self-centered and uncaring thing he could do to Lauren, not to mention his wife. Real generosity, he recognizes, means admiring, seeing through the urge for permanence, and walking away.

  “There’s something I’ve been meaning to say . . . ,” Rabih begins.

  As he talks through his reservations, she is patient with his stumbles and what she calls his tendency towards “Middle Eastern sugarcoating,” throws in some humor about being fired as his mistress, but is gracious, decent, understanding, and, above all, kind.

  “There aren’t many people like you on the earth,” he concludes, and he means it.

  What guided him in Berlin was the sudden hope of bypassing some of the shortcomings of his marriage by means of a new but contained foray into someone else’s life. But as he perceives it now, such hope could only ever have been sentimental claptrap and a form of cruelty in which everyone involved would stand to lose and be hurt. There could be no tidy settlement possible in which nothing would be sacrificed. Adventure and security are irreconcilable, he sees. A loving marriage and children kill erotic spontaneity, and an affair kills a marriage. A person cannot be at once a libertine and a married Romantic, however compelling both paradigms might be. He doesn’t downplay the loss either way. Saying good-bye to Lauren means safeguarding his marriage but it also means denying himself a critical source of tenderness and elation. Neither the love rat nor the faithful spouse gets it right. There is no solution. He is in tears in the kitchen, sobbing more deeply than he has in years: about what he has lost, what he has endangered, and how punishing the choices have been. He has just about enough time to compose himself between the moment the key turns in the lock and Kirsten enters the kitchen.

  The weeks that follow will prove a mixture of relief and sadness. His wife will ask him on a couple of occasions if anything is wrong, and the second time he will make a great effort to adjus
t his manner so that she won’t have to ask him again.

  Melancholy isn’t always a disorder that needs to be cured. It can be a species of intelligent grief which arises when we come face-to-face with the certainty that disappointment is written into the script from the start.

  We have not been singled out. Marrying anyone, even the most suitable of beings, comes down to a case of identifying which variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

  In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the altar, a couple would speak thus: “We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.”

  After the solemn repetition of the last sentence by the congregation, the couple would continue: “We will endeavor to be faithful. At the same time, we are certain that never being allowed to sleep with anyone else is one of the tragedies of existence. We apologize that our jealousies have made this peculiar but sound and non-negotiable restriction very necessary. We promise to make each other the sole repository of our regrets rather than distribute them through a life of sexual Don Juanism. We have surveyed the different options for unhappiness, and it is to each other we have chosen to bind ourselves.”

  Spouses who had been cheated upon would no longer be at liberty furiously to complain that they had expected their partner to be content with them alone. Instead they could more poignantly and justly cry, “I was relying on you to be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness which our hard-won marriage represents.”

  Thereafter, an affair would be a betrayal not of intimate joy but of a reciprocal pledge to endure the disappointments of marriage with bravery and stoic reserve.