#it also implies he is deeply familiar with those opening notes. enough to act within seconds.

[sylvies-kablooie]

trying not to be too torn up about it because as far as homophobic microaggressions go, my dad changing the radio station (while being in the passenger seat of MY car) the minute he heard the opening riff to katy perry's "i kissed a girl" is pretty hilarious

[sunflowerspectre]

Of Strange Brothers | Dungeons and Dragons Commission

This commission was for KiwiToast, of her original D&D characters.

Dungeons and Dragons

Original Character Commission

Summary:

A series of scenes shot throughout the Mistletoe Strangers Series focusing on Alagarthesis and Neronvain.

Requested Word Count: 2k - 5k

Final Word Count: 2026

Also on A03

Of Strange Brothers

Neronvain’s heart is beating wildly against his chest to the beat of the music inside of the castle. He has successfully glided through the many patrons of the ball, blending in seamlessly into the crowd. His pace has been quick, but even and steady as to not draw too much attention to himself. He would have gotten too many looks if he had just darted away or ran, especially if he was seen running away from the mistletoe where (despite being masked) the very recognizable Desire had been. 

He glances around often, a paranoia creeping up his spine. With no sign of anyone, nevertheless Desire, he rests against the balcony’s banister. An odd sensation of disappointment rises his chest. He swallows it down; it is better for both of them if she does not find him, right?

He really should stop listening to that womanizing, romantic brother of his, but how was he supposed to say no? When he saw her standing there under the mistletoe, just waiting, the very image of beauty, for the first time in a long time, he had found himself acting before thinking. Which is new, and more than a bit dangerous. 

“Sooo how was it?” 

Algatheris’ cheeky voice rings, causing Neronvain to curse. He turns to see a grin stretching out across his brother’s face, akin to a cat that ate the canary. His eyes are twinkling with an aura of happiness and giddiness, a stark contrast the sense of doom that has been settling around Neronvain.

“How was what?” 

Algatheris tsk’, “Don’t get coy with me, you kissed her, so tell me, how was it? Was it romantic? Deep? French?”

“It was a kiss,” Neronvain states simply, keeping his voice simple and to the point as he turns his back to his brother, “A kiss that I shouldn’t have let you sway me to do.”

Algatheris sputter, “Sway? Me? If you recall dear brother, I did not say a single word about kissing her. I simply told you that she was there. The kiss is all your making.”

Neronvain opens his mouth, an argument on the tip of his tongue before he swallows his words. He closes his mouth and focuses on the starlight that drips through the sky. The temptation of screaming in frustration growing, he lets out a huff. 

Algatheris pats him on the back sharply, taking the breath from his lungs, but rubs it in a comforting manner. He leans over beside him, his hand now draping around Neronvain’s shoulders to bring him in close.

“Do you regret it,” Algatheris asks, his voice dropping its usual aloofness.The somberness of his tone makes Neronvain pause. He looks to his brother, but Algatheris’ eyes are on the skyline with a wistful, knowing gleam to them. A smile graces Algatheris’ lips. Not the cheeky grin he gives when he knows he’s gotten away with something. It’s not the boastful grin of a man who won his trophy nor the teethy, flashy grin that he flashes to everyone who looks his way. It’s too somber. The grin you give when a grandmother holds your hand on her dying breath. It’s sincere, loving, but unsure of what’s going to happen next.

Neronvain is quiet for a moment. The silence covering them both as the music behind them begins to blur out of focus as their minds become preoccupied.

The kiss could have bad consequences. Neronvain can’t even begin to imagine what would happen if Desire finds out that it was him. She could get mad and even refuse to speak to him again. She could kick him out of their traveling party. She could steal his wallet out of revenge. Their kiss brings more cons than pros, yet...

He can still taste her on his lips. Her lips were a bit dry and he could tell exactly how much she had drank, but her lips were warm. Warm enough to light a fire that he is still trying to dwindle. 

“No, no I don’t.”

Algatheris’ grin stretches as he pats Neronvain on the shoulder, “Then that’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

Neronvain doesn’t answer him, wishing that it is as simply as that.

#####

Theoretically, the idea of watching them from the windows should have also meant that he could hear them. He couldn’t. He watches as Desire drinks - and drinks and drinks - with his brother. The dusting of pink on her cheeks when a hand grazes hers at the first drink. The words that seem to flow easily from her lips as his brother nods and listens. It isn’t as if Desire never talked to him; at times, she talked too much. It isn’t as if she never listened to; there are maybe five times he remembered where she did. But this is different. He can feel it.

Neronvain scrambles, a tad more ungracefully than any ‘prince’ should, away from the window as Desire quickly approaches the door. The idea of staying there, having her confront him, played only for a moment in his mind before his usual confidence falters just enough for him to make a dive for a hiding spot.

He watches as Desire leaves his brother’s abode, half drunk and dazed. She misses the step by the door and he twitches, almost going to help her, but why should he when Algatheris isn’t too far behind? When Algartheris is the one she goes to? When his brother is the one she spills all her concerns too? When apparently she’s oh so close to his brother?

Neronvain waits until she is gone before he approaches the door himself. His hand hovers over the door, but stops before it hits the wood as the door swings open. Algatheris leans against the door frame, casually, with a grin stretching across his face and a gleam in his eyes. 

“You need to learn how to hide better if you don’t want her to see you,” Algatheris comments.

His never-faltering grin only causes Neronvain’s bitterness to grow. It makes Algatheris seem as if he knew something that Neronvain didn’t, as if he knows everything. The sour sensation in his mouth made it harder to admit what he wants to say. Neronvain crosses his arms against his chest and other than a small twitch beginning to form at the corner of his lips, his face remained stoic.

“Why would I worry about her seeing me?”

“You tell me, you’re the one hiding.”

Algatheris watches his brother closely, a more calculating look in his eye. He knows his brother waited outside for quite a while, but he isn’t sure about how much he could really hear.

Neronvain scowls deeply like a pouting child, “I was not hiding.”

“Ah yes, because we all hide within the bushes for fun,” Algatheris laughs, “If you want to make amends, you are more than welcome to come in for a drink….”

His laughter dwindles off as he leans forward with a wink, “...But if you want my opinion, you should stop hiding and go after her before someone else does.”

Neronvain looks closely for any signs of what his brother really means by that statement; what exactly is he implying? Algatheris simply blinks innocently, as if he never implied anything at all, as he waits for a response. 

“I suppose I should make sure that she doesn’t get eaten on her way back to camp after all the drinks you gave her.”

There’s an accusing tone to his voice that Algatheris ignores, grinning, as he watches Neronvain finally depart after her. He can hear the way his brother continues to grumble under his breath, I was not hiding.

#########

It’s been too long since Algatheris has heard from his brother. He rereads the last letter he received, detailing a close call with an ambush on his party’s last trip. It doesn’t say much, other than it being too close for comfort and that it could have been prevented if he was paying attention. There’s a vague mention of Desire, something about her being stupid for almost getting killed. Something that, while worrying him, does make him smile. Neronvain has always had a strange way of showing he cared.

He hopes that rereading it will ease his fears, remind him that if Neronvain is well enough from that ‘close call’ to write a letter, then he is sure to be fine. He had already sent his best wishes, along with five feet of parchment reminding his brother to be careful. Maybe he never got a reply back, but it usually took a while for Neronvain to reply.

But it shouldn’t take this long. 

He wonders how bad Desire’s wounds are - if her almost getting killed meant something that could kill her later. He’s always liked her - she’s funny, makes interesting conversation, stirs up trouble, and makes his brother happy. She’s his friend. 

But she is much more than that to his brother. If something happened to her, if she passed due to her wounds, then he can imagine why Neronvain isn’t sending any letters. It would destroy his brother, as much as he would never admit it, if she got killed. He can’t even begin to imagine what his brother would do - well perhaps he could, but that thought process definitely doesn’t help his fears.

Months go by and each day, each hour, he gets more worried. 

He gets a letter the day before he’s ready to head out himself to find his brother; his duties be damned if his brother needs him. He already had a bag half-packed sitting in his bedroom and maps thrown about his desk as he decided on a route that would take him close to where his brother’s letter was sent from. But all those maps are tossed aside when he gets a letter with his name neatly written in his brother’s handwriting across the top of the parchment. 

His heart is about to beat out of his chest, unsure of what he is about to read. He likes to think it will be good news -  receiving this letter at all eases his worst fears. He takes a deep breath, not even bothering to sit down to read it. He carefully runs a thumb over the seal, noting the familiar wax seal of Desire’s horns. He swallows thickly, his stomach turning as he steadies his hands. 

The letter should be good news, yet this small detail. This little symbol of wax is making his stomach turn. Desire never really sends letters, not formally, and as such she doesn’t typically use her stamp (a stamp, he remembers, that Neronvain got for her). He vaguely recalls Neronvain being upset when he found out that it was shoved deep inside of her belongings, never to see the light of day unless she had to write formal letters - things like business, parties, and funerals. Using her stamp, but knowing his brother’s handwriting, worries him more than hearing no response.

He hesitantly breaks the seal and scans over the letter carefully. The more he reads, the more his worries turn into happiness, his face breaking out into a grin. 

“Son of a bitch,” he whispers under his breath.

There are a few paragraphs at the end that are also in her writing, her swirling and unsteady letters contrasting against the strict, calligraphy hand of Neronvain. Unlike Neronvain, she writes more casually and some of her words are scratched out and their corrections written in smaller writing above it. There’s a few careful words chosen, cautious phrases that new lovers use, as if they don’t want to scare the other off. A few little notes that Desire wrote, added in little letters with arrows at Neronvain’s paragraphs. Desire even signs her name next to Neronvain’s. 

He has to say, they really did a hell of a job getting their message across. His heart swells in his chest, happiness blooming for his brother. 

“They finally did it.”

Interested In A Commission?

[lit--bitch]

Charlotte Geater, ‘poems for my FBI agent’ (2020)

(Disclosure: I don’t know Charlotte Geater, but as I’ve previously stated I am familiar with Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall from Bad Betty Press — though I don’t particularly know them well).

poems for my fbi agent is a convoluted, multi-faceted investigation into surveillance and our present-day predicament. Who is watching us? Who is watching those who watch us? Every time an advertisement appears boasting a lipstick from a brand we were talking about just yesterday, do we still call this serendipity? Or is it evidence that we’re being observed? And is our relationship with “our agent” a symbiotic one, where we share, even indulge, in each other as voyeurs? Unlike Crispin Best’s Hello, Charlotte Geater’s collection probes more sinister pockets of Internet culture: of spy and spied.  It’s provocative, surreal and deeply disturbing. It’s also encrypted by so many different subtexts and jarring imagery, which makes this a challenging and very personal read, because it entirely depends on you and your experiences. So strap yourselves in.

Whenever I start a new book, I always read the acknowledgements first. I do this because I’m nosy. I like to make sense of the writer, I like to know who they are thanking, where work might have been previously published (particularly if it’s a poetry collection or a photobook). Because beyond the author’s name, the acknowledgements page is the writer’s final note. Afterwards, you’re flung into the book’s meat, and you’re on your own. 

I flicked to the acknowledgements and I had a look at what Charlotte had written. At one point she says: “[I thank] all of my friends, for being supportive when I said, “I’ve started writing some poems inspired by a meme that is already kind of dead.”’ I understood what she was referring to. She’s talking about memes like this: 

It’s interesting to see that we as a generation deal with a lot of our problems in meme-culture (and that is a whole separate conversation from this review). The FBI memes were one such example. They’re designed to nullify and humour our digital anxieties about being spied on. We have developed an acute self-awareness both outside in real time, and on the Internet. We know that we are constantly being watched, whether it’s through cookies or CCTV. Privacy is a luxury. It can be purchased like groceries. We’re not automatically entitled to being left alone. And that brings up questions about authenticity, self-identity, self-integrity. It throws up all kind of worries and fears, as our online presence and real selves chafe against each other. But unlike these memes, poems for my fbi agent doesn’t minimise your worries, it amplifies them. 

I couldn’t always penetrate this collection and hold myself to one specific intepretation; it flummoxed me. I was really confused by the dislocation of imagery, the subtlety of Charlotte’s writing style. It’s exactly how Sam Riviere put it: “a Lynchian rabbit hole”. The series of images, which seemingly bear no relation to each other, is quite jolting. You have to make the connections yourself, you have to look within and draw on your own references to access what certain poems “mean” (I’ll expand on this later). At one point I just sat back in bed and gulped. Because I thought “how the fuck am I going to write a review about poetry I don’t always understand?” And I was panicking because, I thought, “there’s a plethora of ways to understand this work, I don’t have to hold myself to one specific interpretation”, but I was struggling to grasp the imagery and syntax. So I figured talking to my mother about it would be useful because sometimes you need to discuss a book and bounce off one another to engage with it. So really I owe a lot of this review to her and our discussions. 

One of the most disarming things about this collection is its perturbing elusiveness. As my mum said, “I can’t put it into words what she means, but I can feel what she means”. 

A pretty good example of this (and what I mean by jarring imagery) is in ‘my FBI agent is a mathematical problem’:

and not just a philosophical one. if i ask who watches the agent  who watches me, it sounds insincere;  but let’s get down to it in our underwear [...] who does he text when he’s lonely?  who gets to see his underwear, [...]

So far, I’m with Charlotte. I too ask the very same questions. Who is keeping our agent under watch? Y’know, does it become a situation of meta-surveillance where everybody is a threat, even the ones who supposedly work “to prevent threat”, like the agent? Is the agent part of, or rather, included within the same system? Or more worringly, do they sit at the top of the hierarchy, and are therefore untouchable? 

if i type a poem instead of writing it out first it feels closer to god, by which i mean closer to you, watching me and if i am not a problem, are you there? 

The FBI agent and our traditional conceptions of “God” as omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, are conflated here. It’s true; the agent has total power and knowledge over everything we do and investigate, even the things we plan to do. The agent can wield time, can document and record. The agent can create business and yet the agent is our business. The agent can defend and attack, break things, read your mind. It’s in the agent’s “god-like” apparition (you can’t put a face to your agent like you can’t with God I guess), and in the agent’s “god-like” power, that we are wholly subservient and are most afeard, because the FBI agent knows all our conversations, thoughts, and internet searches. That access to our personal psychologies makes for an entity like that of God. And it’s all supposedly in the name of our protection, to defend from terrorism or people who might break into houses and axe us out of the blue. The question is: If we’re not posing a threat, or being threatened, where’s the need for the agent? Does the agent evaporate? Do they move only when we move? 

matter changes when it’s hit am i a problem for you yet?  the lake turned to ice improbably fast; and the custard became a rock inside your mouth. 

I mean like, lake? Ice? Custard? This is so random and strange. I sat there scratching my head for ages about this. But I’ve sort of hazarded the best guess I can. And there’s two things. Firstly, this idea about matter changing when it’s hit, liquid states and solid states. So in quantum theory, there is a  suggestion that observation affects reality. So for example, if you wanted to observe electrons and how they move, you have to get them to behave with a proton. And electrons know that they’re being observed when they’re forced to interact with protons, because their wave function changes. It’s horrifically complicated and I don’t know enough about quantum mechanics to really unpack it in detail. But basically, what it means is, simply observing something can change the appearance of how it is perceived. It can have an affect on outcomes. And I’m linking a pretty good, simplified article about this here. 

The second interpretation of this really odd image is a little easier to understand, and again relates to this “lake turning to ice impossibly fast-custard to hard rock” metaphor. So ages back, there was this Doctor Who episode (when David Tennant was the Doctor), called ‘Blink’. In that episode, they were these aliens appearing in the form of stone angel statues, called The Weeping Angels. If you get touched by a Weeping Angel, you get zapped back in time and the Angel feeds off all the energy you might have potentially lived in the present-day. They move impossibly fast. Like they can make their way from a garden into the kitchen within a blink. Here’s the snag: they only ever move when they’re not being watched. The minute you look at them, they turn to stone. They can’t even be seen looking at each other, if they are facing one another, they’ll never move again. 

I think about this episode a lot still, and whenever I watch it, it never fails to get my heart racing. But when I read “matter changes when it’s hit”, I was reminded of the clever, foolproof defence mechanism of the Weeping Angels, which renders them the loneliest creatures in the universe. There were parallels between this and the statement implied in the poem. Is it possible then that like the Weeping Angels, the agent’s movements are rendered undetectable when we try to watch them back? When we catch them in the act, say when our phone randomly opens up an app we closed, does the agent freeze? Or is it the reverse? And how lonely that must be. How alone the agent must feel. It was at this point I became more aware of how I was receiving the writing. When I thought about Doctor Who, and made comparisons from the bulk of my own references, I really tapped into the essence of the work, which is written so cleverly. 

Remember how I said earlier that, to understand what Charlotte’s getting at, you have to look within and draw upon your own experiences, in order to access the work? What I meant was, understanding the random collage of images requires understanding your own anxieties, about being watched all the time, reaching into your own pocket of knowledge, and relating all of it back to the work. Like how I drew upon my memory of Doctor Who. And it’s very much like social media, or Wikipedia. You’re constantly having to manage cookies or accept cookies, so you can continue using the programme. Likewise, you’re constantly forced to share more of yourself in order to access a level of understanding in Charlotte’s poetry. So for example, ‘my FBI agent takes me on a date’. This is Page 28. At this point, the gender pronoun of the agent has shifted. The agent is no longer “he”. “He” is now she. 

and decorates her hair with crane flies  prawn cocktail lips / when i said scare me she listened badly  [...]

[...] and I hate anything with a see-through body  plastic wings dancing no,  it’s the legs are wrong in the air like that  it’s the compartments, the exoskeleton  it’s that she doesn’t know how & she pries me open early  & she has teeth that she thinks give more pleasure at the cracking / she says i will like it 

that she has heard fear / makes us braver people in the end & she eats from within

You can feel the discomfort, the repulsion, in this poem so keenly. Sentences like “& she pries me open early // & she has teeth that she thinks give more pleasure // at the cracking / she says i will like it”, it’s so menacing. I could vividly picture the clacking of plastic wings, the sensation of sharp teeth, the cracking. It’s just horrible. And when you try to think about what a “date” is, and what that means when it’s with an FBI agent, you get something really odd, intimated by the gender shift of the agent to being “she”... When I read this transition, I saw it as an indication that ‘I’’s conscience had evolved. At some point, we become so self-aware of everything we say and do online, that we develop the objectivity like that of the agent. If I’m to assume that the ‘I’ is a she here, it’s arguable that and that the ‘I’ and ‘she’ in ‘my FBI agent takes me out on a date’, are the same entity. 

I think this poem implies that as we reveal more of ourselves online, the acuteness of our self-awareness intensifies. We become our own agents, we assimilate the role of our watchers and watch ourselves. We become transparent, as we study our profiles through our own focalisation. This, to my mind and my mother’s mind too, is the “exoskeleton” that Charlotte resents. It’s the imagery of self-consumption, the self-destruction in laying yourself bare to the world, where in turn it’s you that becomes the meal, it’s you who dates yourself, it’s you who tucks into yourself. We become indiscernible from watching and watched, and in these inexactitudes, we end up disorienting ourselves. We have to share so much in order to be able to “progress” or access sites or information we need. It’s parasitic. This is what Charlotte means by “she eats from within”. As though we’re the parasite and the host, we eat of ourselves. 

Other perplexing images: ‘my agent, a rational object / the same size as a mannequin’ (from ‘my FBI agent takes a holiday’) I found this image really wonderful and so apt in defining the agent’s agency... The mannequin is like, your anonymous blank slate. You change its clothes, it remains the same sculpture. It’s something you imprint, and it projects what it wears, how it wears it. The agent being depicted as a mannequin is again, another non-sequitur of a metaphor in this poem, but it makes absolute sense. The agent’s identity is subsumed in the person they surveillance. The agent is in a strange way, our personal twin, which is basically saying, we’re bonded. 

This symbiotic relationship is reflected on deeply throughout the work, oscillating between the way we are watched, how we watch, and how we watch ourselves. Take ‘my fbi agent doesn’t like to read’:

i read a lot of ebooks because i am always thinking  of him                           and his lack of access to an academic library  marxist monetary theory  kate millett’s sexual politics william morris biographies  [...]  i like to read through his eyes 

This is a profound image. As if the agent and the ‘I’ here are sat together. Whatever ‘I’ indulges in for reading pleasure, the agent indulges in also. Ultimately this is not a space that the agent is invading, when we’re aware we’re being observed. Like in those ‘fbi’ memes, we welcome the agent in, to laugh, to trust that everything, as uninnocent as it all is, is still ultimately innocent. No harm, no foul. So with that assurance, we make do with their elusive presence, content to let them read over our shoulders. 

One perplexion I do have about this work, and perhaps it’s an intentional move from Charlotte, is the inconsistency of grammar and capitalisation. Most of the poetry is written lowercase, it reads like the way we text. But every now and then there’s the odd full stop, or comma or semi-colon, that just doesn’t seem to sit right, and I wonder what the motivations are behind introducing punctuation at certain points. It’s something to think about when you’re reading the collection. Similarly with capitalisation, the book cover title is in lowercase “fbi” whereas all the poems are in the uppercase acronym: “FBI”. Funnily enough when you type ‘fbi’ into your phone, it will autocorrect it to uppercase. So that was an interesting distinction I found. Ultimately I don’t think this writing is yearning to read entirely like a text message, it is inviting punctuated sentences, grammar, clever choices in the positioning of semi-colons. But it’s not always clear why they appear within certain poems at particular points, and I question the impulse behind their inclusion. The form too, is fairly consistent, bar ‘my fbi agent talks me through my facebook ad settings’ on page 14, which really experiments with sentence length and the ‘/’:

i say: is this how you see me?  birthday in october / close friends of men with a birthday in 7-30 days / close friends of ex-pats / commuters / gmail users // 

i want to know about data in poetry when it’s bad data & i want to know about how you see me in these systems when they’re bad, i don’t mean morally, i mean shitty, incomplete, i mean you know too much and it’s all worth except. except for the ways in which it works for you. 

I perceived the ‘/’ here as not just a spacer. I think of it as an imitation of a navigation menu, the “clicking and loading” from one page of information to another. The writing itself also stretches right across the page, like it would across a computer screen. The best way to edit your Facebook ad settings is on a computer, not a smartphone device. And similar to Crispin Best, Charlotte’s line breaks often occur less than half way across the page of the book, imitating the dimensions of a phone screen, again. But in this poem, there’s more elongation, there’s more steps. For that reason, it really stands out and it’s also one of the more clogged pieces in terms of its references. The random assemblage of information pertaining to the ‘I’ and their profile, problematises the way information is harvested on social media. It’s loads of ubiquitous, vacuous crap which is all vested in the same person, but ultimately means very little. The only connection in having a birthday in October and being close friends with ex-pats is simply in the ‘I’, here. But there’s about a bajillion other people out there who could have the same thing in common. This poem is a criticism of the conjectures that the agent makes based off watching everything about us. What is the point in having all this crap on me? How boring. How confusing. 

I understand now why I lack conviction in a lot of my own thoughts about this collection, and it’s also why Charlotte Geater is incredibly talented. Everything in our world is open to reasonable doubt, even more so with technology. That same notion is integral to this collection’s thematics—we doubt who we are, we doubt what we do, we doubt what is around us and worst of all, we know that someone is recording those doubts and documenting them as evidence. The fact that Charlotte can recreate our digital anxieties, forcing us to think and overshare with ourselves so we can access an understanding, in the same way that the Internet does, that’s powerful. That is a technique. 

poems for my fbi agent articulates something much greater than ourselves, and yet we have the power to dispel of it whenever we want, collectively as a species or simply as individuals. Otherwise, morbid consequences follow (and are already a reality): ‘your coffin / is there / for the rest of your life’. This absolutism of our persona’s enduring presence that remains long after physical death is the ultimate artifice of reality, and immortality. We’re never truly dead and gone, we’re never really buried, when the evidence we lived is always there. 

It took me time to wrap my head around it, and tbh I don’t think I’ll ever totally wrap my head around everything, but I loved this collection, and I’m interested to see what Charlotte produces next. This is an incredible debut with an amazing press.

If you want to read some of these amazing poems in full, you can view them in some of Charlotte’s previous publications here, here and here. Or you could skip the bullshit and just buy this amazing work at Bad Betty Press, and follow Charlotte on Twitter. 

[thebigbaddirewolf-blog]

4 Points Every Other half Demands

This article lays out 4 simple things that any partner could do to assist his better half feel absolutely appreciated and deeply liked. Each action is noted as well as quickly discussed below. Should you wish to know more information regarding this article just visit top gun laywer.

1. A hubby needs to choose his spouse over every little thing else. His preferences are mirrored in the options he makes especially those preferring his involvement in family life. This is exactly what shapes the important psychological difference for guys and also almost all females. It could be as basic as his switching off the ball game or television program to be with you, or with the kids. It is his taking a seat to dishes with you as well as the family, not texting or talking on the phone while dining as well as providing you the attention you need thereby informing you, you are chosen. The selections he makes to prefer you could result in the greatest accumulated excellent or their absence could cause the best built up damage to your marriage. To be chosen over every little thing else, by his selection alone, indicates to you his committed dedication to the home and also his readiness to be collaborated with you in family life. Besides, you did obtain married to be with each other and not to live as songs. Guy often forget this reality as well as act as though they are doing their partners a huge support to be considerate and respectful to them. Often other halves act as though they deserve 'repayment' when all they are doing, remains in reality, absolutely nothing more than maintaining their end of the marital relationship vow. They forget they have actually made a spiritual assurance before the Face of God. This vow is a guy's most solemn promise and also word, his extremely honor, a Holy oath. Partners most absolutely do not be entitled to 'repayment' for doing just what they have promised themselves to do. Simply put being a male of his word examinations your hubby's personality as well as does not require a scoreboard to track its employ. He is either a man of his word or he is not a man of his word.

Choosing your other half over all points also indicates that you will certainly put her ahead of your parents and family members. You take her side, your cover over her imperfections, you acknowledge you are her spouse as well as you act in every situation such as this is the case. Many guys fail to comprehend that when they put their better half initially, before all else, they will have an extra loving, as well as profoundly a lot more adult and also enjoyable partnership with the one to whom they are wed. Fortunately is, favoring you other half make life less complex: you no more have to focus on pleasing everybody, because you only need to please a single person, your partner.

2. Hubbies need to know their other halves totally. Past sexuality, affection entails a partner deeply recognizing his other half. It's his knowing just what makes her tick. Actually, a lot of other halves desire this to be the case. They want to be recognized by their partners. So, excellent recommendations for spouses as a whole is for them to keep ever present in their minds that they should aid their partners to know them! Assist him to recognize you as an one-of-a-kind person and also to understand your 'wiring' as a female. The kiss of death for marriage affection is for him to criticize you in any one of these areas. This is that you are as a person; and also, that you are - is she, whom he wed. Surprisingly, affection isn't really crucial just for women; it's also crucial for men.

Flowing out from the deep expertise which real affection supplies is the difficulty each companion faces to approve each various other as being precisely who they are. When you marry, you wed the individual 'equally as they are'. You must not marry the person you daydream your partner is in process of becoming. They need to have already arrived - and also not remain in transit. You each need to deal with God as a finished individual totally fantastic in the view of each various other, not a 'diamond in the rough' which still needs polishing or a 'work in development' needing completion. Sure, there is area for development after the event, this is the 'icing on the cake'; yet, the cake needs to be completely formed when you wed. Full disclosure is a should in the past marriage and also transparency is a should as the years go by. You are no more you, in your unity in God, the 'you' have been transformed into, an 'us'. Eager transparency opens the path to excellent interaction in marital relationship and deepens your intimacy as not does anything else.

3. Spouses have to be good companies for their family members - we are shown that a male who will not provide for his family is worse than an infidel. Numerous other halves improperly think they have this base covered never ever as soon as recognizing that being an excellent company not only includes the monetary and also worldly locations of life, yet additionally includes the psychological as well as spiritual locations of family living also. A spouse that assumes by doing this has actually reduced his value as a partner to being absolutely nothing greater than an income. Such a sight brings about damaging statements like, 'I have my loan, you have your loan' or amusingly claiming, 'I make it as well as she spends it.'

A partner has to understand provision from the wife's viewpoint, not simply his own perspective. For instance, he may say, 'consider what I provide for you - your residence, your car and so on, not capturing on that his partner is checking out the infant's scooter which he has actually overlooked to fix or the fencing which is falling down. Arrangement is proactively paying attention to these type of details. Often, stipulation can also indicate lowering wealth, appears odd does not it? Stipulation can suggest insisting to live within your means, claiming no to debt, refusing to 'live big', which in fact equates into living 'hand to mouth'. This could be thought about arrangement too. One area of arrangement neglected most of the time by hubbies is giving an audio spiritual, moral as well as ethical example for their families. Other halves should be the spiritual leaders in their families. They need to lead in prayer. They ought to lead in worship in the house as well as in church. In a good marriage a wife aims to the other half to take management in these areas.

The word 'supply' can be comprehended by doing this, 'pro' implies towards or towards; the word 'vida' implies life - for this reason arrangement, in this example, means doing things necessary to move in the direction of advertising the well being of family life. In a way, arrangement connects to affection. The degree of affection one has with his partner assists him to 'provide' the important things she really needs; and, the degree of affection she has with her other half helps her to comprehend his genuineness as well as level of selfless initiative he exerts in offering these points. Clearly, it's inadequate to simply be a monetary carrier. Nor is it enough to mainly give psychological assistance as well as not consider the product needs of the family members. Either approach is unbalanced, harmful and; more often than not, a shipwrecked marital relationship. Rather, regard and heart deep complete satisfaction is the natural outcome of listening to attending to family members needs in a well balanced manner. If you're better linked emotionally as well as psychologically, you will be a better service provider, not just financially, however in many other ways too.

4. Spouses need to secure their spouses - wives have to feel protected. They should really feel safeguarded, not just from physical threat however also from emotional threat. Wives have to feel that their total individual safety and the well being of the household is a major problem of their other halves. This implies that partners need to familiarize the things that cause fear and fear in wives. So, again we look to intimacy in this discussion. It is your shared affection which shows your hubby the types of things you fear or fret over. His task is to pay attention the lady's specified issues, identifying them and also realizing they are extremely real to.

Wives need to know he will deal with all opponents - strangers, buddies; as well as if required, also relative in their protection. They require be positive he will take action also if he personally experiences as a result. Females have actually constantly been on the brief end of the 'em otional requirements protection stick'. While wives typically feel protected from physical damage they typically do not feel shielded on a psychological level. It is, sadly, frequently the instance that their very own partners loom up prior to them either as bullies or emotional hazards. Better halves usually feel 'patronized' when revealing their anxieties or that their inmost demands are not legitimate in their spouses opinion. Can it be possible for a better half to feel safe as well as safe and secure in her house when she lives under conditions such as these? Plainly, it is not possible. Typically better halves really feel deserted and also vulnerable when hubbies prefer various other things to the detriment of their household. It is a basic matter for husbands to be familiar with this and to be sensitive to her issues, paying attention to her when she expresses them verbally as well as recognizing she trust funds him to enjoy her sufficient to take suitable action.

Deep satisfying love as well as could not gained, bullied or scolded right into existence. The reality is you can not simply 'do love'. Love is an 'em otion' which is generated as a result of, as a byproduct of, behavior. Love is not raw passion like one sees on the movie screen either. What films depict is emotionalized sex - not love.

[petrichorate]

The Course of Love: Thoughts

The Course of Love (Alain de Botton)

The Course of Love was one of those books where almost every line spoke to me in some way—I was adding notes on almost every page, thinking, “Yes! This is so true!” Much like the other books I’ve really enjoyed recently (like Elena Ferrante’s novels), The Course of Love revealed a lot to me that deeply resonated with me, but that I hadn’t been able to fully express or reflect upon before. It cast an examining and forgiving light on my past experiences, arguments, relationships—all I hope is to carry some of what I’ve learned from this book with me, so that I might learn to cherish and become more charitable.

The book follows a couple from their first meeting, beyond their wedding, through the actual course of love—including children, arguments, and all the infinitely small and large features that compose the journey of a relationship over two people’s lifetimes. It’s an exploration of and a challenge to the Romantic myth, told through an intertwining narrative about Rabih and Kirsten with the author’s own musings (in italics).

Here are some particularly notable parts of the book that I wanted to share (but really, read the whole book—all of it is notable):

This reminds me of a quote from Pride and Prejudice, “A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”: “For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of a majestic and substantial conclusion: that he or she may constitute a comprehensive answer to the unspoken questions of existence.”

On finding individuality in small details: “Despite her apparel (or in truth partly because of it), Rabih at once notes in Kirsten a range of traits, psychological and physical, to whose appeal he is susceptible. He observes her unruffled, amused way of responding to the patronizing attitudes of the muscular twelve-man construction crew; the diligence with which she checks off the various items on the schedule; her confident disregard for the norms of fashion and the individuality implied by the slight irregularity in her upper front teeth.”

On weakness in the strong: “They meet again the following week. As they walk back towards the Taj Mahal for a budget and progress report, Rabih asks if he might give her a hand with the bag of files she is carrying, in response to which she laughs and tells him not to be so sexist. It doesn’t seem the right moment to reveal that he would no less gladly help her to move house—or nurse her through malaria. Then again, it only amplifies Rabih’s enthusiasm that Kirsten doesn’t appear to need much help with anything at all—weakness being, in the end, a charming prospect chiefly in the strong.”

On Romantic versus real love stories: “At the gates to the Botanic Garden, Kirsten tells Rabih to call her and admits, with a smile in which he suddenly sees what she must have looked like when she was ten years old, that she’ll be free any evening the following week. On his walk home to Quartermile, wending through the Saturday crowds, Rabih is thrilled enough to want to stop random strangers and share his good fortune with them. He has, without knowing how, richly succeeded at the three central challenges underpinning the Romantic idea of love: he has found the right person, he has opened his heart to her and he has been accepted.  And yet he is, of course, nowhere yet. 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.”

On the appeal of weakness when we are not responsible for it: “Love is also, and equally, about weakness, about being touched by another’s fragilities and sorrows, especially when (as happens in the early days) we ourselves are in no danger of being held responsible for them. Seeing our lover despondent and in crisis, in tears and unable to cope, can reassure us that, for all their virtues, they are not alienatingly invincible.”

Again, on the attractiveness of weakness in someone strong: “Kirsten lies in the Rabih’s arms while explaining. Her eyes are red. This is another part of her he loves: the weakness of the deeply able and competent person.”

On love being a form of acceptance: “There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled or as ‘normal’, as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile and multiple—all of this our lover can understand and accept us for.”

On nicknames in love: “They must normally answer to names imposed on them by the rest of the world, used on official documents and by government bureaucracies, but love inspires them to cast around for nicknames that will more precisely accord with the respective sources of their tenderness. Kirsten thus becomes ‘Teckle’, the Scottish colloquialism for ‘great’, which to Rabih sounds impish and ingenuous, nimble and determined. He, meanwhile, becomes ‘Sfouf’, after the dry Lebanese cake flavoured with aniseed and turmeric that he introduces her to in a delicatessen in Nicolson Square—and which perfectly captures for her the reserved sweetness and Levantine exoticism of the sad-eyed boy from Beirut.”

On the awkwardness of starting up intimacy on a second date: “The conversation starts off awkwardly. To Rabih there seems no way to reconnect with the greater intimacy of the last time they were together. It’s as if they were back to being only acquaintances again. They talk about his mother and her father and some books and films they both know. But he doesn’t dare to touch her hands, which she keeps mostly in her lap anyway. It seems natural to imagine she may have changed her mind.”

On fantasies versus outward behavior: “That respectable-looking people might be inwardly harbouring some beautifully carnal and explicit fantasies, while outwardly seeming to care only about friendly banter—this still strikes Rabih as somehow an entirely surprising and deeply delightful concept, with the immediate power to soothe a raft of his own underlying guilty feelings about his sexuality. That Kirsten’s late-night fantasies might have been about him, when she had seemed so reserved at the time, and that she was now so eager and so direct—these revelations mark out the moment as among the very best of Rabih’s life.”

On the careful balance of equality in desire: “Rabih runs his fingers roughly through Kirsten’s hair. She indicates, by a movement of her head and a little sigh, that she would like rather more of that—and harder, too, please. She wants her lover to bunch her hair in his hand and pull it with some violence. For Rabih it’s a tricky development. He has been taught to treat women with great respect, to hold the two genders as equal and to believe that neither person in a relationship should ever wield power over the other. But right now his partner appears to have scant interest in equality, nor much concern from the ordinary rules of gender balance, either.”

On the fallacies created by living by yourself: “He proposes with such confidence and certainty because he believes himself to be a really rather straightforward person to live alongside—another tricky circumstantial result of having been on his own for a very long time. The single state has a habit of promoting a mistaken self-image of normalcy. Rabih’s tendency to tidy obsessively when he feels chaotic inside, his habit of using work to ward off his anxieties, the difficulty he has in articulating what’s on his mind when he’s worried, his fury when he can’t find a favourite T-shirt—these eccentricities are all neatly obscured so long as there is no one else around to see him, let alone to create a mess, request that he come and eat his dinner, comment sceptically on his habit of cleaning the TV remote control or ask him to explain what he’s fretting about. Without witnesses, he can operate under the benign illusion that he may just, with the right person, prove no particular challenge to be around.”

On love versus familiarity: “We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood—and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes.  How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearned. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.”

On our neglect of the “ordinary relationship”: “The ordinary challenging relationship remains a strangely and unhelpfully neglected topic. It’s the extremes that repeatedly grab the spotlight—the entirely blissful partnerships or the murderous catastrophes—and so it is hard to know what we should make of, and how lonely we should feel about, such things as immature rages, late-night threats of divorce, sullen silences, slammed doors and everyday acts of thoughtlessness and cruelty.”

On books knowing about our own lives, and our overestimation of unhappiness: “Ideally, art would give us the answers that other people don’t. This might even be one of the main points of literature: to tell us what society at large is too prudish to explore. The important books should be those that leave us wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known so much about our lives. But too often a realistic sense of what an endurable relationship is ends up weakened by silence, societal or artistic. We hence imagine that things are far worse for us than they are for other couples. Not only are we unhappy; we misunderstand how freakish and rare our particular form of unhappiness might be. We end up believing that our struggles are indications of having made some unusual and fundamental error, rather than evidence that our marriages are essentially going entirely according to plan.”

On the characteristics of 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 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.”

Kirsten sounding distant while secretly feeling despair: “‘Teckle,’ he greets her. ‘Another day of mind-numbing meetings and idiots from the council causing trouble for no good reason. I miss you so much. I’d pay a lot for a hug from you right now.’ There’s a pause (he feels that he can hear the miles that separate them), then she replies in a flat voice that he has to get his name added to the car insurance before 1 March, adding that their neighbour also wants to speak to them about the drain, the one on the garden side—at which point Rabih repeats, gently but firmly, that he misses her and wishes they could be together. In Edinburgh, Kirsten is curled up at one end, ‘his’ end, of the sofa, wearing his jumper, with a bowl of tuna and a slice of toast on her lap. She pauses again, but when she responds to Rabih, it is with a curt and administrative-sounding ‘Yes’. It’s a pity that he can’t see that she is fighting back tears.”

On taking out our frustrations on the people we care about the most: “The world upsets, disappoints, frustrates and hurts us in countless ways at every turn. It delays us, rejects our creative endeavours, overlooks us for promotions, reward idiots and smashes our ambitions on its bleak, relentless shores. And almost invariably, we can’t complain about any of it. It’s too difficult to tease out who may really be to blame; and too dangerous to complain even when we know for certain (lest we be fired or laughed at).  There is only one person to whom we can expose our catalogue of grievances, one person who can be the recipient of all our accumulated rage at the injustices and imperfections of our lives. It is of course the height of absurdity to blame them. But this is to misunderstand the rules under which love operates. It is because we cannot scream at the forces who are really responsible that we get angry with those we are sure will best tolerate us for blaming them. We take it out on the very nicest, most sympathetic, most loyal people in the vicinity, the ones least likely to have harmed us, but the ones most likely to stick around while we pitilessly rant at them.”

On the Romantic ideal that to love someone means you cannot try to change them: “The very concept of trying to ‘teach’ a lover things feels patronizing, incongruous and plain sinister. If we truly loved someone, there could be no talk of wanting him or her to change. Romanticism is clear on this score: true love should involve an acceptance of a partner’s whole being. It is this fundamental commitment to benevolence that makes the early months of love so moving. Within the new relationship, our vulnerabilities are treated with generosity. Our shyness, awkwardness and confusion endear (as they did when we were children) rather than generate sarcasm or complaint; the trickier sides of us are interpreted solely through the filter of compassion. From these moments, a beautiful yet challenging, and even reckless, conviction develops: that to be properly loved must always mean being endorsed for all that one is.”

On how we contrast spouses with people in our lives who don’t have any similar level of responsibility for us, and an alternative perspective on changing our loved ones: “Sentimentally, we contrast the spousal negativity with the encouraging tone of our friends and family, on whom no remotely comparable set of demands has ever been made. There are other ways to look at love. In their philosophy, the ancient Greeks offered a usefully unfashionable perspective on the relationship between love and teaching. In their eyes, love was first and foremost a feeling of admiration for the better sides of another human being. Love was the excitement of coming face to face with virtuous characteristics. It followed that the deepening of love would always involve the desire to teach and in turn to be taught ways to become more virtuous: how to be less angry or less unforgiving, more curious or braver. Sincere lovers could never be content to accept one another just as they were; this would constitute a lazy and cowardly betrayal of the whole purpose of relationships.”

On how children teach us to love, rather than to be loved: “Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might constitute only a narrow, and perhaps rather mean-minded, aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it; to be loved rather than to love. Children may end up being the unexpected teachers of people many times their age, to whom they offer—through their exhaustive dependence, egoism and vulnerability—an advanced education in a wholly new sort of love, one in which reciprocation is never jealously demanded or fractiously regretted and in which the true goal is nothing less than the transcendence of oneself for the sake of another.”

Rabih, on changing his presentation of the world for his daughter: “Although cynical by nature, he is now utterly on the side of hope in presenting the world to her. Thus the politicians are trying their best; scientists are right now working on curing diseases; and this would be a very good time to turn off the radio. In some of the more run-down neighborhoods they drive through, he feels like an apologetic official giving a tour to a foreign dignitary. The graffiti will soon be cleaned up, those hooded figures are shouting because they’re happy, the trees are beautiful at this time of year... In the company of his small passenger, he is reliably ashamed of his fellow adults.  As for his own nature, it too has been sanitized and simplified. At home he is ‘Dada’, a man untroubled by career or financial worries, a lover of ice cream, a goofy figure who likes nothing more than to spin his wee girl around and lift her on to his shoulders. He loves Esther far too much to dare impose his anxious reality upon her. Loving her means striving to have the courage not to be entirely himself.”

On the sweetness of children: “Childhood sweetness: the immature part of goodness, as seen through the prism of adult experience, which is to say from the far side of a substantial amount of suffering, renunciation and discipline. We label as ‘sweet’ children’s open displays of hope, trust, spontaneity, wonder and simplicity—qualities which are under severe threat, but are deeply longed for in the ordinary run of grown-up life. The sweetness of children reminds us of how much we have had to sacrifice on the path to maturity; the sweet is a vital part of ourselves—in exile.”

On William’s art and sweetness: “His drawings add to the sweetness. Partly it’s their exuberant optimism. The sun is always out, people are smiling. There’s no attempt to peer below the surface and discover compromises and evasions. In his parents’ eyes, there’s nothing trivial whatsoever about such cheer: hope is an achievement and their little boy is a champion at it. There’s charm in his utter indifference to getting scenes ‘right’. Later, when art classes begin at school, he will be taught the rules of drawing and advised to pay precise attention to what is before his eyes. But for now, he doesn’t have to concern himself with how exactly a branch is attached to a tree trunk or what people’s legs and hands look like. He is gleefully unconcerned with the true and often dull facts of the universe. He cares only about what he feels and what seems like fun at this precise moment; he reminds his parents that there can be a good side to uninhibited egoism.”

On children’s tantrums and why they are a sign of love and comfort: “The boy’s behavior is appalling, of course, and a little surprising (Dada meant so well!), but on this occasion, as on more than a few others, it also stands as a perverse sort of tribute to Rabih as a father. A person has to feel rather safe around someone else in order to be this difficult. Before a child can throw a tantrum, the background atmosphere needs to be profoundly benevolent. Rabih himself wasn’t anything like this tricky with his own father when he was young, but then again, neither did he ever feel quite so loved by him. All the assurances he and Kirsten have offered over the years—‘I will always be on your side’, ‘You can tell us whatever you’re feeling’—have paid off brilliantly: they have encouraged William and his sister to direct their frustrations and disappointments powerfully towards the two loving adults who have signalled that they can, and will, take the heat.”

On the difficulty of passing down wisdom to children: “The dream is to save the child time; to pass on in one go insights that required arduous and lengthy experience to accumulate. But the progress of the human race is at every turn stymied by an ingrained resistance to being rushed to conclusions. We are held back by an inherent interest in re-exploring entire chapters in the back catalogue of our species’ idiocies—and to wasting a good part of our life finding out for ourselves what has already been extensively and painfully charted by others.”

On our special admiration of our own children: “At times the protective veil of paternal sentimentality slips and Rabih sees that he has given over a very substantial share of the best days of his life to a pair of human beings who, if they weren’t his own children, would almost surely strike him as being fundamentally unremarkable—so much so, in fact, that were he to meet them in a pub in thirty years’ time, he might prefer not even to talk to them. The insight is unendurable.”

On how children may measure their future spouses against the love of their parents, and how differently parents act with their children versus with their spouses: “The relationship nevertheless makes Kirsten worry a little for her daughter’s future. She wonders how other men will be able to measure up to such standards of tenderness and focused attention—and whether Besti may end up rejecting a range of candidates based on nothing more than the fact that they don’t come close to offering her the sort of friendship she once enjoyed with her dad. Yet what niggles Kirsten most of all is the sentimentality of Rabih’s performance. She knows at first hand that the kindness he displays with their daughter is available from him only in his role as a father, not as a husband. She has plenty of experience with his drastic change in tone once the two of them are out of earshot of the children. He is unwittingly planting an image in Esther’s mind of how a man might ideally behave with a woman—notwithstanding that the ideal in no way reflects the truth of who he, Rabih, really is. Thus Esther may, in later life, ask a man who is acting in a selfish, distracted and severe manner why he can’t be more like her father, little realizing that he is actually remarkably like Rabih, just not the version of him that she ever got to see.”

On the constant need to close the distance between two people: “We might imagine that the fear and insecurity of getting close to someone would happen only once: at the start of a relationship, and that anxieties couldn’t possibly continue after two people had made some explicit commitments to one another, like marrying, securing a joint mortgage, buying a house, having a few children and naming each other in their wills. Yet conquering distance and gaining assurances that we are needed aren’t exercises to be performed only once; they have to be repeated every time there’s been a break—a day away, a busy period, an evening at work—for every interlude has the power once again to raise the question of whether or not we are still wanted. It’s therefore a pity how hard it is to find a stigma-free and winning way of admitting to the intensity of our need for reassurance. Even after years together, there remains a hurdle of fear around asking for a proof of desire. But with a horrible, added complication: we now assume that any such anxiety couldn’t legitimately exist.”

On fantasies: “From one perspective, it can seem pathetic to have to concoct fantasies—rather than to try to build a life in which daydreams can reliably become realities. But fantasies are often the best thing we can make of our multiple and contradictory wishes; they allow us to inhabit one reality without destroying the other. Fantasizing spares those we care about from the full irresponsibility and scary strangeness of our urges. It is, in its own way, an achievement, an emblem of civilization—and an act of kindness.”

On how difficult it is to balance responsibility and empathize in a relationship: “The modern expectation is that there will be equality in all things in the couple, which means, at heart, an equality of suffering. But calibrating grief to ensure an equal dosage is no easy task; misery is experienced subjectively, and there is always a temptation for each party to form a sincere yet competitive conviction that, in truth, his or her life really is more cursed—in ways that the partner seems uninclined to acknowledge or atone for. It takes a superhuman wisdom to avoid the consoling conclusion that one has the harder life.”

Kirsten, on the responsibilities of a mother and a woman: “‘Yes, women do in fact have needs of their own, and sometimes, even if they have husbands they love and are good mothers, they would like someone new and unknown to notice them and want them desperately. Which doesn’t mean they won’t also be the picture of sensible concern every day and think about what kinds of healthy snacks to pack inside their children’s lunch boxes. Sometimes you seem to believe you’re the only one around here who has an inner life. But all of your very subtle feelings are in the end very normal, and no sign of genius.’”

On jealousy: “However unedifying and plain silly attacks of jealousy may be, they cannot be skirted: we should accept that we simply cannot stay sane on hearing that the person we love and rely on has touched the lips, or even so much as the hand, of another party. This makes no sense, of course—and runs directly counter to the often quite sober and loyal thoughts we may have had when we happened to betray someone in the past. But we are not amenable to reason here. To be wise is to recognize when wisdom will simply not be an option.”

On infatuations, and on the “cure for love”: “Infatuations aren’t delusions. That way a person has of holding their head may truly indicate someone confident, wry and sensitive; they really may have the humour and intelligence implied by their eyes and the tenderness suggested by their mouth. The error of the 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. The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. The best cure for love is to get to know them better.”

On different kinds of attachments: “1. ‘I want emotionally close relationships, but I find that other people are often disappointing or mean with out good reason. I worry that I will be hurt if I allow myself to become too close to others. I don’t mind spending time on my own.’ (Avoidant Attachment) 2. ‘I want to be emotionally intimate with others, but I often find that they are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I worry that others don’t value me as much as I value them. It can make me feel very upset and annoyed.’ (Anxious Attachment) 3. ‘It is relatively easy for me to become emotionally close to others. I feel comfortable depending on others and having them depend on me. I don’t worry about being alone or not being accepted by others.’ (Secure Attachment)”

On therapy: “It is a pity, therefore, that the insights on offer in the consulting room are so negligible in the wider culture. Their conversations feel like a small laboratory of maturity in a world besotted by the idea of love as an instinct and a feeling beyond examination. That Mrs Fairbairn’s room is tucked up some tenement stairs seems symbolic of the marginalized nature of her occupation. She 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.”

Rabih, on our immaturity and anxiety: “During his sleepless nights, he occasionally thinks about and misses his mother. He wishes with embarrassing intensity that he might be eight again and curled up under a blanket, with a slight fever, and that she could bring him food and read to him. He longs for her to reassure him about the future, absolve him of his sins and comb his hair neatly into a left-side parting. He is at least mature enough to know there is something important which ought to resist immediate censorship in these regressive states. He can see that he hasn’t, despite the outward signs, come very far. He realizes that anxiety will always dog him. It may appear that each new wave of it is about this or that particular thing—the party where he won’t know many people, the complicated journey he has to make to an unfamiliar country, a dilemma at work—but considered from a broader perspective, the problem is always larger, more damning and more fundamental. He once fantasized that his worries would be stilled if he lived elsewhere, if he attained a few professional goals, if he had a family. But nothing has ever made a difference.”

On only being able to treasure moments after they are over: “There is a photograph he loves in the kitchen, of Kirsten, William, Esther and himself in a park on an autumn day, throwing leaves at one another from a pile blown together by the wind. Joy and abandon are evident in all their faces, a delight in being able to make a mess without consequence. But he recalls, also, how inwardly troubled he was on that day; there was something at work with an engineering company, he was keen to get home and make some calls to an English client, his credit card was far above its limit. Only when events are over is there really any chance for Rabih to enjoy them.”

On having a ‘good enough’ marriage: “Choosing a person to marry is hence just a matter of deciding exactly what kind of suffering we want to endure, rather than of imagining we have found a way to skirt round the rules of emotional existence. We will all by definition end up with that stock character of our nightmares, ‘the wrong person’.  This needn’t be a disaster, however. Enlightened Romantic pessimism simply assumes that one person can’t be everything to another. We should look for ways to accommodate ourselves as gently and as kindly as we can to the awkward realities of living alongside another fallen creature. There can only ever be a ‘good enough’ marriage. For this realization to sink in, it helps to have had a few lovers before settling down, not in order to have had a chance to locate ‘the right person, but in order to have had an ample opportunity to discover at first hand, and in many different contexts, the truth that there isn’t any such person; and that everyone really is a bit wrong when considered from close up.”

On maturity, and how it means we are ready to love: “We speak of ‘love’ as if it were a single, undifferentiated thing, but it comprises two very different modes: being loved and loving. We should marry when we are ready to do the latter and have become aware of our unnatural and dangerous fixation on the former.  We start out knowing only about ‘being loved’. It comes to seem—quite wrongly—the norm. To the child, it feels as if the parent were just spontaneously on hand to comfort, guide, entertain, feed and clear up, while remaining almost constantly warm and cheerful. We take this idea of love with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret corner of our mind, we picture a lover who will anticipate our needs, read our hearts, act selflessly and make everything better. It sounds ‘romantic’; yet it is a blueprint for disaster.”

On compatibility: “Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the ‘right’ person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.”

On capturing moments of joy: “Wanting to capture this moment, Rabih calls them to gather for a photo, then sets the camera on a rock and runs to get into the shot. He knows that perfect happiness comes in tiny, incremental units only, perhaps no more than five minutes at a time. This is what one has to take with both hands and cherish. Struggles and conflicts will arise again soon enough: one of the children will become unhappy, Kiresten will make a short-tempered remark in response to something careless he has done, he will remember the challenges he’s facing at work, he will feel scared, bored, spoilt and tired... Rabih’s awareness of the uncertainly makes him want to hang on to the light all the more fervently. If only for a moment, it all makes sense. He knows how to love Kirsten, how to have sufficient faith in himself and how to feel compassion for and be patient with his children. But it is all desperately fragile. He 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.”