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The Course of Love

Book by Alain de Botton · 22 quotes · Love, Relationships, Marriage

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The Course of Love Quotes

“We place such demands on our partners, and become so unreasonable around them, because we have faith that someone who understands obscure parts of us, whose presence solves so many of our woes, must be somehow also be able to fix everything about our lives. We exaggerate the other's powers in a curious sort of homage - heard in adult life decades down the line - to a small child's awe at their own parents' apparently miraculous capacities.”

Trust
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“The start receives such disproportionate attention because it isn't deemed to be just one phase among many; for the Romantic, it contains in a concentrated form everything significant about love as a whole. Which is why, in so many love stories, there is simply nothing else for the narrator to do with a couple after they have triumphed over a range of initial obstacles other than to consign them to an ill-defined contented future--or kill them off. What we typically call love is only the start of love.”

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“What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of, and can win, the goodwill of others if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination. As children, these good communicators must have been blessed with caregivers who knew how to love their charges without demanding that every last thing about them be agreeable and perfect. Such parents would have been able to live with the idea that their offspring might sometimes—for a while, at least—be odd, violent, angry, mean, peculiar, or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love.”

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“We must concede that adultery cannot be a workable answer, for no one can be its victim and not feel forever cut to the core. A single meaningless adventure truly does have a recurring habit of ending everything. It's impossible for the victims of adultery to appreciate what might actually have been going through a partner's mind during the 'betrayal', when they lay entwined with a stranger for a few hours. We can hear their defence 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 trustworthy humans. To insist on any other conclusion is like arguing against a tide.”

BetrayalAdultery
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“We allow for complexity, and therefore make accommodations for disagreement and its patient resolution, in most of the big areas of life: international trade, immigration, oncology... but when it comes to domestic existence, we tend to make a fateful presumption of ease, which in turn inspires in us a tense aversion to protracted negotiation. We would think it peculiar indeed to devote a two-day summit to the management of a bathroom, and positevely absurd to hire a professional mediator to help us identify the right time to leave the house to go out for dinner. Without patience for negotiation, there is bitterness: anger that has forgotten where it came from. There is a nagger who wants it done now and can't be bothered to explain why. And there is a naggee who no longer has the heart to explain that his or her resistance is grounded in some sensible counter- arguments or, alternatively, in some touching and perhaps even forgivable flaws of character. The two parties just hope the problems - so boring to them both - will simply go away.”

Couples Fights
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“We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes. How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.”

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“What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality and their unpopular, awkward or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of and can win the goodwill of others, if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination. As children, these good communicatiors must have been blessed with caregivers who knew to love their charges without demanding that every last thing about them be agreeable and perfect. Such parents would have been able to live with the idea that their offsping might sometimes - for a while, at least - be odd, violent, angry, mean, peculiar or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love. The parents would thus have created an invaluable wellspring of courage from which those children would eventually be able to draw to sustain the confessions and direct conversations of adult life.”

Good Communicator
Book:The Course of Love
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