debi_g's review against another edition
4.0
"It is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects us and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love" (63).
"Even the most Eloquent among us at instinctively prefer not to spell things out when it partners are at risk of failing to read us properly...only when we don't have to explain can we feel certain that we are genuinely understood" (64).
"Adventure and security are irreconcilable...a loving marriage and children kill erotic spontenaity, and an affair kills a marriage. A person cannot at once be a libertine and a married romantic, however compelling both paradigms might be" (181).
"The fault lies with art, not life...we may need to tell ourselves more accurate stories--stories that don't dwell so much on the beginning, that don't promise us complete understanding, that strive to normalize our troubles and show us a melancholy yet hopeful path through the course of love" (218).
The Course of Love is atypical. It reminds me of a Leo Buscaglia book or even The Celestine Prophecy or Paulo Cohelo's writing-- an extended parable is used as a frame for rumination.
I'm glad I read it, and I recommend it for those unafraid of leading an examined life.
"Even the most Eloquent among us at instinctively prefer not to spell things out when it partners are at risk of failing to read us properly...only when we don't have to explain can we feel certain that we are genuinely understood" (64).
"Adventure and security are irreconcilable...a loving marriage and children kill erotic spontenaity, and an affair kills a marriage. A person cannot at once be a libertine and a married romantic, however compelling both paradigms might be" (181).
"The fault lies with art, not life...we may need to tell ourselves more accurate stories--stories that don't dwell so much on the beginning, that don't promise us complete understanding, that strive to normalize our troubles and show us a melancholy yet hopeful path through the course of love" (218).
The Course of Love is atypical. It reminds me of a Leo Buscaglia book or even The Celestine Prophecy or Paulo Cohelo's writing-- an extended parable is used as a frame for rumination.
I'm glad I read it, and I recommend it for those unafraid of leading an examined life.
estherdb's review against another edition
5.0
My first five star book of 2020. Thus far my favourite book of the year and I think it's a strong contestant to keep said title.
Wow, what a roller coaster of emotions! Though the plot is quite simple in itself (an ordinary guy meets an ordinary girl, they fall in love, get married, get children and deal with all the issues that come with those life events), de Botton writes it down so beautifully, poetically and philosophically that it made me stop and consider about relationships more times than I could count.
Though the novel - as well as the philosophic (more essayistic, if you will) paragraphs he inserts in the novel) - focuses mostly on romantic relationships, I feel like this book really makes me look at ALL human relationships with new and, I would like to think, more considerate eyes.
Finishing this book broke me. It ends the way it was throughout the book, there were no grand finales or big reveals, but that is the power of the novel. It's just so relatable and addressed my own personal hopes, wishes and fears.
Granted, I don't agree with all of the statements on love and relationships in this book, but I don't disagree enough to deduct any points from the total ;)
I absolutely recommend this book. 100% and then some. This is a book to read before you ever have a relationship, when you're in one or when you're going through a break-up. No matter what stage of life or love you're in, this is a book that always rewards its readers with a new insight. (At least in my humble opinion.) I really believe this to be a book I'll come back to.
About forming couples in this day and age:
The prestige of instinct [when it comes to forming couples] is the legacy of a collective traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable ‘reason’. – p. 37
About sulking:
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. In the womb, we never had to explain. Our every requirement was catered to. The right sort of comfort simply happened. Some of this idyll continued in our first years. We didn’t have to make our every requirement known: large, kind people guessed for us. They saw past our tears, our inarticulacy, our confusions: they found the explanations for discomforts which we lacked the ability to verbalize.
That may be why, in relationships, even the most eloquent among us may instinctively prefer not to spell things out when our partners are at risk of failing to read us properly. Only wordless and accurate mind reading can feel like a true sign that our partner is someone to be trusted; only when we don’t have to explain can we feel certain that we are genuinely understood. […]
[T]he real message is poignantly retrogressive: “Deep inside, I remain an infant, and right now I need you to be my parent. I need you correctly to guess what is truly ailing me, as people did when I was a baby, when my ideas of love were first formed.”
We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favor when we are able to regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant. We are so alive to the idea that it’s patronizing to be thought of as younger than we are; we forget that it is also, at times, the greatest privilege for someone to look beyond our adult self in order to engage with—and forgive—the disappointed, furious, inarticulate child within. – p. 61-63
About being reasonable vs. being in a relationship:
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 – p. 83
About forgiveness and tolerance (which in my opinion goes for ANY relationship with another human being):
arents are apt to proceed from the assumption that their children, though they may be troubled or in pain, are fundamentally good. […] How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships—if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion, and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love. – p. 111
About (not) being yourself in a relationship:
We are so impressed by honesty that we forget the virtues of politeness; a desire not always to confront people we care about with the full, hurtful aspects of our nature.
Repression, a degree of restraint, and a little dedication to self-editing belong to love just as surely as a capacity for explicit confession. The person who can’t tolerate secrets, who in the name of “being honest” shares information so wounding to the other that it can never be forgotten—this person is no friend of love. – P. 181
Unfortunately, we often end up behaving a certain way out of fear (or helplessness):
It is therefore unfortunate, bordering on the tragic, that his way of responding to his vulnerabilities takes a form that masks them entirely and seems guaranteed to alienate the person he wants so badly to be comforted by. – P. 194
About love:
[The couple’s therapist] is the champion of a truth that Rabih and Kirsten are now intimate with, but which they know is woefully prone to get lost in the surrounding noise: that love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm. – P. 198
About our self-image:
Ordinary life rewards a practical, unintrospective outlook. There’s too little time and too much fear for anything else. We let ourselves be guided by an instinct for self-preservation: we push ourselves forwards, strike back when we’re hit, turn the blame onto others, quell stray questions, and cleave closely to a flattering image of where we’re headed. We have little option but to be relentlessly on our own side. – P. 200 It takes bravery to really delve into your own self.
About (a sometimes disappointing lack of) talent:
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. – P. 202 Coming to terms with the fact that you just might be nothing more but average.
About one of life’s first and most shaping disappointment:
We start off in childhood believing parents might have access to a superior kind of knowledge and experience. They look, for a while, astonishingly competent. Our exaggerated esteem is touching but also intensely problematic, for it sets them up as the ultimate objects of blame when we gradually discover that they are flawed, sometimes unkind, in areas ignorant and utterly unable to save us from certain troubles. It can take a while, until the fourth decade or the final hospital scenes, for a more forgiving stance to emerge. Their new condition, frail and frightened, reveals in a compellingly physical way something which has always been true psychologically: that they are uncertain vulnerable creatures motivated more by anxiety, fear, a clumsy love, and unconscious compulsions than by godlike wisdom and moral clarity—and cannot, therefore, forever be held responsible for either their own shortcomings or our many disappointments. – P. 206
About the everyday heroism of mediocrity:
[Rabih] 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.
Very little can be made perfect; he knows that now. He has a sense of the bravery it takes to live even an utterly mediocre life like his own. To keep all of this going, to ensure his continuing status as an almost sane person, his capacity to provide for his family financially, the survival of his marriage and the flourishing of his children—these projects offer no fewer opportunities for heroism than an epic tale. […] [T]his is true courage; this is a heroism in a class all its own. – P. 221-222.
Wow, what a roller coaster of emotions! Though the plot is quite simple in itself (an ordinary guy meets an ordinary girl, they fall in love, get married, get children and deal with all the issues that come with those life events), de Botton writes it down so beautifully, poetically and philosophically that it made me stop and consider about relationships more times than I could count.
Though the novel - as well as the philosophic (more essayistic, if you will) paragraphs he inserts in the novel) - focuses mostly on romantic relationships, I feel like this book really makes me look at ALL human relationships with new and, I would like to think, more considerate eyes.
Finishing this book broke me. It ends the way it was throughout the book, there were no grand finales or big reveals, but that is the power of the novel. It's just so relatable and addressed my own personal hopes, wishes and fears.
Granted, I don't agree with all of the statements on love and relationships in this book, but I don't disagree enough to deduct any points from the total ;)
I absolutely recommend this book. 100% and then some. This is a book to read before you ever have a relationship, when you're in one or when you're going through a break-up. No matter what stage of life or love you're in, this is a book that always rewards its readers with a new insight. (At least in my humble opinion.) I really believe this to be a book I'll come back to.
Spoiler
Because I feel my words just aren't enough to express my appreciation for this book, here are some quotes that I found particularly striking (I added the page numbers from my edition, so that I'll be able to find them more easily):About forming couples in this day and age:
The prestige of instinct [when it comes to forming couples] is the legacy of a collective traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable ‘reason’. – p. 37
About sulking:
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. In the womb, we never had to explain. Our every requirement was catered to. The right sort of comfort simply happened. Some of this idyll continued in our first years. We didn’t have to make our every requirement known: large, kind people guessed for us. They saw past our tears, our inarticulacy, our confusions: they found the explanations for discomforts which we lacked the ability to verbalize.
That may be why, in relationships, even the most eloquent among us may instinctively prefer not to spell things out when our partners are at risk of failing to read us properly. Only wordless and accurate mind reading can feel like a true sign that our partner is someone to be trusted; only when we don’t have to explain can we feel certain that we are genuinely understood. […]
[T]he real message is poignantly retrogressive: “Deep inside, I remain an infant, and right now I need you to be my parent. I need you correctly to guess what is truly ailing me, as people did when I was a baby, when my ideas of love were first formed.”
We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favor when we are able to regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant. We are so alive to the idea that it’s patronizing to be thought of as younger than we are; we forget that it is also, at times, the greatest privilege for someone to look beyond our adult self in order to engage with—and forgive—the disappointed, furious, inarticulate child within. – p. 61-63
About being reasonable vs. being in a relationship:
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 – p. 83
About forgiveness and tolerance (which in my opinion goes for ANY relationship with another human being):
arents are apt to proceed from the assumption that their children, though they may be troubled or in pain, are fundamentally good. […] How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships—if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion, and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love. – p. 111
About (not) being yourself in a relationship:
We are so impressed by honesty that we forget the virtues of politeness; a desire not always to confront people we care about with the full, hurtful aspects of our nature.
Repression, a degree of restraint, and a little dedication to self-editing belong to love just as surely as a capacity for explicit confession. The person who can’t tolerate secrets, who in the name of “being honest” shares information so wounding to the other that it can never be forgotten—this person is no friend of love. – P. 181
Unfortunately, we often end up behaving a certain way out of fear (or helplessness):
It is therefore unfortunate, bordering on the tragic, that his way of responding to his vulnerabilities takes a form that masks them entirely and seems guaranteed to alienate the person he wants so badly to be comforted by. – P. 194
About love:
[The couple’s therapist] is the champion of a truth that Rabih and Kirsten are now intimate with, but which they know is woefully prone to get lost in the surrounding noise: that love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm. – P. 198
About our self-image:
Ordinary life rewards a practical, unintrospective outlook. There’s too little time and too much fear for anything else. We let ourselves be guided by an instinct for self-preservation: we push ourselves forwards, strike back when we’re hit, turn the blame onto others, quell stray questions, and cleave closely to a flattering image of where we’re headed. We have little option but to be relentlessly on our own side. – P. 200 It takes bravery to really delve into your own self.
About (a sometimes disappointing lack of) talent:
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. – P. 202 Coming to terms with the fact that you just might be nothing more but average.
About one of life’s first and most shaping disappointment:
We start off in childhood believing parents might have access to a superior kind of knowledge and experience. They look, for a while, astonishingly competent. Our exaggerated esteem is touching but also intensely problematic, for it sets them up as the ultimate objects of blame when we gradually discover that they are flawed, sometimes unkind, in areas ignorant and utterly unable to save us from certain troubles. It can take a while, until the fourth decade or the final hospital scenes, for a more forgiving stance to emerge. Their new condition, frail and frightened, reveals in a compellingly physical way something which has always been true psychologically: that they are uncertain vulnerable creatures motivated more by anxiety, fear, a clumsy love, and unconscious compulsions than by godlike wisdom and moral clarity—and cannot, therefore, forever be held responsible for either their own shortcomings or our many disappointments. – P. 206
About the everyday heroism of mediocrity:
[Rabih] 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.
Very little can be made perfect; he knows that now. He has a sense of the bravery it takes to live even an utterly mediocre life like his own. To keep all of this going, to ensure his continuing status as an almost sane person, his capacity to provide for his family financially, the survival of his marriage and the flourishing of his children—these projects offer no fewer opportunities for heroism than an epic tale. […] [T]his is true courage; this is a heroism in a class all its own. – P. 221-222.
minabix's review against another edition
This book's too busy philosophising - about how apparently everyone only marries cos they're lonely and why it's okay to cheat - to actually let us get close to the characters or care about them; they just feel like subjects of a scientific study or something. I chopped it up to make collages but even then there aren't that many interesting words to use 😔
Two stars for boringness (and why all the graphic sex scenes ... we don't need to know all that ... just ew).
Two stars for boringness (and why all the graphic sex scenes ... we don't need to know all that ... just ew).
octanexit's review against another edition
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
storymi's review against another edition
4.0
Ik vond het een interessant boek, verfrissend eerlijk en er stonden een paar hele mooie quotes in, die me aan het denken hebben gezet. Niet alleen over liefdesrelaties, maar ook over relaties tussen mensen in 't algemeen. Het boek zit tussen roman en essay in. Het relatie-verhaal van Rabih en Kirsten wordt gebruikt om de citaten over liefde tussendoor praktisch te maken. Deze quote vat het boek goed samen:
"By the standards of most love stories, our own, real relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory. No wonder separation and divorce so often appear inevitable. But we should be careful not to judge our relationships by the expectations imposed on us by a frequently misleading aesthetic medium. The fault lies with art, not life.
Rather than split up, we may need to tell ourselves more accurate stories - stories that don't dwell so much on the beginning, that don't promise us complete understanding, that strive to normalize our troubles and show us a melancholy yet hopeful path trough the course of love.'
Handige om te weten: Dit boek is ook vertaald naar het Nederlands :)
"By the standards of most love stories, our own, real relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory. No wonder separation and divorce so often appear inevitable. But we should be careful not to judge our relationships by the expectations imposed on us by a frequently misleading aesthetic medium. The fault lies with art, not life.
Rather than split up, we may need to tell ourselves more accurate stories - stories that don't dwell so much on the beginning, that don't promise us complete understanding, that strive to normalize our troubles and show us a melancholy yet hopeful path trough the course of love.'
Handige om te weten: Dit boek is ook vertaald naar het Nederlands :)
manalhamdi's review against another edition
4.0
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the real aspects of love relationships. It is a must read for people in long term relations as it provides insights that make you feel less alone concerning problems that arise after dating a person for a while. Definitely read it before big step commitments like marriage. It focuses on what happens AFTER having dated a partner for a while rather than the debut as most books and romance movies do.
just_another_ace_who_reads's review against another edition
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
This is such a unique little book, and after reading two romances before this, I really struggled to get into it. It felt more like the literary theories I've read than a book I saw compared to 'Normal People'. I see why the two would be compared, as this is an intense character study of two characters – Rabih and Kirsten – and the course of their love (as the title implies).
But I wouldn't go into this book expecting a kind of vague character study, one that is purely plot and no theory. It's more a mix of the two. The book is separated into sections, each with a chapter focusing on another area of love. It takes a while to get used to, but after a while, it was nice to read a section of Rabih and Kirsten's life, and the have a little vignette of philosophy from de Botton.
I think the downfalls of this book are some sections just didn't seem to be doing what they set out to be doing, and in some cases could bring across the wrong message, especially the study on adultery and sexual feelings for others outside of a relationship. I think de Botton had some good ideas, but he presented them in a way that wasn't explicitly clear not only of his position, but also not acknowledging the idea of those who don't experience sexual or romantic feelings regardless, or *consensual* open relationships. I feel like the lines were a little murky in this chapter, and there are other instances of this in the book as well.
I think that this book ended nicely, and in a way that made sense. If it had ended on "Ready for Marriage" (a chapter I found to be one of the most boring), it would have been a let down but the book ended as strongly as it began.
I feel like if you liked 'Beautiful World, Where Are You?' and the email exchange within that book, you'd be more inclined to like this than if you liked 'Normal People'. For my part, I'm glad I pushed through with this book, and although it took me a while I was writing notes on nearly every page I read.
Some of my favourite quotes:
"We learn the relief and privilege of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves"
"Love is, in its purest form, a kind of service"
"No one can hope to be strong enough to negotiate the thick tangles of existence, they maintain, without having once enjoyed a sense of mattering limitlessly"
"It is an expression of grateful wonder, verging on disbelief, that in a world of isolation and disconnection, the wrists, thighs, earlobes and napes of necks are all there, finally, for us to behold"
"They will never have to be resentful; they can continue to appreciate each other as only those without a future can"
"The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don't yet know very well"
"The appropriate response is hence never cynicism or aggression but, in 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"
"He is only a visitor who has managed to confuse his self with the world"
"This is what one has to take with both hands and cherish"
But I wouldn't go into this book expecting a kind of vague character study, one that is purely plot and no theory. It's more a mix of the two. The book is separated into sections, each with a chapter focusing on another area of love. It takes a while to get used to, but after a while, it was nice to read a section of Rabih and Kirsten's life, and the have a little vignette of philosophy from de Botton.
I think the downfalls of this book are some sections just didn't seem to be doing what they set out to be doing, and in some cases could bring across the wrong message, especially the study on adultery and sexual feelings for others outside of a relationship. I think de Botton had some good ideas, but he presented them in a way that wasn't explicitly clear not only of his position, but also not acknowledging the idea of those who don't experience sexual or romantic feelings regardless, or *consensual* open relationships. I feel like the lines were a little murky in this chapter, and there are other instances of this in the book as well.
I think that this book ended nicely, and in a way that made sense. If it had ended on "Ready for Marriage" (a chapter I found to be one of the most boring), it would have been a let down but the book ended as strongly as it began.
I feel like if you liked 'Beautiful World, Where Are You?' and the email exchange within that book, you'd be more inclined to like this than if you liked 'Normal People'. For my part, I'm glad I pushed through with this book, and although it took me a while I was writing notes on nearly every page I read.
Some of my favourite quotes:
"We learn the relief and privilege of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves"
"Love is, in its purest form, a kind of service"
"No one can hope to be strong enough to negotiate the thick tangles of existence, they maintain, without having once enjoyed a sense of mattering limitlessly"
"It is an expression of grateful wonder, verging on disbelief, that in a world of isolation and disconnection, the wrists, thighs, earlobes and napes of necks are all there, finally, for us to behold"
"They will never have to be resentful; they can continue to appreciate each other as only those without a future can"
"The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don't yet know very well"
"The appropriate response is hence never cynicism or aggression but, in 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"
"He is only a visitor who has managed to confuse his self with the world"
"This is what one has to take with both hands and cherish"
emilylegere07's review against another edition
3.0
The book gave an interesting perspective for sure. I enjoyed some of the “notes” that were throughout the whole book, some of them had nice quotes. However I kind of feel like I just finished reading a textbook. I found it somewhat difficult to stay focused reading this book. I almost dnf’d it but didn’t.
fassinated's review against another edition
4.0
An almost-perfect love and relationship manual. Oh, but if only life goes according to a written guidebook.
Wonderfully insightful and introspective of, well, the course of love, that I see myself coming back to these pages from time to time – after a fight, a heartbreak, an unwelcome flashback to the parents' divorce.
Alain de Botton's words are rational and assuring; they help decipher the confusing states of our own emotional conditions during various stages of a relationship. This book is useful for anybody – I mean anybody – who's capable of love.
Wonderfully insightful and introspective of, well, the course of love, that I see myself coming back to these pages from time to time – after a fight, a heartbreak, an unwelcome flashback to the parents' divorce.
Alain de Botton's words are rational and assuring; they help decipher the confusing states of our own emotional conditions during various stages of a relationship. This book is useful for anybody – I mean anybody – who's capable of love.