The Course of Love
A Touchpoint Book Review
For anyone pursuing a relationship in the modern world, The Course of Love by Alain De Botton is a must read. It’s a beautiful love story that tackles all of the peaks and valleys of finding and maintaining a romantic partnership. The story is chockfull of one-liners about intimacy, partnership, courtship, betrayal, and so much more. It’s part fiction, part personal growth, and as De Botton eloquently shares his own unique perspective on the meaning of things, you may find yourself on a journey of personal discovery reminiscent of The Alchemist or Siddhartha.
Without giving away the plot, we wanted to share a few of our key take-aways and quotations from the book.
“We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.”
As a society, we’re obsessed with how two lovers meet, the moment they knew they were in love, or how the proposal went down. We’ve conjured up a million ways these things can happen in perfect storybook scenarios, but what we’ve failed to glorify and amplify is what happens next. What happens when fights go in circles, priorities change, and sex isn’t happening? How do we keep a partnership strong when our personal or professional lives aren’t serving us? Perhaps if we became equally infatuated with these less sexy, but arguably more important elements of life-long love, we’d be better served romantically.
“There is no one more likely to destroy us than the person we marry.”
At Touchpoint, someone once defined ‘radical transparency,’ as intimacy — the bearing of one’s true self to another. De Botton believes that this vulnerability creates the possibility of real growth, as well as real destruction. The realization that we’ve empowered our partners to build us up or break us down is a powerful, and sometimes, frightening one.
“We readily treat children with a degree of kindness that we are oddly and woefully reluctant to show to our peers.”
The idea that we could extend the kind of open, empathetic compassion we offer to children to adults is an attractive one. Perhaps we believe kids will be more receptive to kindness than adults will? But why?
“Love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.”
Realizing that loving another person is more than just a feeling we experience or share, but a set of learned and applied behaviors can be life-changing. Discovering how to disagree without escalation, create space without abandonment, make love without insecurity — these are all practices to be explored and learned. They’re not intuitive, and we certainly haven’t received any formalized education in them.
“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.”
Many of us can find ourselves in the search for someone who is ‘the perfect fit.’ But since each one of us is a dynamic, shape-shifting human, it’s unrealistic to think that our compatibility today will inform tomorrow. I believe this is De Botton’s most important message. It’s the learning to co-exist in the presence of differences that can make loving another person so profound.
All in all, The Course of Love is quick and powerful read. If you’ve read it, we’d love to get your thoughts in the comments below.
If you‘ve got any recommendations for books that we should be reading or reviewing, feel free to share them with us here.
Love, Jmw.
