Alain de Botton

What happens when true love meets real life? Meet Rabih and Kirsten. Two people who meet, fall in madly love and get married. In most stories this would be how it ends. Here, it is just the beginning. Embarking on a shared life path with no idea where it will lead, both Rabih and Kirsten believe that all you need is love. But in the real world, love isn't a feeling - it's a skill. And once they've settled down, started a home and a family, life gets a lot more complicated. . . This is a modern love story. It is a story about learning to survive, endure and flourish in a relationship. Above all, it is a story full of tenderness and sympathy for the hard work of keeping love going, and full of hope that we can make it through.

The Course of Love

amasi

“He will surmise 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.”

“We are never through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn’t a curse limited to the inadequate and the weak. Insecurity may even be a peculiar sign of well-being. It means we haven’t allowed ourselves to take other people for granted, that we remain realistic enough to see that things could genuinely turn out badly—and that we are invested enough to care.”

“Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.”

camille leung

Love stories begin not when we fear someone may be unwilling to see us again but when they decide they would have no objection to seeing us all the time

Love is also, and equally, about weakness, about being touched by another's fragilities and sorrows

Children teach us that love is, in its purest form, a kind of service.

He is gleefully unconcerned with the true and often dull facts of the universe.

his heart would tighten with grief because a meeting threatened to overrun and get him home an hour too late to put the kids to bed.

How could they possibly be expected, after eighteen or so years of answering to a child's every need, to react enthusiastically to a new and competing source of love?

Pronouncing a lover "perfect" can only be a sign that we have failed to understand them.

The Course of Love quotes

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