“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 worth 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.”
— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love
What I love about this book: it talks about the right problems. In a world filled with happily-ever-after fairytales and stereotyped black-and-white good-or-bad relationships, de Botton chooses to grapple with what it means for two real and imperfect people to be in a real and imperfect relationship. He describes the individuals’ feelings and the relationship problems in a way that resonates with relationship experiences as they might actually happen, rather than in some idealized form.
What I don’t love about this book: it sometimes shows wrong or oversimplified behaviors. I worry that people will treat this book as a guide for how to respond in their own relationships, and there were at least three problematic behaviors that bothered me.
- Effective communication is oversimplified. While it’s great for a person to apologize if he thinks he has done something wrong, the author seems to imply that an apology is sufficient to heal a relationship after a fight, when it doesn’t actually solve what actually caused the fight. I wish there had been a follow-up scene to the apology, in which the two people discussed what happened and why, demonstrated strong listening skills, brainstormed potential solutions, and then tried to make real changes in their behavior for each other.
- Honesty is not valued as highly as I think it should be. Even by the end of the book, one character chooses to “not hurt his partner’s feelings” and hide his affair from his partner forever, rather than tell the truth about his affair. I find this appalling. I’ll write another post about honesty in relationships sometime, but one of the reasons I think honesty is so important in relationships is that by being honest, you give your partner the agency to act based on the information you have, and by lying you are robbing them of that agency. That seems wrong.
- Polygamy and jealousy are oversimplified. The author seems, through one of the characters, to claim one authoritative view on jealousy and affairs: that affairs are only bad in that they hurt your partner, but that this is sufficiently damning to put affairs off limits. This is certainly a valid way to view sex outside of marriage, but it’s only one perspective, and in a healthy relationship, I think the two parties should talk about their views rather than assume how the other person would feel. Two people could certainly commit to a monogamous relationship, or they could mutually commit to allowing certain kinds of sex outside of marriage. Two people could agree that they would feel jealous and unhappy about it happening, or they could agree that they will aim to be happy that their partner is living their fullest and happiest life, even if it involves sex with someone else (see compersion: opposite of jealousy). In my view, the discussion and shared commitment is critical, and I’m disappointed that the book didn’t give it appropriate weight.