The Course of Love by Alain de Botton

Swiss-born British philosopher Alain de Botton is an original thinker whose projects include writing a book about a week spent people-watching at Heathrow Airport.

Whether implied or explicitly stated, "happily ever after" ends each romantic story, beginning with fairy tales. This novel portrays the lives of a married couple during a more realistic and less romantic "ever after." Each time a marital conflict occurs, the author steps in with an explanatory comment.

With ruthless clarity, he dismantles the madness of our cultural and romantic ideals. A marriage between two people, he says, is "an infinitely kind gamble...binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate."

Children he describes as "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 new sort of love...in which the true goal is nothing less than the transcendence of oneself for the sake of another."

What a priceless gift: "the child teaches the adult...that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on...beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behaviour."

Loving parents want to help children grow up with minimal fuss and pain, but in spite of their ambition "to pass on in one go insights that require arduous and lengthy processes to accumulate," they themselves must come to terms with the fact that people learn through their own experience. Humans are filled with "an ingrained resistance" to rushing that process of maturing. Indeed, we "are held back by an inherent interest in re-exploring entire chapters in the back catalogue of our species' idiocies," and insist on "wasting a good part of life finding out for ourselves what has already been extensively and painfully charted by others."

Teaching our partners what we know is also enormously difficult. We may see, or think we see, what they need to know, but help is "a challenging gift to give to those who are most in need of it." Love is a skill. Only over time can we be graced with the knowledge that overwhelmingly, "those who hurt us are themselves in pain." Hence the appropriate response is "never cynicism or aggression, but at the rare moments one can manage it, always love."

Marriage "yields its important lessons only to those who have signed up for the curriculum," and readiness tends "to follow rather than precede the ceremony itself -- perhaps by a decade or two." In choice of partner, we should not seek compatibility; we humans are "too varied and peculiar" for that to be realistic in the long term as we evolve.

Instead, we must hope both to become and to find a partner "who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and good grace." The "capacity to tolerate dissimilarity" is the key quality of the 'right' partner. Compatibility is "an achievement of love" and "shouldn't be its precondition."