The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

It tells us something about the relative status of rigorous analysis in the nuptial
process that it would be considered unRomantic, and even mean, to ask an
engaged couple to explain in any depth, with patience and self-awareness, what
exactly had led them to make and accept a proposal. But we’re keen, of course,
always to ask where and how the proposal took place.
It isn’t disrespectful to Rabih to suggest that he doesn’t really know why he has
asked her to marry him, 
know
in the sense of being in command of a rationally
founded, coherent set of motives which could be shared with a skeptical or
probing third party. What he has instead of a rationale is feelings, and plenty of
them: the feeling of never wanting to let her go because of her broad, open

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forehead and the way her upper lip protrudes ever so slightly over her lower one;
the feeling that he loves her because of her furtive, slightly surprised, quick-
witted air which inspires him to call her his “Rat” and his “Mole” (and which
also, because her looks are unconventional, makes him feel clever for finding her
attractive); the feeling that he needs to marry her because of the diligent
concentration on her face when she prepares a cod and spinach pie; because of
her sweetness when she buttons up her duffel coat; and because of the cunning
intelligence she displays when she unpacks the psyches of people they know.
There is virtually no serious thought underpinning his certainty about
marriage. He has never read any books on the institution; he has in the last
decade never spent more than ten minutes with a child; he has never cynically
interrogated a married couple let alone spoken in any depth with a divorced one
and would be at a loss to explain why the majority of marriages fail, save from
the general idiocy or lack of imagination of their participants.
For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons:
because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing grain
business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or
both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And
from such reasonable marriages there flowed loneliness, rape, infidelity,
beating, hardness of heart, and screams heard through the nursery doors.
The marriage of reason was not, from any sincere perspective, reasonable at
all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish, exploitative, and abusive.
Which is why what has replaced it—the marriage of feeling—has largely been
spared the need to account for itself. What matters is that two people wish
desperately that it happen, are drawn to one another by an overwhelming
instinct, and know in their hearts that it is right. The modern age appears to
have had enough of “reasons,” those catalysts of misery, those accountants’
demands. Indeed the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been
only six weeks since they met; one of them has no job; or both are barely out of
their teens), the safer it may actually be deemed to be, for apparent
“recklessness” is taken as a counterweight to all the errors and tragedies
vouchsafed by the so-called sensible unions of old. The prestige of instinct is the
legacy of a collective traumatized reaction against too many centuries of
unreasonable “reason.”
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. Those voices
which hint that marriage is no longer necessary, that it is far safer simply to

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cohabit, are right from a practical point of view, concedes Rabih; but they miss
the emotional appeal of danger, of putting oneself and one’s beloved through an
experience which could, with only a few twists of the plotline, result in mutual
destruction. Rabih takes his very willingness to be ruined in love’s name as
proof of his commitment. That it is “unnecessary” in the practical sense to marry
serves only to render the idea more compelling emotionally.