The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed
by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can
contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or
unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust.

---

They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense
of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they
are worthy of, and can win, the goodwill of others if only they have the
wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and
imagination.
As children, these good communicators must have been blessed with
caregivers who knew how to love their charges without demanding that every
last thing about them be agreeable and perfect. Such parents would have been
able to live with the idea that their offspring might sometimes—for a while, at
least—be odd, violent, angry, mean, peculiar, or sad, and yet still deserve a
place within the circle of familial love. The parents would thus have created an
invaluable wellspring of courage from which those children would eventually be
able to draw to sustain the confessions and direct conversations of adult life.
Rabih’s father was taciturn and severe. Only one generation removed from a life
of extreme poverty and agricultural labor in a small village near Baalbek, he had
been the first in his family to escape and go to university, though he would
continue to preserve a long ancestral legacy of being careful around authority.
Speaking up and volunteering one’s opinions were not standard practices among
the Khans.
The education in communication imparted by Rabih’s mother was no more
encouraging. She loved him fiercely, but she needed him to be a certain way.
Whenever she returned from her airline work to the anxious atmosphere of
Beirut and of her marriage, her son would see the strain around her eyes and feel
that he mustn’t add to her problems. He wanted more than anything to put her at
ease and make her laugh. Whatever anxieties he felt, he would reflexively
conceal. His job was to help keep her intact. He could not afford to tell her too
many tricky but true things about himself.
Rabih thereby grew up to understand the love of others as a reward for being
good, not for being transparent. As an adult and as a husband, he lacks any idea
of how to make something coherent out of the nonnormative parts of himself. It
is neither arrogance nor a sense that his wife has no right to know who he really
is that makes him secretive and hesitant; rather, it is sheer terror that his
tendencies towards self-loathing will be intensified to an unbearable degree by
the presence of a witness.
Were Rabih less afraid of his own mind, he might be able to square up to
Kirsten with his desires, like a natural scientist holding up for a colleague’s
inspection some newly discovered, peculiar-looking species which both of them
might strive to understand and accommodate themselves to. But he instinctively

---

feels that there is quite a lot about himself that it would be wiser for him not to
share. He is too dependent on Kirsten’s love to map out for her all the places to
which his libido regularly takes him. She thus never learns about the woman her
husband daily admires behind the till at the newsagent in Waverley Station, or
his curiosity about her friend Rachel on the night of her birthday, or the dress
that turns him on in a shop on Hanover Street, or some of his thoughts about
stockings, or some of the faces that, unbidden, occasionally pass through his
mind while he is in bed with her.
The first heady period of sexual adventure and total honesty passes. It is
significantly more important to Rabih now that he remain attractive to Kirsten
than that he be a truthful correspondent of the reality of his inner life.