The Course of Love by Alain de Botton

less on local government contracts, Rabih doesn’t—as someone else might do—request a meeting and sit down with him for half an hour in the top-floor conference room with its view over Calton Hill to explain why this policy shift could prove not only mistaken but possibly dangerous. Instead he remains largely quiet, making only a few gnomic remarks and fantasizing that others will somehow magically deduce his opinion. Similarly, when he realizes that Gemma, an entry-level staffer who has been taken on to assist him with his workload, has been getting many of her measurements wrong, he feels inwardly frustrated but never raises the issue with her and simply does the work himself, leaving the young woman amazed by how little there is for her to do in her new job. He’s not secretive, controlling, or withdrawn for malicious reasons; he just gives up on otherpeople—and on his ability to persuade them of anything—with unhelpful ease.
    For the rest of the day, after their visit to the Brioschi Café and the humiliating business about Antonella, there’s the kind of tension between Rabih and Kirsten that often follows on from aborted sex. Somewhere in his mind Rabih feels a disappointment and irritation that he doesn’t know what to do with. After all, it isn’t right to start making a fuss when your partner isn’t wild at the idea of having a threesome with a recent graduate who knows her way around a plate of eggs and happens to look nice in an apron.
    What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of, and can win, the goodwill of others if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination.
    As children, these good communicators must have been blessed with caregivers who knew how to love their charges without demanding that every last thing about them be agreeable and perfect. Such parents would have been able to live with the idea that their offspring might sometimes—for a while, at least—be odd, violent, angry, mean, peculiar, or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love. The parents would thus have created an invaluable wellspring of courage from which those children would eventually be able to draw to sustain the confessions and direct conversationsof adult life.
    Rabih’s father was taciturn and severe. Only one generation removed from a life of extreme poverty and agricultural labor in a small village near Baalbek, he had been the first in his family to escape and go to university, though he would continue to preserve a long ancestral legacy of being careful around authority. Speaking up and volunteering one’s opinions were not standard practices among the Khans.
    The education in communication imparted by Rabih’s mother was no more encouraging. She loved him fiercely, but she needed him to be a certain way. Whenever she returned from her airline work to the anxious atmosphere of Beirut and of her marriage, her son would see the strain around her eyes and feel that he mustn’t add to her problems. He wanted more than anything to put her at ease and make her laugh. Whatever anxieties he felt, he would reflexively conceal. His job was to help keep her intact. He could not afford to tell her too many tricky but true things about himself.
    Rabih thereby grew up to understand the love of others as a reward for being good, not for being transparent. As an adult and as a husband, he lacks any idea of how to make something coherent out of the