The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

avoidant
and 
anxious
are hardly typical in a
love story, but if 
Romantic
is taken to mean “helpful to the progress of love,”
then they turn out to be among the most romantic words Kirsten and Rabih will
ever stumble upon, for they enable them to grasp patterns that have been
destructively at work between them every day of their married lives.
They come to appreciate the strange and special psychotherapeutic diplomatic
back channel which has made a new mode of discourse possible for them, a
sanctuary where weekly they can confess to being furious or sad under the
benevolent watch of a referee who is guaranteed to contain the other’s reaction
long enough to secure a necessary degree of understanding and perhaps
empathy. Thousands of years of halting steps towards civilization have at last led
to a forum where two people can painstakingly discuss how hurtful one of them
has been to the other about laying a table or saying something at a party or
arranging a holiday, with neither side being permitted simply to get up, storm
out, or swear. Therapy is, Kirsten and Rabih conclude, in some ways the greatest
invention of the age.
The conversations they have in Mrs. Fairbairn’s presence start to color how
they talk to one another at home. They begin to internalize the therapist’s
benign, judicious voice. “What would Joanna [a name they never use in her
presence] say?” becomes a ritual, playful question between them—much as
Catholics might once have tried to imagine Jesus’s response to a trial of life.
“If you carry on getting annoyed with me, I’m going to end up avoidant,”
Kirsten might warn in response to a standoff with Rabih.
They still joke about therapy, just no longer at its expense.
It is a pity, therefore, that the insights on offer in the consulting room are so
negligible in the wider culture. Their conversations feel like a small laboratory
of maturity in a world besotted by the idea of love as an instinct and a feeling
beyond examination. That Mrs. Fairbairn’s room is tucked up some tenement
stairs seems symbolic of the marginalized nature of her occupation. She is the
champion of a truth that Rabih and Kirsten are now intimate with, but which
they know is woefully prone to get lost in the surrounding noise: that love is a
skill, not just an enthusiasm.

---

Maturity
Throughout the winter Rabih works on designs for a gymnasium. He meets a
dozen times with the members of the local education authority who are
commissioning it. It promises to be an exceptional building, with a system of
skylights which will make it bright inside even on the dullest days.
Professionally speaking, it may be the beginning of something very substantial
for him. And then, in the spring, they call him back in and, in that aggressive
manner sometimes adopted by people who feel so guilty about letting someone
down that they become offensive, bluntly tell him it’s off—and that they’ve
decided to go with another practice with more experience. That’s when the not-
sleeping begins.
Insomnia can, when it goes on for weeks, be hell. But in smaller doses—a night
here and there—it doesn’t always need a cure. It may even be an asset, a help
with some key troubles of the soul. Crucial insights that we need to convey to
ourselves can often be received only at night, like city church bells that have to
wait until dark to be heard.
During the day he has to be dutiful towards others. Alone in the den, past
midnight, he can return to a bigger, more private duty. His thought processes
would no doubt sound weird to Kirsten, Esther, and William. They need him to
be a certain way, and he doesn’t want to let them down or scare them with the
strangeness of his perceptions; they have a right to benefit from his
predictability. But there are now other, inner demands on his attention. Insomnia
is his mind’s revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during
the daylight hours.
Ordinary life rewards a practical, unintrospective outlook. There’s too little time
and too much fear for anything else. We let ourselves be guided by an instinct
for self-preservation: we push ourselves forwards, strike back when we’re hit,
turn the blame onto others, quell stray questions, and cleave closely to a
flattering image of where we’re headed. We have little option but to be
relentlessly on our own side.
Only at those rare moments when the stars are out and nothing further will be

---

needed from us until dawn can we loosen our hold on our ego for the sake of a
more honest and less parochial perspective.
He looks at the familiar facts in a new way: he is a coward, a dreamer, an
unfaithful husband, and an overly possessive, clingy father. His life is held
together by string. He is over halfway through his career, and he has achieved
next to nothing in comparison with the hopes that were once placed on him.
He can, at three a.m., be oddly unsentimental in listing his faults: a willful
streak that provokes distrust in his superiors, a tendency to get offended too
easily, a preference for caution based on a terror of rejection. He has not had the
self-confidence to stick with things. By his age, others have gone ahead and set
up their own architectural practices instead of waiting to be asked and then
blaming the world for not begging hard enough. There is precisely one building
—a data-storage facility in Hertfordshire—with his name on it. He is on track to
die with the largest parts of his talent still unexploited, registering as mere
flashes of inspiration that he occasionally perceives out of the corner of his
mind’s eye while he’s in the shower or driving alone down the motorway.
At this point he is beyond self-pity, the shallow belief that what has happened
to him is rare or undeserved. He has lost faith in his own innocence and
uniqueness. This isn’t a midlife crisis; it’s more that he is finally, some thirty
years too late, leaving adolescence behind.
He sees he is a man with an exaggerated longing for Romantic love who
nevertheless understands little about kindness and even less about
communication. He is someone afraid of openly striving for happiness who takes
shelter in a stance of preemptive disappointment and cynicism.
So this is what it is to be a failure. The chief characteristic may be silence: the
phone doesn’t ring, he isn’t asked out, nothing new happens. For most of his
adult life he has conceived of failure in the form of a spectacular catastrophe,
only to recognize at last that it has in fact crept up on him imperceptibly through
cowardly inaction.
Yet, surprisingly, it’s okay. One gets used to everything, even humiliation.
The apparently unendurable has a habit of coming to seem, eventually, not so
bad.
He has already sucked too much of life’s bounty, without particular profit and
to no good effect. He has been on the earth for too many decades; he has never
had to till the soil or go to bed hungry, yet he has left his privileges largely
untouched, like a spoilt child.
His dreams were once very grand indeed: he would be another Louis Kahn or
Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe or Geoffrey Bawa. He was going to bring a

---

new kind of architecture into being: locally specific, elegant, harmonious,
technologically cutting-edge, progressive.
Instead he is the almost-broke deputy director of a second-rate urban-design
firm, with a single building—more of a shed, really—to his name.
Nature embeds in us insistent dreams of success. For the species, there must be
an evolutionary advantage in being hardwired for such striving; restlessness has
given us cities, libraries, spaceships.
But this impulse doesn’t leave much opportunity for individual equilibrium.
The price of a few works of genius throughout history is a substantial portion of
the human race being daily sickened by anxiety and disappointment.
Rabih used to assume that only the flawless version of anything was worth
having. He was a perfectionist. If the car was scratched, he couldn’t enjoy
driving it; if the room was untidy, he couldn’t rest; if his lover didn’t understand