#thelitbit // The Course of Love
The Course of Love by Alain de Botton
Growing up I always had this idealised view of love. The kind you watch in the movies or in books. Romanticised. Sure they'd go through a rough patch but it'd be happily ever after from there...or so it seemed. The movies and books never got into the everyday. The mundane, the nitty gritty of the constant choice to love.
I can see why Daily Mail said The Course of Love "Should be a compulsory reading for anyone contemplating tying the knot" - a fictional love story interspersed with doses of the real deal.
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1. "Love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm."
"He will conclude that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling opening ambitions; and that for his relationships to work he will need to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place. He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm."
2. They say grow up but never lose your childlike sense of wonder. Similarly, children are a reminder of the simple things, the core things that matter, and the core of humanity.
"Anything can be a good starting point for curiosity, when you haven't yet got to the stifling stage of supposedly knowing where your interests lie."
And in a similar vein,
"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."
3. The precursors of successful relationships are not necessarily compatibility or excitement, but rather the resolute commitment to keep working at "it", whatever "it" may surface itself to be.
"The partner truly 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."
[read on]