The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

partner’s mind during the “betrayal,” when they lay entwined with a stranger
for a few hours. We can hear their defense as often as we like, but we’ll be sure
of one thing in our hearts: that they were hell-bent on humiliating us and that
every ounce of their love has evaporated, along with their status as a trustworthy
human. To insist on any other conclusion is like arguing against the tide.
He is ready for marriage because (on a good day) he is happy to be taught and
calm about teaching.
We are ready for marriage when we accept that, in a number of significant
areas, our partner will be wiser, more reasonable, and more mature than we
are. We should want to learn from them. We should bear having things pointed
out to us. And at other moments we should be ready to model ourselves on the
best pedagogues and deliver our suggestions without shouting or expecting the
other simply to know. Only if we were already perfect could the idea of mutual
education be dismissed as unloving.
Rabih and Kirsten are ready to be married because they are aware, deep down,
that they are not compatible.
The Romantic vision of marriage stresses the importance of finding the “right”
person, which is taken to mean someone in sympathy with the raft of our
interests and values. There is no such person over the long term. We are too
varied and peculiar. There cannot be lasting congruence. The partner truly best
suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste but the
one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and good grace.
Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity
to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the “right” person.
Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.
Rabih is ready for marriage because he is fed up with most love stories and
because the versions of love presented in films and novels so seldom match what
he now knows from lived experience.
By the standards of most love stories, our own real relationships are almost all
damaged and unsatisfactory. No wonder separation and divorce so often appear
inevitable. But we should be careful not to judge our relationships by the

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expectations imposed on us by a frequently misleading aesthetic medium. The
fault lies with art, not life. Rather than split up, we may need to tell ourselves
more accurate stories—stories that don’t dwell so much on the beginning, that
don’t promise us complete understanding, that strive to normalize our troubles
and show us a melancholy yet hopeful path through the course of love.

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The Future
It is Kirsten’s birthday, and Rabih has arranged for them to spend the night at a
wildly luxurious and expensive hotel in the Highlands. They drop the children
off with a cousin of hers in Fort William and drive to the nineteenth-century
castle. It promises battlements, five stars, room service, a billiard room, a pool, a
French restaurant, and a ghost.
The children have made their unhappiness clear. Esther has accused her father
of ruining her mother’s birthday. “I just know you’re going to get bored without
us and that Mummy is going to miss us,” she insists. “I don’t think you should
be away for so long.” (They will be meeting again the following afternoon.)
William reassures his sister that their parents can always watch television and
might even find a games room with a computer.
Their room is in a turret at the top of the building. There is a large bathtub in
the center, and the windows look out over a succession of peaks dominated by
Ben Nevis, still carrying a light dusting of snow on its tip in June.
Once the young bellboy has dropped off their luggage, they feel awkward in
each other’s presence. It has been years, many years, since they have been alone
in a hotel room together, without children or anything in particular to do over the
next twenty-four hours.
It feels as if they are having an affair, so differently do they act towards each
other in this setting. Encouraged by the dignity and quiet of the vast, high-
ceilinged room, they are more formal and respectful. Kirsten asks Rabih with
unaccustomed solicitude what he might like to order from the room-service tea
menu—and he runs her a bath.