Free The Course of Love by Alain de Botton Page A

seem to have been absorbed into the ideology of Romanticism, which accords a similarly prestigious place to the concept of sexual fidelity within the idea of love. In the secular world, too, monogamy has been declared a necessary and crowning expression of emotional commitment and virtue. Our age has strikingly maintained the essential drift of an earlier religious position: the belief that true love must entail wholehearted fidelity.
    Rabih and Kirsten head home, walking slowly, hand in hand, occasionally stopping to browse in a shop. It’s going to be a remarkably warm day, and the sea looks turquoise, almost tropical. It’s Kirsten’s turn to go first in the shower, and when they’re both done, they go back to bed feeling that, after a long and hard week, they deserve to indulge themselves.
    They love to make up stories during sex. One of them will kick off, then the other will take it forward and pass it back for further elaboration. The scenarios can get extreme. “It’s after school, and the classroom is empty,” Kirsten begins one time. “You’ve asked me to stay behind so we can go over my essay. I’m shy and blush easily, a legacy of my strict Catholic upbringing. . . .” Rabihadds details: “I’m the geography teacher, specializing in glaciers. My hands are shaking. I touch your left knee, hardly daring to believe that . . .”
    So far, they have coauthored stories featuring a lost male mountaineer and a resourceful female doctor, their friends Mike and Bel, and a pilot and her reserved but curious passenger. There is nothing structurally unusual, therefore, in Rabih’s impulse, this morning, to initiate a narrative involving a waitress, a crucifix, and a leather strap.
    Although it often struggles to be heard in respectable circles, there is an alternative to the Christian-Romantic tenet that sex and love should always be inseparable. The libertine position denies any inherent or logical link between loving someone and needing to be unfailingly sexually loyal to them. It proposes that it can be entirely natural and even healthy for partners in a couple occasionally to have sex with strangers for whom they have little feeling but to whom they nonetheless feel strongly attracted. Sex doesn’t always have to be bound up with love. It can sometimes, this philosophy holds, be a purely physical, aerobic activity engaged in without substantive emotional meaning. It is, so its adherents conclude, just as absurd to suppose that one should only ever have sex with the person one loves as it would be to require that only those in committed couples ever be permitted to play table tennis or go jogging together.
    This remains, in the current age, the minority view by a very wide margin.
    Rabih sets the scene: “So we’re in this little seaside town in Italy, maybe Rimini, and we’ve had some ice cream, maybe pistachio, when you notice the waitress, who is shy but really friendly in a natural way that’s at once maternal and fascinatingly virginal.”
    â€œYou mean Antonella.”
    â€œNot necessarily.”
    â€œRabih Khan, shut up!” Kirsten scoffs.
    â€œOkay, then: Antonella. So we suggest to Antonella that after she’s finished her shift, she might want to come back to our hotel for some grappa. She’s flattered but a bit embarrassed. You see, she’s got a boyfriend, Marco, a mechanic at the local garage, who’s very jealous but at the same time remarkably incompetent sexually. There are certain things that she’s been wanting to have a go at for ages but that he flat-out refuses to try. She can’t get them out of her head, which is in part why she takes us up on our unusual offer.”
    Kirsten is silent.
    â€œNow we’re in the hotel, in the room, which has a big bed with an old-fashioned brass headboard. Her skin is so soft. There’s a trace of moisture on the down of her upper lip.