Dearest,
Definitely, one of my favorite books ever, The Course Of Love by Alain De Botton is what you should gift yourself and the person you love, immediately.
Replete with lessons about “the real stuff”, this book prepares you for relationships.
It tells you that what is usually depicted in books and movies as love, is only the start of it, the real struggle commences thereafter.
This book is a provocative life-affirming novel for people who want to understand love in all its entirety.
As I skimmed through the book again, I picked my favorite bits for you and compiled them below. Hope this nudges you to read this beautiful story about about love.
1. The weird honors of love
We should add that 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. Eventually.
2. The capacity to acknowledge
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.
3. A kind of a gamble
Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.
4. Whenever you can, love
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.
5. Negotiate the differences
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 grace. (My favorite!)
6. Why aren’t we as kind to adults as we are to children?
It’s not just children who are childlike. Adults, too, are – beneath the bluster – intermittently playful, silly, fanciful, vulnerable, hysterical, terrified, and pitiful and in search of consolation and forgiveness.
We’re well versed at seeing the sweet and the fragile in children and offering them help and comfort accordingly. Around them, we know how to put aside the worst of our compulsions, vindictiveness and fury. We can recalibrate our expectations and demand a little less than we normally do; we’re slower to anger and a bit more aware of unrealised potential. We readily treat children with a degree of kindness that we are oddly and woefully reluctant to show to our peers.
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.
7. What we call love is only the start of love
The start receives such disproportionate attention because it isn’t deemed to be just one phase among many; for the Romantic, it contains in a concentrated form everything significant about love as a whole. Which is why, in so many love stories, there is simply nothing else for the narrator to do with a couple after they have triumphed over a range of initial obstacles other than to consign them to an ill-defined contented future–or kill them off. What we typically call love is only the start of love.
Have you read this incredible book? If yes, do let me know what stuck out to you the most. If you haven’t read it, I would highly recommend it. Pro-tip: Read it with the one you love.
Sending some adorable sulking your way,
Ree
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See you next Sunday,
Love, Riya
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