#while. still keeping a lot of the romantic underpinnings somehow

[viralarcadian]

the dic and cloverway dubs need to continue existing or else no one will understand why sailor moon uncensored was a Thing in the fandom

[dustedmagazine]

Lorkin O’Reilly — Marriage Material (Team Love)

Marriage Material by Lorkin O'Reilly

Lorkin O’Reilly has a way of underselling his songs, whispering transporting scenarios so you can hardly hear them, playing guitar so softly that it barely breaks the surface, speaking the verses so that you only hear the melody in the chorus. It’s the sort of music that makes you lean in. You may even be inclined to dismiss it, initially, until a phrase or an image or a fleeting bit of tune catches your attention and forces you to quietly pay attention.

O’Reilly was born in Scotland and has Irish roots, so his music has a Celtic lilt to it. It is gently underpinned by acoustic picking and banjo licks and not much else, and yet though it has a simplicity that might be read as primitive, the music is not historically minded, unless you count personal history. His songs unwind like low-budget independent films, a stream of mundane details that suddenly, unexpectedly catch the light.

Consider, for instance, “Teethmares,” in which O’Reilly recounts a dream where all his teeth fall out while he’s acting in a high school play. The lyrics are full of specifics, the soccer moms in the audience, the lines written out in ink on one arm, the Victorian stockings of his costume, and he recounts them in an unruffled monotone. In the gaps you can hear another voice, even quieter, speculating on how to interpret the dream, positing a sense of loss or maybe the end of a marriage. It is absurd and funny and touching all at once, and you’ll miss the whole thing if you are not extremely, extremely still throughout.

Other songs give the same novelistic attention to O’Reilly’s memories of watching soccer with his grandfather, an uncle about to get out of prison after decades and his earliest romantic encounters. There’s an affectionate cast to the way O’Reilly writes, so that even the hardest things seem wreathed in the soft glow of nostalgia. “My big silly heart keeps falling in love,” he croons, and you can hear that open-hearted tenderness in nearly every song.

The track comes last in the lovely “Baby Steps,” which borrows a phrase from Blaze Foley’s “If I Could Only Fly,” but returns it so lovingly buffed and polished that no one could object. The song recounts O’Reilly’s long roundabout journey to where he is now, over the ocean to America, through an early marriage and out of it, and into the care of an informal family. There’s a striking scene when somebody is singing the Foley song over Skype or Zoom to their grandmother, and O’Reilly flashes onto all the changes he’s been through in the land of Tony Hawke, Vanna White and Elvis. He finishes in a beautifully understated way, urging listeners to “Surround yourself with people, who laugh and pick you up, who care and hold you close and love to play Blaze Foley songs.” And then he sings the song’s most memorable phrase in a soft voice full of love and admiration, letting the words “If I could only fly” hang in the air until the song and the album is finished.

Lots of artists would put a crescendo under that moment, letting the sound swell so that everyone knows how important it is. O’Reilly hits it so softly that you have to actively seek it out with your ears, which somehow makes it even more striking.

Jennifer Kelly  

[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.”