The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

betrayal that is all too often simply a face-saving attempt to pretend we don’t
need someone, an arduous proof of indifference that we reserve for, and secretly
address to, the person we truly care about—but are terrified of showing that we
need and have been inadvertently hurt by.
We are never through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn’t a curse
limited to the inadequate and the weak. Insecurity may even be a peculiar sign of
well-being. It means we haven’t allowed ourselves to take other people for
granted, that we remain realistic enough to see that things could genuinely turn
out badly—and that we are invested enough to care.

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It is getting very late now. The children have swimming practice early the next
day. Rabih waits until Kirsten has finished her consideration of where Esther and
William might eventually study, then reaches over and takes his wife’s hand.
She lets it lie there unattended awhile, then gives it a squeeze, and they begin to
kiss. He opens, and starts to stroke, her thighs. As he’s doing so, his gaze strays
to the night-table on which Kirsten has placed a card from William: “Happy
Bithrdey Mumy,” it says, alongside a drawing of an extremely good-natured and
smiley sun. This makes him think of William’s impish face and, strangely, also
of Kirsten taking him on her shoulders around the kitchen, which she did only
the previous week, when he’d dressed up as a wizard after school.
One part of Rabih very much wants to press on with seducing his wife; he’s
been wanting this for so long. But another side of him isn’t so sure if he’s
properly in the mood now, for reasons he finds hard to pin down.
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.
Yet there is one thing we want to do with our grown-up lovers that was
previously very much off-limits with our reassuring early caregivers; we seek to
have sex with the very individuals who in key ways remind us of types with whom
we were once strongly expected not to have sex. It follows that successful
intercourse depends on shutting down some of the overly vivid associations
between our romantic partners and their underlying parental archetypes. We
need—for a little while—to make sure our sexual feelings don’t become
unhelpfully confused with our affectionate ones.
But the task becomes trickier the moment children arrive and directly call
upon the specifically parental aspects of our partners. We might be aware at a
conscious level that our partner is of course not a sexually forbidden parent—
they’re the same person they always were, the one who, in the early months, we
once did fun and transgressive things with. And yet the idea is put under ever
greater strain as their sexual selves grow increasingly obscured beneath the
nurturing identities they must wear all day, exemplified by those chaste and
sprightly titles (which we might even occasionally mistakenly use to refer to
them ourselves): “Mum” or “Dad.”
What his wife’s breasts might look like was once a subject of inordinate concern
for Rabih. He remembers casting surreptitious glances at them in the black top
she wore the first time they met, then later studying them beneath a white T-shirt
which hinted at their fascinatingly modest size, then brushing against them ever

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so slightly during that initiatory kiss at the botanical gardens and then finally
circling them with his tongue in her old kitchen. His obsession with them in the
early days was constant. He wanted her to keep her bra on during lovemaking,
alternately pushing it up and pulling it down, so as to keep at a maximum pitch
the extraordinary contrast between her clothed and unclothed selves. He would
ask her to cup and caress them as she might if he weren’t there. He wanted to
place his penis between them, as if mere hands were not enough and a more
definitive indicator of possession and possibility were required to mark out this
previously taboo territory.
And yet now, some years later, they lie next to each other in the marital bed
with about as much sexual tension between them as there might be between a
pair of leathery grandparents tanning themselves on a Baltic nudist beach.