The Course of Love - Alain de Botton  ## Metadata - Author: **Alain de Botton** - Full Title: The Course of Love - Category: #books - Tags: #love ## Highlights - Love stories begin not when we fear someone may be unwilling to see us again but when they decide they would have no objection to seeing us all the time; not when they have every opportunity to run away but when they have exchanged solemn vows promising to hold us, and be held captive by us, for life. (Location 145) - The three central challenges underpinning the Romantic idea of love: he has found the right person; he has opened his heart to her; and he has been accepted. (Location 152) - Love means admiration for qualities in the lover that promise to correct our weaknesses and imbalances; love is a search for completion. (Location 161) - He loves from a feeling of incompleteness—and from a desire to be made whole. (Location 165) - Love is also, and equally, about weakness, about being touched by another’s fragilities and sorrows, especially when—as happens in the early days—we ourselves are in no danger of being held responsible for them. (Location 174) - Love reaches a pitch at those moments when our beloved turns out to understand, more clearly than others have ever been able to, and perhaps even better than we do ourselves, the chaotic, embarrassing, and shameful parts of us. (Location 212) - Love is a dividend of gratitude for our lover’s insight into our own confused and troubled psyche. (Location 215) - Sexiness might at first appear to be a merely physiological phenomenon, the result of awakened hormones and stimulated nerve endings. But in truth it is not so much about sensations as it is about ideas—foremost among them the idea of acceptance and the promise of an end to loneliness and shame. (Location 260) - Shame and repression of impulse aren’t just things that our ancestors and certain buttoned-up religions latched onto for obscure and unnecessary reasons: they are fated to be constants in all eras—which is what lends such power to those rare moments (there might be only a few in a lifetime) when a stranger invites us to drop our guard and admits to wanting pretty much exactly what we had once privately and guiltily craved. (Location 281) - It’s more than mere coyness to refer to what they have done as “making love.” They haven’t just had sex; they have translated their feelings—appreciation, tenderness, gratitude, and surrender—into a physical act. (Location 290) - To receive the apparently dirtiest, most private, guiltiest part of her lover into the most public, most respectable part of herself is symbolically to free them both from the punishing dichotomy between dirty and clean, bad and good—in the process, (Location 348) - He asks her to marry him because it feels like an extremely dangerous thing to do: if the marriage were to fail, it would ruin both their lives. (Location 403) - Marriage, to Rabih, feels like the high point of a daring path to total intimacy; proposing has all the passionate allure of shutting one’s eyes and jumping off a steep cliff, wishing and trusting that the other will be there to catch one. (Location 409) - To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone. (Location 431) - The success of any relationship should be determined, not just by how happy a couple are to be together, but by how worried each partner would be about not being in a relationship at all. (Location 439) - Rabih wants his own sadness to find an echo in his partner’s character. (Location 455) - We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. (Location 459) - 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. (Location 465) - In reality, there are rarely squabbles over “nothing” in Rabih and Kirsten’s marriage. The small issues are really just large ones that haven’t been accorded the requisite attention. Their everyday disputes are the loose threads that catch on fundamental contrasts in their personalities. (Location 564) - In the West, we owe to Christianity the view that sex should only ever rightly occur in the presence of love. The religion insists that two people who care for each other must reserve their bodies, and their gaze, for each other alone. To think sexually about strangers is to abandon the true spirit of love and to betray God and one’s own humanity. (Location 695) - Shorn of their explicitly theistic rationale, they seem to have been absorbed into the ideology of Romanticism, which accords a similarly prestigious place to the concept of sexual fidelity within the idea of love. In the secular world, too, monogamy has been declared a necessary and crowning expression of emotional commitment and virtue. (Location 698) - Romanticism hasn’t only increased the prestige of monogamous sex; along the way it has also made any extraneous sexual interest seem unvaryingly foolish and unkind. It has powerfully redefined the meaning of the urge to sleep with someone other than one’s regular partner. It has turned every extramarital interest into a threat and, often, something close to an emotional catastrophe. (Location 735) - The overreactor is responsible, as the psychological term puts it, for the “transference” of an emotion from the past onto someone in the present—who perhaps doesn’t entirely deserve it. (Location 843) - We too often act from scripts generated by the crises of long ago that we’ve all but consciously forgotten. (Location 866) - Tags: #psychology - We may struggle to know which period of our lives we are really in, with whom we are truly dealing, and what sort of behavior the person before us is rightfully owed. (Location 868) - When our minds are involved in transference, we lose the ability to give people and things the benefit of the doubt; we swiftly and anxiously move towards the worst conclusions that the past once mandated. (Location 884) - The business of repatriating emotions emerges as one of the most delicate and necessary tasks of love. To accept the risks of transference is to prioritize sympathy and understanding over irritation and judgment. Two people can come to see that sudden bursts of anxiety or hostility may not always be directly caused by them, and so should not always be met with fury or wounded pride. (Location 888) - In their philosophy, the ancient Greeks offered a usefully unfashionable perspective on the relationship between love and teaching. In their eyes, love was first and foremost a feeling of admiration for the better sides of another human being. (Location 1086) - It followed that the deepening of love would always involve the desire to teach and in turn to be taught ways to become more virtuous: how to be less angry or less unforgiving, more curious or braver. Sincere lovers could never be content to accept one another just as they were; this would constitute a lazy and cowardly betrayal of the whole purpose of relationships. There would always be something to improve on in ourselves and educate others about. (Location 1088) - Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might only constitute a narrow and perhaps rather mean-minded aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it, to be loved rather than to love. (Location 1141) - Children teach us that love is, in its purest form, a kind of service. The word has grown freighted with negative connotations. An individualistic, self-gratifying culture cannot easily equate contentment with being at someone else’s call. We are used to loving others in return for what they can do for us, for their capacity to entertain, charm, or soothe us. Yet babies can do precisely nothing. There is, as slightly older children sometimes conclude with serious discomfiture, no “point” to them; that is their point. They teach us to give without expecting anything in return, (Location 1148) - The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behavior. (Location 1177) - The sweetness of children reminds us of how much we have had to sacrifice on the path to maturity; (Location 1250) - All the assurances he and Kirsten have offered over the years—“I will always be on your side”; “You can tell us whatever you’re feeling”—have paid off brilliantly: they have encouraged William and his sister to direct their frustrations and disappointments powerfully towards the two loving adults who have signaled that they can, and will, take the heat. (Location 1320) - It’s a well-known thesis: the people we are attracted to as adults bear a marked resemblance to the people we most loved as children. It might be a certain sense of humor or a kind of expression, a temperament, or an emotional disposition. (Location 1468) - No relationship could start without a commitment to wholehearted intimacy. But in order for love to keep going, it also seems impossible to imagine partners not learning to keep a great many of their thoughts to themselves. (Location 1953) - The person who can’t tolerate secrets, who in the name of “being honest” shares information so wounding to the other that it can never be forgotten—this person is no friend of love. (Location 1956) - Choosing a person to marry is hence just a matter of deciding exactly what kind of suffering we want to endure rather than of assuming we have found a way to skirt the rules of emotional existence. (Location 2278) - We speak of “love” as if it were a single, undifferentiated thing, but it comprises two very different modes: being loved and loving. We should marry when we are ready to do the latter and have become aware of our unnatural—and dangerous—fixation on the former. (Location 2297) - Only if we were already perfect could the idea of mutual education be dismissed as unloving. (Location 2313) - The Romantic vision of marriage stresses the importance of finding the “right” person, which is taken to mean someone in sympathy with the raft of our interests and values. There is no such person over the long term. We are too varied and peculiar. There cannot be lasting congruence. The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and good grace. (Location 2314) - Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the “right” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition. (Location 2317)