Book Review_The Course of Love by Alain de Botton

It is said that unmarried women wants to be married and those who haven't gain honor chase honor. We always want something unknown. Being 'unknown' is the precondition of our dream. I recommend this gook to unmarried people or married couples who are having hard time getting used to the marriage system.


We think that 'marriage' is the end of love story, and we imagine rose-colored future in marriage. However, when we marry, we face the reality. This book kindly describes the married couple's life; their misery, the gap between the romanticism and reality, and hard work to keep our marriage.


- “Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.”  
Due to romaticism, we don't bother to objectively analyze our lover's merits and demerits and how much we fit into each other. That is how we start our marriage life.


- In modern society, it seems that married couples want equality in everything. However, what they really want is the equality in pain. They want to carry as the same amount of pain as their partners does. We always think that we are more miserable that our partners. Thus, we need wisdom to get over this tragic thought. We cannot carry the same amount of pain in life. We should focus more on what our partenrs do for us. We should think that we can do more for our happiness, and eventually myself.


- Adultery. Denying all the possibilities of adultery means denying all the richness of our lives. Let's say that a person doesn't feel any curiosity in infidelity. Is it reasonable to trust that kind of person?
I wanted to marry a man who never ever feels curiosity in other attractive women. Or a man who every women doesn't feel attracted. However, this kind of man is not a man, but instead it is just a robot. It means that that type of guy doens't know about life and finds it hard to spiritually interact with other people. I don't want that kind of guy. I like a man who sometimes feels attracted to other women but he tries to keep his position with consideration and smartness.

- “Never having been betrayed sets up poor preconditions for remaining faithful. Evolving into genuinely more loyal people requires us to suffer through some properly innoculative episodes, in which we feel for a time limitlessly panicked, violated and on the edge of collapse. Only then can the injunction not to betray our spouses evolve from a bland bromide into a permanently vivid moral imperative.”

This part shows Botton's acute observation. It seems that we never betray our partners when we've never been betrayed. However, the opposite is more plausible. When we are in the same situation, we truely understand other's pain because we alreayd know how hurt it is.


- “The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste, but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and grace.”


I thought I would lead a happy marriage life with a perfectly matched one. I mean when we share the same value, life goals, habits, movie and book taste, humor code. However, Everyone has different taste. There is no one who share the same taste with me. Thus, the alternative is a man who knows how to negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and grace. I want to recommend this book to unmarried people. They will grasp how their marriage life will be unfolded. Also, they can get an idea of what type of person they should spend their rest of lives.