The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

Without patience for negotiation, there is bitterness: anger that forgot where it
came from. There is a nagger who wants it done now and can’t be bothered to
explain why. And there is a naggee who no longer has the heart to explain that
his or her resistance is grounded in some sensible counterarguments or,
alternatively, in some touching and perhaps even forgivable flaws of character.
The two parties just hope the problems—so boring to them both—will simply
go away.
As it happens, it’s in the middle of yet another standoff about the window and
the air temperature that Kirsten’s friend Hannah calls from Poland where she
lives with her partner and asks how “it”—by which she means the marriage (a
year old now)—is going.
Kirsten’s husband has donned an overcoat and woollen hat to maximize the
force of his objection to his wife’s demands for fresh air and is sitting huddled in
childish self-pity in a corner of the room with the duvet over him. She has just
referred to him, and not for the first time, as a big Jessie.
“Just great,” answers Kirsten.
However fashionable an openness around relationships might be, it remains
not a little shameful to have to admit that one just may, despite so many
opportunities for reflection and experiment, have gone ahead and married the
wrong person.
“I’m here with Rabih, having a quiet night in, catching up on some reading.”
There is in reality no ultimate truth in either Rabih’s or Kirsten’s mind as to
how things actually are between them. Their lives involve a constant rotation of
moods. Over a single weekend they might spin from claustrophobia to
admiration, desire to boredom, indifference to ecstasy, irritation to tenderness.
To arrest the wheel at any one point in order to share a candid verdict with a
third party would be to risk being held forever to a confession which might, with

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hindsight, turn out to reflect only a momentary state of mind—gloomy
pronouncements always commanding an authority that happier ones can’t trump.
So long as they keep making sure there are no witnesses to their struggles,
Kirsten and Rabih are free not to have to decide quite how well or how badly
things are going between them.
The ordinary challenging relationship remains a strangely and unhelpfully
neglected topic. It’s the extremes that repeatedly grab the spotlight—the entirely
blissful partnerships or the murderous catastrophes—and so it is hard to know
what we should make of, and how lonely we should feel about, such things as
immature rages, late-night threats of divorce, sullen silences, slammed doors,
and everyday acts of thoughtlessness and cruelty.
Ideally, art would give us the answers that other people don’t. This might even
be one of the main points of literature: to tell us what society at large is too
prudish to explore. The important books should be those that leave us
wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known
so much about our lives.
But too often a realistic sense of what an endurable relationship is ends up
weakened by silence, societal or artistic. We hence imagine that things are far
worse for us than they are for other couples. Not only are we are unhappy, we
misunderstand how freakish and rare our particular form of unhappiness might
be. We end up believing that our struggles are indications of having made some
unusual and fundamental error, rather than evidence that our marriages are
essentially going entirely according to plan.
They are spared continuous bitterness by two reliable curatives. The first is poor
memory. It is hard, by four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, to remember quite
what the fury in the taxi the previous evening was really about. Rabih knows it
had something to do with Kirsten’s slightly contemptuous tone, combined with
the flippant, ungrateful way she responded to his remark about having to leave
work early for no good reason. But the precise contours of the offense have now
lost their focus, thanks to the sunlight that came through the curtains at six in the
morning, the chatter on the radio about ski resorts, a full in-box, the jokes over
lunch, the preparations for the conference, and the two-hour meeting about the
Web site’s design, which together have gone almost as far towards patching
things up between them as a mature, direct discussion would have done.
The second remedy is more abstract: it can be difficult to remain furious for
very long, given quite how large the universe happens to be. A few hours after
the Ikea incident, around mid-afternoon, Rabih and Kirsten set off on a long-

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planned walk in the Lammermuir Hills to the southeast of Edinburgh. They start
out silent and cross, but nature gradually releases them from the grip of their
mutual indignation, not through its sympathy but through its sublime
indifference. Stretching interminably far into the distance, created through the
compression of sedimentary rocks in the Ordovician and Silurian periods (some
four hundred fifty million years before Ikea was founded), the hills strongly
suggest that the struggle which has lately loomed so large in their minds does not
in fact occupy such a significant place in the cosmic order and is as nothing
when set against the aeons of time to which the landscape attests. Clouds drift
across the horizon without pausing to take stock of their injured sense of pride.
Nothing and no one seem to care: not the family of common sandpipers circling
up ahead nor the curlew, the snipe, the golden plover or the meadow pipit. Not
the honeysuckle, the foxgloves, or the harebells nor the three sheep near
Fellcleugh Wood who are grazing on a rare patch of clover with grave intent.
Having felt belittled by each other for most of the day, Rabih and Kirsten are
now relieved from feeling small by an apprehension of the vastness within which
their lives unfold. They become readier to laugh off their own insignificance as it
is pointed out to them by forces indomitably more powerful and impressive than
they are.
So helpful are the limitless horizon and ancient hills that, by the time they
reach a café in the village of Duns, they have even forgotten what they are meant
to be furious with each other about. Two cups of tea later, they have agreed to
drive back to Ikea, where they eventually manage to pick out some glasses that
they will both succeed in tolerating for the rest of their lives: twelve tumblers
from the Svalka line.

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Sulks
For a good while, everyone else feels superfluous to them. They don’t want to
see any of the friends on whom they each depended in the long years before their
meeting. But then guilt and a renewed curiosity gradually get the better of them.
In practice this means seeing more of Kirsten’s friends, as Rabih’s are scattered
around the world. Kirsten’s Aberdeen University gang congregate in the Bow
Bar on Fridays. It’s way across town from their flat but it offers a great range of
whiskies and craft beers—although, on the night Kirsten persuades Rabih to
visit, he settles for a sparkling water. It’s not because of his religion specifically,
he has to explain (five times); he’s just not really in the mood for a drink.
“ ‘Husband and wife’! Wow!” says Catherine, a trace of mockery in her voice.
She is against marriage and responds best to people who confirm her bias. Of
course, the phrase