“What we typically call love is only the start of love,” Alain de Botton shrewdly observes in The Course of Love, his part-novel, part-philosophical treatise.  In Hollywood movies and sappy love songs, love is often arrested in its development.  Our love stories preoccupy themselves with the first stage of love: infatuation.  Fairytales center around the first confession of love, the first breathtaking glance of the beloved.  They trace love’s journey from obsessive crush and culminate in a first kiss.  Then our princess marries the prince and they ride off into the sunset.  “And they lived happily ever after,” fairytale wisdom says.    

But what happens after the giddy couple prances off into the sunset?  Do Cinderella and Prince Charming remain enamored of each other?  Do Ariel and Prince Eric find martial bliss or does their relationship crumble under the weight of unequal sacrifices and grudge-bearing resentment?

Consider one of the most beloved love stories of the modern era, Titanic.  Like Disney movies and old Hollywood romances, Titanic concerns itself with love’s conception.  Jack and Rose’s affair only lasts a few days before the unsinkable ship fatefully crashes into an iceberg and Jack perishes.  Because of his untimely death, their story is imperishably frozen: their love is eternally perfect.  Almost a hundred years old, the aging Rose fondly remembers Jack Dawson as the life-loving, free-spirited artist, the man who saved her from a materially secure but loveless marriage.

But had Jack not frozen to death in the frigid Atlantic, would he and Rose really have frolicked into the sunset?  Would they have been able to sustain their steamy, sex-in-random-cars passion?  Or would they— like most long-term couples— settle into the monotonous routines of marriage?  After the terror of almost dying in the mid-Atlantic and thrill of escaping Rose’s gun-slinging almost-husband, would their forbidden relationship lose some of its excitement?  Would Jack become an inattentive, inconsiderate husband?  Would Rose have cheated?  Would she eventually resent Jack’s bohemian lifestyle and desire him to be something more than a penniless artist?  Would they have bickered about dirty dishes and unfolded laundry and who’s turn it was to take out the trash?

In The Course of Love, sage of love Alain de Botton suggests real love is full of disappointment and sacrifices.  Had Jack and Rose’s love story continued after Titanic’s maiden voyage, they would have almost certainly endured periods of boredom and quarreled about what time to leave for an 8 o’ clock dinner reservation. 

The problem with most depictions of love is they conveniently omit love’s later stages.  We only see the bride and groom blissfully happy as they leave their wedding in a horse-drawn carriage— we don’t see the slammed doors and sulky silent treatment, the spats about forgotten anniversaries and the late night squabbles about finances.

The result?

Our real-life love seems woefully inadequate.   

Consolingly cynical, Botton sets out to undermine such detrimentally romantic conceptions of love and marriage.  A kind of sequel to his debut novel On Love, The Course of Love tells the story of a young couple, Rabih and Kirsten, who fall in love, get married and have children.  Conventional wisdom says their love story begins and ends the moment they say “I do” and Rabih kisses Kirsten.

But Botton argues what we think of as the story of love is really just an introduction.  Love is everything that comes after: the affectionate nicknames and cruelly, carelessly uttered expletives; the early rip-off-your-clothes passion and the later weeks (sometimes months) of obligatory, unimaginative sex.  As Botton so wittily writes: 

“He and Kirsten will marry, they will suffer, they will frequently worry about money, they will have a girl first, then a boy, one of them will have an affair, there will be passages of boredom, they’ll sometimes want to murder one another and on a few occasions, to kill themselves.  This will be the real love story.”

Rabih and Kirsten’s love story begins like every couple’s: with admiration.  In the prologue of their relationship, both feel they are fragmented and unfinished until the other completes them:

“He had fallen in love with her calm; her faith that it will be OK; her lack of a sense of persecution, her absence of fatalism— these are the virtues of his new Scottish friend who speaks in an accent so hard to understand that he has to ask three times for clarification on her use of the word temporary.  Rabih’s love is a logical response to the discovery of complementary strengths and a range of attributes to which he aspires.  He loves from a feeling of incompleteness— and from a desire to be made whole. 

He isn’t alone in this.  Albeit in different areas, Kirsten is likewise seeking to makeup for deficiencies.  She didn’t travel outside Scotland until after university.  Her relatives all come from the same small part of the country.  Spirits are narrow there, the colors grey, the atmosphere provincial, the values self-denying.  She is, in response, powerfully drawn to what she associates with the south.  She wants light, hope, people who live through their bodies with passion and emotion.  She reveres the sun while hating her own paleness and discomfort in the rays.  There is a poster of the medina in Fez hanging on her wall. 

She is excited by what she has learnt about Rabih’s background.  She finds it intriguing that he is the son of a Lebanese engineer father and a Germain air-hostess mother.  He tells her stories about a childhood spent in Beirut, Athens, Barcelona, in which there were moments of brightness and beauty and, now and then, extreme danger.  He speaks Arabic, French, German, and Spanish; his endearments, playfully delivered, come in many flavors.  His skin is olive to her rosy white.  He crosses his long legs when he sits and his surprisingly delicate hands know how to prepare her makdous, tabbouleh, and Kartoffelsalat.  He feeds her his worlds.”

But the giddiness of love doesn’t last.  Like all couples, Rabih and Kirsten perform the best version of themselves in the beginning of the relationship.  But after years of marriage, both reveal they can be petty, selfish, and inattentive.  The differences they once found charming become exasperating evidence of their incompatibility and a source of resentment (why does Rabih tell stories so directly?  why does Kirsten insist on sleeping with the window open?).  Passion withers with baby bottles and mortgage payments.

Despite his deep love for his wife, Rabih eventually has an affair with Lauren, an urban planner from Los Angeles, while away at a work conference.

What drives people to betray their spouses?

Popular wisdom says a cheater cheats because he/she no longer loves his/her wife/husband. 

But nothing could be less true. 

According to Botton, affairs are driven by a desire for excitement, a desperate longing to recover first love’s exhilaration.  In the flirtatious first stage of a relationship, we’re released from the crushing realities of actually being with another person.  When we have sex with a stranger in a Berlin hotel room, they’re infinitely more charming than our significant other for the sole reason that we don’t know them.  Hands fumbling beneath blouses, wet tongues eagerly exploring each others’ mouths, we desire our late night lover with such intensity because we know nothing of their maddening habits and don’t split a phone bill yet (“The best cure for love is to get to know [someone],” Botton quips).

Ultimately, the appeal of an affair is adventure.  Over many years, our affection for our husband/wife becomes deadened by habit and custom: we no longer notice the considerate way they make us coffee without being prompted or ask about their day and bother to actually listen.  But in a foreign city with a stranger, we can appreciate the little things about our newfound lover because of the novelty of the situation.

A forbidden affair makes our humdrum lives feel worth living again.  Stealing kisses in strange hotels and sneaking away to make clandestine phone calls, we feel like James Bond in a spy movie instead of a bored housewife in rural Iowa.  Sleeping with Lauren frees Rabih from the tedium of his domestic roles as husband and father.  With her, he can forget about bath times and bedtime stories, his coming crows feet and his disappointing career.

Rabih finds himself pulled between two irreconcilable longings: safety and adventure.  On one hand, he finds comfort in the predictable domestic life he’s built with Kirsten: the quiet nights eating pasta and playing Monopoly, the tender intimacy of sitting in silence and watching a movie. 

On the other, he yearns for adrenaline, for adventure.  He misses going to crowded night clubs, electronic music blaring, technicolor lights flashing, tan women in barely there tops pulsating with sweat.  He nostalgically recalls nights in his youth when he’d go to a bar and have no idea where the night might take him.  Now at 31, his life feels so regimented.

Lauren represents all the other men he could be, all the other more interesting lives he could have.  During their Facetime calls, he imagines a parallel life with her in Los Angeles.  They would make love all day; they would have margaritas and shrimp by the ocean at sunset.  They wouldn’t fight in the glassware section of IKEA or squander whole afternoons giving each other the silent treatment.

But Rabih soon realizes you can’t have both the adventure of an affair and the safety and security of a long term relationship.  They are diametrically opposite:

“Adventure and security are irreconcilable, he sees.  A loving marriage and children kill erotic spontaneity, and an affair kills marriage.  A person cannot at once be a libertine and a married Romantic, however compelling both paradigms might be.  He doesn’t downplay the loss either way.  Saying goodbye to Lauren means safeguarding his marriage but it also means denying himself a critical source of tenderness and elation.  Neither the love rat nor the faithful spouse gets it right.  There is no solution.” 

His fantasies of a life with Lauren are just that: fantasies.  If he left his wife for his mistress, he almost certainly would encounter the same problems he has in his marriage.  In time, Lauren would reveal she has just as many flaws as Kirsten, though they might be different.  His wife might irrationally demand they arrive at a restaurant an hour early for a dinner reservation— Lauren might have an irritating habit of using the word “literally” every other sentence.  Inevitably, Rabih and Lauren would have disagreements about where to spend the holidays and whose turn it was to pack the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  As Botton writes, 

“Infatuations aren’t delusions.  That way they have of holding their head may truly indicate someone confident, wry, and sensitive; they really may have the humor and intelligence implied by their eyes and the tenderness suggested by their mouth.  The error of 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.” 

Botton concludes marriage isn’t complete understanding, perpetual passion, perfect compatibility or absolute faithfulness.  Often times, it’s making serious compromises.  Or as Botton asserts, it’s “identifying which variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.”  “Happily ever after” will always involve being deeply happy in some ways and exceptionally unhappy in others.  By choosing to remain with Kirsten, Rabih forfeits the dopamine rush of infatuation but gains the steadiness of a shared life that comes with forever committing yourself to one person.