“He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.”

The Course of Love, Chapter: Infatuations

I’m not going to give you the whole story of how I found this book, mostly because it would involve me talking about how I clicked on a clickbait video title and ended up looking for the text version (which was an essay in the New York Times) and that led me to this book. It’s not my first book by de Botton – I had to read The Art of Travel in school – but since I came to this via an essay, I was sort of expecting a bunch of essays.

But I was wrong. The Course of Love is a novel about Rabih and Kirsten’s marriage. But honestly, it feels like these two people are just here so we can learn about love from something that is not an essay. The story of them is frequently broken up with italic paragraphs on love, such as:

“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.”

As a novel, I probably wouldn’t enjoy this very much. It feels like we are expected to observe Rabih and Kirsten, not to share in their feelings. The commentary on their relationship adds to the sense of distance, and I don’t think I ever really felt like these two were “real” people in the way that I sometimes think “I would like/would hate to be friends with [insert character name]” when reading.

However, because I was expecting a series of essays on love, the fact that Rabih and Kirsten felt flat to me ended up not being an issue. I preferred the meditations on love and de Botton’s central argument is an interesting one. He argues that we have allowed a romantic ideal of love to hijack the concept of love, obscuring its everyday mundanity and the work required for us to stay in love. For the most part, I agree with him and the parenting sections on selfless love even sound very close to the Christian concept of love. However, he also seems to argue that it’s normal for people to dream of sleeping with other people and I’ve got enough of a romantic in me that I wouldn’t want the person I’m dating to be fantasizing about other girls while he’s with me.

Overall, the course of true love never did run smooth, and despite the flat character bumps, The Course of Love was an engaging book to me. It makes me want to reread The Art of Travel, and I will probably do so in the latter half of the year, after I’m back in Singapore and have access to my books.

“We learn, too, that being another’s servant is not humiliating, quite the opposite, for it sets us free from the wearing responsibility of continuously catering to our own twisted, insatiable natures. We learn the relief and privilege of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves.”