Alain de Botton, The Course of Love
Published:
A friend recommended The Course of Love, one of Allain de Botton's books, to me. It reminded me of Irvin Yalom's When Nietzsche Wept. Not because of the story, because the two books tell very different tales and examine the question of love from two separate points of view, but because of the conclusions they reach.
Yalom asserts that love is a choice.
De Botton asserts that love is a skill.
I would assert it is a mix both. You have to choose a person, and have to be able to know how to love them. If you make a choice without a skill then your best, or only, bet is to basically say alea iacta est and hope for the best; it may be a learning experience, but the learning will usually come through failure. If you suppose you have the skill, but never make a choice then you have theory without practice. You need both.
The tragedy is that you also need someone to let you have either. You have to make a choice, but you also have to be chosen, and need someone to let you choose them. You have to learn, but you need someone to learn with.
It is the same problem as with most interpersonal situations — you can't solve it yourself, and you have to rely on another person's good will towards you. A simpler, more direct example, is getting a hug. You can wrap your arms around your body and pretend that you are being hugged, but you would be deluding yourself: you would be hugging yourself, not being hugged.
This makes me think that there is a third necessary ingredient: luck. I used to think that life can be mastered, that I can "make it my bitch", through enough perseverance, work, and patience, but I no longer think so. Looking back at my own life, I can see that no amount of perseverance, work, and patience would have been enough without a bit of luck. Sometimes you need plenty of luck, sometimes just a tiny bit, but you usually need some amount of it.
Luck was also how I met the dear friend I mentioned in the first sentence of this post.
So what do I think about The Course of Love? I think it is very much worth reading, and the world of dating, romantic relationships, marriage, etc would be better if people looked at it through the lenses de Botton presents.