The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

Melancholy isn’t always a disorder that needs to be cured. It can be a species of
intelligent grief which arises when we come face-to-face with the certainty that
disappointment is written into the script from the start.
We have not been singled out. Marrying anyone, even the most suitable of
beings, comes down to a case of identifying which variety of suffering we would
most like to sacrifice ourselves for.
In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the altar, a
couple would speak thus: “We accept not to panic when, some years from now,
what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we
promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better
options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.”
After the solemn repetition of the last sentence by the congregation, the couple
would continue: “We will endeavor to be faithful. At the same time, we are
certain that never being allowed to sleep with anyone else is one of the tragedies
of existence. We apologize that our jealousies have made this peculiar but sound
and non-negotiable restriction very necessary. We promise to make each other
the sole repository of our regrets rather than distribute them through a life of
sexual Don Juanism. We have surveyed the different options for unhappiness,
and it is to each other we have chosen to bind ourselves.”
Spouses who had been cheated upon would no longer be at liberty furiously to
complain that they had expected their partner to be content with them alone.
Instead they could more poignantly and justly cry, “I was relying on you to be
loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness which our hard-won
marriage represents.”
Thereafter, an affair would be a betrayal not of intimate joy but of a
reciprocal pledge to endure the disappointments of marriage with bravery and
stoic reserve.

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Secrets
No relationship could start without a commitment to wholehearted intimacy. But
in order for love to keep going, it also seems impossible to imagine partners not
learning to keep a great many of their thoughts to themselves.
We are so impressed by honesty that we forget the virtues of politeness; a
desire not always to confront people we care about with the full, hurtful aspects
of our nature.
Repression, a degree of restraint, and a little dedication to self-editing belong
to love just as surely as a capacity for explicit confession. The person who can’t
tolerate secrets, who in the name of
“being honest”
shares information so
wounding to the other that it can never be forgotten—this person is no friend of
love.
And if we suspect (as we should regularly if our relationship is a worthy
one) that our partner is also lying (about what she’s thinking of, how he judges
our work, where she was last night, etc.), then we would do well not to act the
sharp and relentless inquisitor. It may be kinder, wiser, and closer to the true
spirit of love to pretend we simply didn’t notice.
For Rabih, there is no alternative but to lie forever about what happened in
Berlin. He has to because he knows that telling the truth would beget an even
greater order of falsehood: the profoundly mistaken belief that he no longer
loves Kirsten or else that he is a man who can no longer be trusted in any area of
life. The truth risks distorting the relationship far more than the untruth.
In the wake of the affair, Rabih adopts a different view of the purpose of
marriage. As a younger man he thought of it as a consecration of a special set of
feelings: tenderness, desire, enthusiasm, longing. However, he now understands
that it is also, and just as importantly, an institution, one which is meant to stand
fast from year to year without reference to every passing change in the emotions
of its participants. It has its justification in stabler and more enduring phenomena
than feelings: in an original act of commitment impervious to later revisions and,
more notably, in children, a class of beings constitutionally uninterested in the
daily satisfactions of those who created them.
For most of recorded history, people stayed married because they were keen to
fit in with the expectations of society, had a few assets to protect, and wanted to

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maintain the unity of their families. Then gradually another, very different
standard took hold: couples were to remain together, ran the thought, only so
long as certain feelings still obtained between them—feelings of authentic
enthusiasm, desire, and fulfillment. In this new Romantic order, spouses could
be justified in parting ways if the marital routine had become deadening, if the
children were getting on their nerves, if sex was no longer enticing, or if either