The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

The particulars of what arouses us may sound odd and illogical, but—seen from
close up—they carry echoes of qualities we long for in other, purportedly saner
areas of existence: understanding, sympathy, trust, unity, generosity, and
kindness. Beneath many erotic triggers lie symbolic solutions to some of our
greatest fears, and poignant allusions to our yearnings for friendship and
understanding.
It’s three weeks now since their first time. Rabih runs his fingers roughly
through Kirsten’s hair. She indicates, by a movement of her head and a little
sigh, that she would like rather more of that—and harder, too, please. She wants
her lover to bunch her hair in his hand and pull it with some violence. For Rabih
it’s a tricky development. He has been taught to treat women with great respect,
to hold the two genders as equal, and to believe that neither person in a
relationship should ever wield power over the other. But right now his partner
appears to have scant interest in equality nor much concern for the ordinary rules
of gender balance, either.
She’s no less keen on a range of problematic words. She invites him to
address her as though he cared nothing for her, and they both find this exciting
precisely because the very opposite is true. The epithets 
bastard
, 
bitch
, and 
cunt
become shared tokens of their mutual loyalty and trust.
In bed, violence—normally such a danger—no longer has to be a risk; a
degree of force can be expended safely and won’t make either of them unhappy.
Rabih’s momentary fury can remain entirely within his control even as Kirsten
draws from it an empowering sense of her own resilience.
As children they were both often physical with their friends. It could be fun to
hit. Kirsten would whack her cousins hard with the sofa pillows, while Rabih
would wrestle with his friends on the grass at the swimming club. In adulthood,
however, violence of any kind has been prohibited: no grown person is ever
supposed to use force against another. And yet, within the boundaries of the
couple’s games, it can feel strangely pleasing to take a swipe, to hit a little and
be hit; they can be rough and insistent; there can be a savage edge. Within the
protective circle of their love, neither of them has to feel in any danger of being

---

hurt or left bereft.
Kirsten is a woman of considerable steeliness and authority. She manages a
department at work, she earns more than her lover, she is confident and a leader.
She has known from a young age that she must be able to take care of herself.
However, in bed with Rabih, she now discovers that she’d like to assume a
different role, as a form of escape from the wearying demands of the rest of her
life. Her being submissive to him means allowing a loving person to tell her
exactly what to do, letting him take responsibility and choice away from her.
The idea has never appealed to her before, but only because she believed that
most bossy people were not to be trusted; they didn’t seem, as Rabih does, truly
kind and utterly nonviolent by nature (she playfully calls him “Sultan Khan”).
She’s craved independence in part by default, because there have been no
Ottoman potentates around who were nice enough to deserve her weaker self.
For his part, Rabih has all his adult life had to keep his bossiness sharply in
check, and yet, in his deeper self, he’s aware of having a sterner side to his
nature. He is sometimes sure he knows what’s best for other people and what
they rightly have coming to them. In the real world he may be a powerless minor
associate in a provincial urban-design firm, with strong inhibitions around
expressing what he really thinks; but in bed with Kirsten he can feel the appeal
of casting aside his customary reserve and enforcing absolute obedience, just as
Suleiman the Magnificent might have done in his harem in the marble and jade
palace on the shores of the Bosphorus.