When exactly did you get violent disney? Was it "Beauty and the Beast", "Arielle" or "Tarzan"? Does not matter. Ultimately, the same thing always happened to the princesses anyway: got to know libertine, got perfect prince. Only in real life, it was kind of different. We thought it would be super smart to marry a prince instead of hopefully clinging to a libertine. He was sweet, educated, interested and daring. Years later he may still be, just kind of annoying. It seems to be the same for him. The tone is often not really nice after a couple of years together. So what's wrong with love? What have we all done wrong?
Alain de Botton – founder of the School of Life and bestselling author – has a pretty merciless answer to that! "We are all married to the wrong person," he said in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung recently. What he means by reading his current novel "The Run of Love" is understood. Well, a novel in the classic sense is not now, even if the reader is allowed to accompany the British couple Rabih and Kirsten from getting to know each other to couple therapy. Between the chapters, de Botton gives us a few factual hints as to why Rabih and Kirsten are doing as they are. In any case, what happens in life happens to the average couple: marriage, children, marital crisis, adultery, jealousy, slamming doors, touching loneliness in the common bedroom. Always there, as strange as it sounds: love.
"Our understanding of love is misled and deceived by the first seductive and moving moments."
While Rabih and Kirsten fight with all means for the preservation of romance, against demons of the past and for the common future, de Botton, in italics, explains so soberly about the background of the big and small crises that it is in interaction with Rabihs and Kirstens Helplessness seems almost grotesque. Despite the sometimes almost cynical tone, he does so so gently that one is hardly ashamed to recognize himself in almost all chapters. All the doubts, the anger, the secret thoughts about what would have happened if you had chosen a different path, chosen a different person. For such moments, de Botton reassures his cool, italics Hand on the shoulder and you can almost hear him say: This is the course of love. Not just your love, but every love.
"This is exactly marriage, we signed it …"
Why it is like that? Because, according to de Botton in the book, "marrying someone, even the most suitable person, ultimately means choosing which combination of suffering we want to sacrifice ourselves for." Because nobody really fits in the long run. Because our jealousy limits each other, monogamy is always a burden and our fears will always hurt the other in some way. That sounds hard at first, but the book is not a song of love. Not at all. On the contrary: it is rather an antidote to Walt Disney, to excessive expectations of the idea of eternal shared happiness that is simply there without doing anything for it. The expectation of ourselves to be a thoroughly good partner after all the experiences we have had in our life seems almost ridiculous. But back to our couple:
"Rabih and Kirsten are ready for marriage because they are very clear that they don't match."
Despite all the difficulties, Rabih and Kirsten always succeed in discovering the beauty of their love between household and tripartite fantasies, child cries and fundamental debates, tenderly facing the abysses of the other (and also their own). And de Botton does not leave the reader without pouring the wisdom into a single sentence: If you want to have a successful relationship, he writes about Rabih, "you will have to learn that love is not an enthusiasm, but an art."
How exactly this art can look can be read in "The course of love".
Alain de Botton
The course of love
S. Fischer publishing house
288 pages
ISBN: 978-3100024435