The Evolution of Love: The Long Years I’ll Spend with You

The Evolution of Love: The Long Years I’ll Spend with You

In most love stories, once the prince and princess have overcome countless obstacles and finally become a couple, the story abruptly ends with a perfunctory “live happily ever after.” It is almost as if they did not get married, but died and went to heaven instead. (Perhaps those who say “marriage is the grave of love” imagine it this way too.) These romantic tales, which many of us absorb from childhood, create a serious cognitive distortion for young people. Only when the truth of marriage gradually reveals itself does that distortion become fully visible, carving out a vast gulf between ideal and reality. Couples who become aware of this gap—more often women—may turn to relationship manuals for help, or perhaps—again, more often women—use idealized, fairy-tale-like films and TV dramas to hypnotize and anesthetize themselves, drawing from fantasy the satisfaction missing in real life.

And yet, if we told children the truth about marriage from the very beginning—that their seemingly happy parents (or perhaps not-so-happy-but-still-peacefully-coexisting parents) are far from the prince and princess of fairy tales, that “becoming a couple” is merely the starting point of a long march rather than its destination—would that create a different kind of harm? Might it make young people unwilling, or afraid, to face marriage at all? This concern is not unfounded. Growing up in a broken family or in an environment lacking warmth can indeed make one more pessimistic and negative about marriage and family life. Debates over the “family of origin” may never be settled, but there is little doubt about how deeply one’s upbringing shapes a person.

Before the rise of romanticism, people’s expectations of marriage may have aligned more closely with the lessons they absorbed in childhood. “A good family match, daily necessities, practical concerns”—in traditional evaluations of marriage, these objective conditions often outweighed emotional factors. In extreme cases, two people entered marriage entirely by “parental arrangement and the matchmaker’s word,” without ever having had any real interaction beforehand. From a pessimistic point of view, a marriage formed solely on the basis of objective compatibility may be no less contingent than one that grows out of romantic love and then enters marriage—though I admit this view is not backed by data. After all, becoming someone’s life partner and facing the long road of life together is fundamentally different from the roles and expectations within a romantic relationship. In fact, the difference can feel almost as great as the distance between strangers. In the early days of marriage, we may often discover that the person we thought we knew has somehow become a stranger.

Alain de Botton’s The Course of Love begins precisely where romance ends and marriage begins. Unlike most books about relationships, it is not organized around a set of lessons or theories. Instead, it takes the form of a novel, following an ordinary man and woman as they move from love into marriage. As time passes and their relationship changes, the story unfolds naturally, and through it de Botton explains and examines each stage of married life. Unlike the romantic tone that colors many of his other works, The Course of Love dissects marriage from an objective and rational perspective. Through the lives of its protagonists, it presents the conflicts, upheavals, and frictions of marriage before the reader, while offering the distinctive and penetrating reflections of a philosopher. The book contains none of the neatly systematized theories or instructions found in relationship manuals. It simply tries to help us observe marriage—our own and others’—from a more objective angle. Yet this kind of lived observation and scrutiny may be more valuable than any amount of theory.

In the dominant pattern of modern relationships, romantic love is the precondition for everything that follows. In the book, we follow the male protagonist, Rabih, step by step as he draws close to Kirsten. We see their first slightly rushed and awkward date; we witness their first kiss after a period of mutual testing and tentative attraction; we follow Rabih into Kirsten’s bedroom for the first time, watching her respond eagerly to his touch and teasing, taking his hand to undo the button of her jeans...

But this is not all de Botton wants to offer. At just the right moments, he inserts philosophical commentary such as this: “Sexiness may at first seem like a physiological phenomenon, the result of awakened hormones and stimulated nerve endings. But in essence, it is not merely a feeling; it is a form of thought—and most important within it are acceptance and commitment, a promise to bring an end to loneliness and shame.” Reflections like this appear throughout The Course of Love. More than that, de Botton’s meticulous observations and descriptions of Rabih and Kirsten’s life scenes easily stir readers’ own memories and resonance. And beyond his philosophical commentary, he goes further still, narrating and analyzing the more private side of their lives: their upbringing, their private habits, and the subtlest shifts in their inner worlds. These details are at once similar to and different from those of most readers, but in either case they prompt us to observe and reflect on our own circumstances.

As time passes, the lives of Rabih and Kirsten continue to evolve. The plot lacks dramatic confrontation, yet it remains deeply engaging. On the one hand, we rarely have access to the minute details of other people’s lives in a way that might help us understand ourselves better, and de Botton’s narrative offers just such a rare opportunity. Like most married couples, Rabih and Kirsten face the full range of life’s realities: conflict, career, finances, children, fidelity, parents... Within marriage, “love” itself becomes strangely unspoken. It seems not to exist, and yet it seems to be everywhere—like air.

A perfect relationship between two people does not exist. Only through continuous learning, reflection, growth, and improvement can our inner lives and outer relationships remain in harmony. If we are to accompany the person beside us through what may be the longest stretch of our lives, then just as we must learn how to be alone, we must also keep learning how to live with another person. Among all the books on relationships I have read, I have yet to encounter one more illuminating than The Course of Love.