I’m a big fan of true love. Not just the part where you can count on a free dopamine and serotonin rush to your brain upon the very mention of the Object of Desire (I like how this abbreviates to OD), but the less glamorous parts where you come home after work one Tuesday evening and survey the chaos that is your life — screaming toddlers, unmet deadlines, a sink loaded with dirty dishes, another leaking valve and a co-pilot who sincerely believes he is more exhausted than you are — and have to rely on the more hardcore oxytocin and vasopressin to do their thing and keep the love intact when every fibre of your being wants to pull an Eat Pray Love (jump on a plane to Rome and wish with all your heart that a man named Giovanni with ‘giant brown liquid-centre Italian eyes’ would kiss you).
This is why I devoured Alain de Botton’s The Course of Love in a day. The blurb promised that I was in for another delightful (after Essays in Love ) de Botton book scrutinising my favourite subject: “Rabih and Kirsten find each other, fall in love, get married. Society tells us this is the end of the story. In fact, it is only the beginning.” And indeed, I was.
I do feel the need to point out to romance enthusiasts, however, that this is not your regular love story. No, not only because it begins where Serendipity ends, but because the story itself is merely a prop (an exceptionally engaging one with entirely touchable characters, but a prop nonetheless) to illustrate and delve deeply into the question of what it means to be married or “the awkward realities of living alongside another fallen creature” in a culture that has taught us “far too much about how love starts and recklessly little about how it may continue.”
So if you’re only in it for what happens next, you may read no further than the end of Chapter 2 where we are — in anti-climactic fashion — told: “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 will sometimes want to murder one another and on a few occasions to kill themselves.”
Oh. That puts a nice, round full stop to any hopes you might have entertained of sinking into your favourite couch on a Sunday afternoon with a mug of hot chocolate and escaping into a love story.
This book is no escape. If anything, it’s an intervention. And a much-needed one for a generation primed by the romantic notion that all our needs — mental, emotional, physical and spiritual — can and will be met by ‘the right person.’ It is not, however, the kind of embarrassing intervention where your friends, parents, aunts and uncles jump out from behind a curtain and basically ambush you, so they can tell you that you’re a junkie. This is more like stepping into a laboratory — of life, that is — looking around with respectful curiosity at the carefully separated and examined nuances of thought and feeling, held up against the backdrop of a modern day marriage for you to take in — very slowly — and go ‘Alright, I’ll concede I might have been looking at this under the wrong lighting all along.’
The narrative is interspersed with the author’s commentary in italics, which fans of the linear may find a touch annoying but I for one, thoroughly enjoyed. Granted, these observations are, at times, somewhat elementary to anyone who has researched extensively or even thought a great deal about the subject. What is that ‘word’ the Internet loves so much? Mansplaining? Yes, that. Minus the gender bias though. This particular brand of mansplaining involves dumbing things down for both women and men. But then again, de Botton is a modern day philosopher. Which means, he spends a great deal of his time pondering, debating and writing books about matters crucial to our existence while we are busy taking Buzzfeed quizzes. So I forgive the mansplaining. He is allowed, once in a while, to suspect that the rest of us might be idiots.
But before I digress any further: The Course of Love frames the Happily Ever After story in unflinching ordinariness — Rabih and Kirsten’s marriage is the story of our lives and relationships — and the fact that mainstream pop-culture has been stubbornly distorting the facts, causing us all to subconsciously subscribe to ideas far removed from reality for so long, is suddenly — though we’ve known it all along — and infuriatingly jarring.
This is the book I wish I had read in my early 20s. It might have not only saved me a great deal of heartbreak, but taught me to interpret such things as coldness and emotional withdrawal with kindness and generosity, instead of having to work it out by myself and arriving at all the wrong conclusions.
Read this book if you are married, plan to marry or, like me, are fascinated by the idea of relating at a profound level to another human being. Entirely quotable and brimming with de Botton’s signature wry humour, there is no way you’ll take nothing out of it. At the very least, the next time you find yourself bored and alone at a snooty highbrow party, you can look forward to mansplaining the hell out of some unsuspecting pretentious stranger.
Judy Balan is a novelist who writes comedy across mediums. She is a fussy reader who believes life is too short to complete books you don’t like.
