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mjcglz's review against another edition
3.0
Lots of interesting thoughts on the Romantic idealism of love and how it affects real relationships, plus the analysis of psychological traits and behavior that hardens the course of love. The fictitious couple of this book goes through falling in love to being married and having kids, all cemented by plenty of theory. To be honest, I struggled getting through this one, perhaps because I’m not married so many of the scenarios I couldn’t relate to. Definitely a book I’ll reread later in life, when I can counter it with my own experiences. Good book though.
naoki's review against another edition
5.0
“Choosing a person to marry is just a matter of deciding what kind of suffering we want to endure.” What wonderful lessons I learn from Alain de Botton.
The Course of Love tells the story of an ordinary marriage. Instead of focussing on the getting together like much of pop culture does, de Botton concentrates on the staying together. And this, he says, is where the real love begins.
This book reveals what it really takes to share a life with someone. Spoiler: it’s never easy. And through the couple’s many ups and downs, we learn there’s no such thing as a perfect soulmate.
“By the standards of most love stories, our own, real relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory.”
It’s a big, hard hit of reality. Smashing all those romantic love stories we have modelled our lives on. But, in the end, if we can wrap our heads around these lessons, we will probably save ourselves some heartache (maybe a bit).
Anyone who is married, getting married, or planning on being in a longterm relationship MUST read this book. A cool story interspersed with philosophical observations by a very clever person.
The Course of Love tells the story of an ordinary marriage. Instead of focussing on the getting together like much of pop culture does, de Botton concentrates on the staying together. And this, he says, is where the real love begins.
This book reveals what it really takes to share a life with someone. Spoiler: it’s never easy. And through the couple’s many ups and downs, we learn there’s no such thing as a perfect soulmate.
“By the standards of most love stories, our own, real relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory.”
It’s a big, hard hit of reality. Smashing all those romantic love stories we have modelled our lives on. But, in the end, if we can wrap our heads around these lessons, we will probably save ourselves some heartache (maybe a bit).
Anyone who is married, getting married, or planning on being in a longterm relationship MUST read this book. A cool story interspersed with philosophical observations by a very clever person.
pia_de_e's review against another edition
3.0
A story about falling in love and also about falling out of love. The story of Kirsten and Rabih: how they meet, fall in love, marry, have children, have problems, get bored with each other and try to make something out of their marriage.
Inserted through the book, in between the story of the marriage, are the author's reflections on love, life, marriage. Though we are urged to identify deeply with these characters, and to reflect on his and her own experiences in love (as the book description reads), I found Kirsten and Rabih quite boring, so it was not the easiest of tasks.
I know love has many stages, and boredom can certainly be one of them, but I just couldn't relate to this couple. I did find the authors' reflections on love and marriage very interesting, and this is what makes it a good book, in my opinion. Who hasn't been in a great-good-bad-mediocre relationship?
I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Inserted through the book, in between the story of the marriage, are the author's reflections on love, life, marriage. Though we are urged to identify deeply with these characters, and to reflect on his and her own experiences in love (as the book description reads), I found Kirsten and Rabih quite boring, so it was not the easiest of tasks.
I know love has many stages, and boredom can certainly be one of them, but I just couldn't relate to this couple. I did find the authors' reflections on love and marriage very interesting, and this is what makes it a good book, in my opinion. Who hasn't been in a great-good-bad-mediocre relationship?
I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
kellyannward's review against another edition
3.0
3.5/5: although i didn’t necessarily agree with all of his insights, the format was unique and the author had a clear therapeutic reasonable voice that i think many could benefit from. definitely felt like it was written for primarily male audience tho
kelsiej's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
I thought there were a lot of interesting thoughts on relationships and I appreciated the thought exercise. It was a bit preachy and I didn't love the way it condoned affairs and lying for the sole reason that it's impractical to think one person can satisfy you sexually forever
ina_fab's review against another edition
4.0
Love is like a second job and it gets harder to work with every day. It drains you and it asks more from you each day. As Alain de Botton says, ‘love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.'
I really liked how the story was a clear example about life and love, then after each paragraph came the author’s explanations for each situation. This book was a great insight about love and I’m glad I finally read it. I know some things in life are repetitive and you cannot see them with clear eyes anymore. This book gave me a much clearer view over them, as love can either break you or save you from everything else in your life.
I really liked how the story was a clear example about life and love, then after each paragraph came the author’s explanations for each situation. This book was a great insight about love and I’m glad I finally read it. I know some things in life are repetitive and you cannot see them with clear eyes anymore. This book gave me a much clearer view over them, as love can either break you or save you from everything else in your life.
diana_skelton's review against another edition
4.0
'The Romantic faith must always have existed but only in the past few centuries has it been judged anything more than an illness; only recently has the search for a soulmate been allowed to take on the status of something close to a purpose in life. An idealism previously directed at gods and spirits has been rerouted towards human subjects—an ostensibly generous gesture, nevertheless freighted with forbidding and brittle consequences, since it is no simple thing for any human being to honour over a lifetime the perfections he or she might have hinted at to an imaginative observer in the street, the office, or the adjoining aeroplane seat. […] Love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.'
'Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue. […] It tells us something about the relative status of rigorous analysis in the nuptial process that it would be considered un-Romantic, and even mean, to ask an engaged couple to explain in any depth, with patience and self-awareness, what exactly had led them to make and accept a proposal. And yet we're keen, of course, to ask where and how the proposal took place. […] The Romantic challenge is behind them. Life from now on will assume a steady, repetitive rhythm, to the extent that they will often find it hard to locate a specific event in time, so similar will the years appear in their outward form. But their story is far from over: it is just a question of henceforth having to stand for longer in the stream and use a smaller-meshed sieve to catch the few grains of interest.'
'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. […] Rabih's momentary fury can remain entirely within his control even as Kirsten draws from it an empowering sense of her own resilience. […] Within the protective circle of their love, neither of them has to feel in any danger of being hurt or left bereft.'
'For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined his, his family had a flourishing grain business, her father was the magistrate in the town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, rape, infidelity, beating, hardness of heart, and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, from any sincere perspective, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish, exploitative and abusive. Which is why what has replaced it—the marriage of feeling—has largely been spared the need to account for itself. […] The modern age appears to have had enough of “reasons”, those catalysts of misery, those accountants' demands. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it's been only six weeks since they met; one of them has no job; or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it may actually be deemed to be, for apparent “recklessness” is taken as a counterweight to all the errors and tragedies vouchsafed by the so-called sensible unions of old. The prestige of instinct is the legacy of a collective traumatised reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable “reason”.'
'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 positively absurd to hire a professional mediator to help us identify the right time to leave the house to go out to dinner.'
'At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one. We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk: it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.'
'Rabih didn't speak, and Kirsten didn't listen. Instead, they went to the cinema and had a thoroughly nice evening together. In the engine room of their relationship, however, a warning light had come on. Rabih resigns himself to being partially misunderstood—and unconsciously, to blaming his wife for not accepting those sides of his nature that he lacks the courage to explain to her. Kirsten, for her part, settles for never daring to ask her husband what is really going on in his sexual mind outside of her role in it, and chooses not to look very hard at why it is that she feels so afraid to find out more.'
'All animals are distinctive because they have evolved to thrive in very particular environments. […] “But these adaptations aren't much use when your new habitat is actually the zoo where you're living in a concrete room with a meal delivered to you three times a day through a hatch. […] You just grow fat and tetchy.”
“Perhaps humans are no different. We're saddled with impulses which were probably sensible when they evolved, yet give us nothing but trouble now. Like being super alert to noises in the night, which now just stops us sleeping when a car alarm goes off. Or being primed to eat anything sweet, which makes us fat given how many temptations there are. Or feeling almost compelled to look at the legs of strangers in the streets, which annoys and hurts our partners...”
“Mr. Khan! Using Darwin to get me to feel sorry for you not having seven wives and yet another ice cream!”'
'Kirsten's manoeuvre brings out all of her skills as a financial negotiator. Rabih concludes that he is exceptionally lucky to be married to a woman so obviously adept at dealing with money. […] The price he must pay is having to ensure certain associated downsides as well. The same virtues that make her a great negotiator and financial controller can also render her, sometimes—most particularly when he feels anxious about his career—a maddening and unsettling companion with whom to consider the achievements of others. In both scenarios, there is the same attachment to security, the same unwillingness to discount material criteria of success, and the same intelligent concern for what things cost. Identical qualities produce both amazing house deals and insecurities around status.'
'Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might constitute only a narrow, and perhaps rather narrow-minded, aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it; to be loved rather than to love. Children may end up being the unexpected teachers of people many times their age, to whom they offer—through their exhaustive dependence, egoism, and vulnerability—an advanced education in a wholly new sort of love, one in which reciprocation is never jealously demanded or fractiously regretted and in which the true goal is nothing less than the transcendence of oneself for the sake of another.'
'“You're such a genius at making me feel I'm the mad, horrible one. All I can say is everything is very well-ordered around here. It can start to seem dead. Boring, even.” He can't help himself. He's impelled to say the very worst things, to try to smash the relationship to see if it's real and worth trusting. […] Why does she so often answer him with a puzzling “Hmm” just when he most needs her support? That's why he shouted at her, swore, then stalked off. It wasn't ideal, but she was seriously letting him down. A sign of an anxiously attached person is an intolerance of, and dramatic reaction to, ambiguous situations—like a silence, a delay, or a non-committal remark. These are quickly interpreted in negative ways. Inside, anxiously attached people often feel as if they were fighting for their lives—though they are typically unable to explain their fragility to those around them who, understandably, may instead label them as cantakerous, irritable or cruel.'
'Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue. […] It tells us something about the relative status of rigorous analysis in the nuptial process that it would be considered un-Romantic, and even mean, to ask an engaged couple to explain in any depth, with patience and self-awareness, what exactly had led them to make and accept a proposal. And yet we're keen, of course, to ask where and how the proposal took place. […] The Romantic challenge is behind them. Life from now on will assume a steady, repetitive rhythm, to the extent that they will often find it hard to locate a specific event in time, so similar will the years appear in their outward form. But their story is far from over: it is just a question of henceforth having to stand for longer in the stream and use a smaller-meshed sieve to catch the few grains of interest.'
'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. […] Rabih's momentary fury can remain entirely within his control even as Kirsten draws from it an empowering sense of her own resilience. […] Within the protective circle of their love, neither of them has to feel in any danger of being hurt or left bereft.'
'For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined his, his family had a flourishing grain business, her father was the magistrate in the town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, rape, infidelity, beating, hardness of heart, and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, from any sincere perspective, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish, exploitative and abusive. Which is why what has replaced it—the marriage of feeling—has largely been spared the need to account for itself. […] The modern age appears to have had enough of “reasons”, those catalysts of misery, those accountants' demands. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it's been only six weeks since they met; one of them has no job; or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it may actually be deemed to be, for apparent “recklessness” is taken as a counterweight to all the errors and tragedies vouchsafed by the so-called sensible unions of old. The prestige of instinct is the legacy of a collective traumatised reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable “reason”.'
'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 positively absurd to hire a professional mediator to help us identify the right time to leave the house to go out to dinner.'
'At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one. We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk: it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.'
'Rabih didn't speak, and Kirsten didn't listen. Instead, they went to the cinema and had a thoroughly nice evening together. In the engine room of their relationship, however, a warning light had come on. Rabih resigns himself to being partially misunderstood—and unconsciously, to blaming his wife for not accepting those sides of his nature that he lacks the courage to explain to her. Kirsten, for her part, settles for never daring to ask her husband what is really going on in his sexual mind outside of her role in it, and chooses not to look very hard at why it is that she feels so afraid to find out more.'
'All animals are distinctive because they have evolved to thrive in very particular environments. […] “But these adaptations aren't much use when your new habitat is actually the zoo where you're living in a concrete room with a meal delivered to you three times a day through a hatch. […] You just grow fat and tetchy.”
“Perhaps humans are no different. We're saddled with impulses which were probably sensible when they evolved, yet give us nothing but trouble now. Like being super alert to noises in the night, which now just stops us sleeping when a car alarm goes off. Or being primed to eat anything sweet, which makes us fat given how many temptations there are. Or feeling almost compelled to look at the legs of strangers in the streets, which annoys and hurts our partners...”
“Mr. Khan! Using Darwin to get me to feel sorry for you not having seven wives and yet another ice cream!”'
'Kirsten's manoeuvre brings out all of her skills as a financial negotiator. Rabih concludes that he is exceptionally lucky to be married to a woman so obviously adept at dealing with money. […] The price he must pay is having to ensure certain associated downsides as well. The same virtues that make her a great negotiator and financial controller can also render her, sometimes—most particularly when he feels anxious about his career—a maddening and unsettling companion with whom to consider the achievements of others. In both scenarios, there is the same attachment to security, the same unwillingness to discount material criteria of success, and the same intelligent concern for what things cost. Identical qualities produce both amazing house deals and insecurities around status.'
'Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might constitute only a narrow, and perhaps rather narrow-minded, aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it; to be loved rather than to love. Children may end up being the unexpected teachers of people many times their age, to whom they offer—through their exhaustive dependence, egoism, and vulnerability—an advanced education in a wholly new sort of love, one in which reciprocation is never jealously demanded or fractiously regretted and in which the true goal is nothing less than the transcendence of oneself for the sake of another.'
'“You're such a genius at making me feel I'm the mad, horrible one. All I can say is everything is very well-ordered around here. It can start to seem dead. Boring, even.” He can't help himself. He's impelled to say the very worst things, to try to smash the relationship to see if it's real and worth trusting. […] Why does she so often answer him with a puzzling “Hmm” just when he most needs her support? That's why he shouted at her, swore, then stalked off. It wasn't ideal, but she was seriously letting him down. A sign of an anxiously attached person is an intolerance of, and dramatic reaction to, ambiguous situations—like a silence, a delay, or a non-committal remark. These are quickly interpreted in negative ways. Inside, anxiously attached people often feel as if they were fighting for their lives—though they are typically unable to explain their fragility to those around them who, understandably, may instead label them as cantakerous, irritable or cruel.'
freyja_laila's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.25
laurflanagan's review against another edition
The style of an omniscient narrator on the side interspersed throughout wasn't working for me.