Alain de Botton, the author of “How Proust Can Change Your Life” follows the course of a relationship from first love to maturity. Lots of life lessons in this little novel. Here are some annotations from the book:
For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of a majestic and substantial conclusion: that he or she may constitute a comprehensive answer to the unspoken questions of existence.
Love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.
What we typically call love is only the start of love.
Cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards.
For Rabih, the most attractive people aren’t those who accept him right away (he doubts their judgment) or those who never give him a chance (he grows to resent their indifference) but rather those who, for unfathomable reasons—perhaps a competing romantic entanglement or a cautious nature, a physical predicament or a psychological inhibition, a religious commitment or a political objection—leave him turning for a little while in the wind.
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.
Love means admiration for qualities in the lover that promise to correct our weaknesses and imbalances; love is a search for completion.
We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity.
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.
Ideally, art would give us the answers that other people don’t. This might even be one of the main points of literature: to tell us what society at large is too prudish to explore. The important books should be those that leave us wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known so much about our lives.
But too often a realistic sense of what an endurable relationship is ends up weakened by silence, societal or artistic. We hence imagine that things are far worse for us than they are for other couples. Not only are we are unhappy, we misunderstand how freakish and rare our particular form of unhappiness might be. We end up believing that our struggles are indications of having made some unusual and fundamental error, rather than evidence that our marriages are essentially going entirely according to plan.
To which he replies, “Fuck you, leave me alone.” Which is sometimes how fear can sound.
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: 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. Sulking pays homage to a beautiful, dangerous ideal that can be traced back to our earliest childhoods: the promise of wordless understanding.
It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or sickens us that we should begin to be concerned, for this may be the surest sign that we are being gently lied to or shielded from the other’s imagination, whether out of kindness or from a touching fear of losing our love.
We don’t need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.
The only release from our longing may be to stop demanding a perfect love and noting its many absences at every turn, and instead start to give love away (perhaps to a small person) with oblivious abandon without jealously calculating the chances of it ever returning.
The sweetness of children reminds us of how much we have had to sacrifice on the path to maturity. It’s not just children who are childlike. Adults, too, are—beneath the bluster—intermittently playful, silly, fanciful, vulnerable, hysterical, terrified, pitiful, and in search of consolation and forgiveness.
It is a wonderful thing to live in a world where so many people are nice to children. It would be even better if we lived in one where we were a little nicer to the childlike sides of one another.
A person has to feel rather safe around someone else in order to be this difficult.
The progress of the human race is at every turn stymied by an ingrained resistance to being rushed to conclusions. We are held back by an inherent interest in reexploring entire chapters in the back catalogue of our species’ idiocies—and to wasting a good part of life finding out for ourselves what has already been extensively and painfully charted by others.
If parental kindness were enough, the human race would stagnate and in time die off. The survival of the species hinges on children eventually getting fed up and heading off into the world armed with hopes of finding more satisfying sources of excitement. The continuation of families down the generations depends on the young ones’ eventually losing patience with their elders.
The modern expectation is that there will be equality in all things in the couple—which means, at heart, an equality of suffering. But calibrating grief to ensure an equal dosage is no easy task. It takes a superhuman wisdom to avoid the consoling conclusion that one has the harder life.
An impure conscience is a useful spur to being a bit nicer.
Is there not, wonders Rabih, an infantile idealism in our wish to find everything in one other being—someone who will be simultaneously a best friend, a lover, a co-parent, a co-chauffeur, and a business partner? What a recipe for disappointment and resentment in this notion upon which millions of otherwise perfectly good marriages regularly flounder.
Love isn’t like a cake: if you give love to one person, it doesn’t mean there is less for anyone else.
The error of the infatuation is more subtle: a failure to keep in mind the central truth of human nature: that everyone—not merely our current partners, in whose multiple failings we are such experts—but everyone will have something substantially and maddeningly wrong with them when we spend more time around them, something so wrong as to make a mockery of those initially rapturous feelings. The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. The best cure for love is to get to know them better.
Adventure and security are irreconcilable.
Marrying anyone, even the most suitable of beings, comes down to a case of identifying which variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for. We have surveyed the different options for unhappiness, and it is to each other we have chosen to bind ourselves.
It’s rather a blow to the ego to be forced to conceive of oneself, not as some kind of infinitely nuanced character whom a novelist might struggle to capture in eight hundred pages, but rather as a generic type who could easily fit within the parameters of a few paragraphs in a psychoanalytic textbook.
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.
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.
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.
Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love.
Some things need to go permanently wrong before we can start to admire the stem of a rose or the petals of a bluebell.
Aging is a bit like looking tired, but in a way that no amount of sleep will repair. Every year it will get a little worse. Everything that has happened to others will happen to him, too. No one gets away.
He is just a fortuitous constellation of atoms which have chosen to resist entropy for a few moments within cosmic eternity.
They have been married for thirteen years and yet only now, a little late, does Rabih feel ready for marriage. It’s not the paradox it seems. Given that marriage yields its important lessons only to those who have enrolled in its curriculum, it’s normal that readiness should tend to follow rather than precede the ceremony itself, perhaps by a decade or two. He is ready for marriage because—to begin the list—he has given up on perfection.
The awkward realities of living alongside another fallen creature. There can only ever be a “good enough” marriage.
The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and good grace. 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.
The trick is perhaps not to start a new life but to learn to reconsider the old one with less jaded and habituated eyes.
He knows that perfect happiness comes in tiny, incremental units only, perhaps no more than five minutes at a time. This is what one has to take with both hands and cherish. But it is all desperately fragile. He knows full well that he has no right to call himself a happy man; he is simply an ordinary human being passing through a small phase of contentment.