The Course of Love

The Proposal

Over Christmas, their first spent together, they return to Kirsten’s mother’s house in Inverness. Mrs. McLelland shows him maternal kindness (new socks, a book on Scottish birds, a hot-water bottle for his single bed) and, although it is skillfully concealed, constant curiosity. Her inquiries, beside the kitchen sink after a meal or on a walk around the ruins of St. Andrews Cathedral, have a surface casualness to them, but Rabih is under no illusion. He is being interviewed. She wants to understand his family, his previous relationships, how his work in London came to an end, and what his responsibilities are in Edinburgh. He is being assessed as much as he can be in an age which doesn’t allow for parental vetting and which insists that relationships will work best if no outside arbiters are awarded authority, for romantic unions should be the unique prerogative of the individuals concerned—excluding even those who may have, not so many years ago, given one of the pair her bath every evening and, on weekends, taken her to Bught Park in a pram to throw bread to the pigeons.

Having no say does not mean, however, that Mrs. McLelland has no questions. She wonders if Rabih will prove to be a philanderer or a spendthrift, a weakling or a drunk, a bore or the sort to resolve an argument with a little force—and she is curious because she knows, better than most, that there is no one more likely to destroy us than the person we marry.

When, on their last day together, Mrs. McLelland remarks to Rabih over lunch what a pity it is that Kirsten never sang another note after her father left home, because she had a particularly promising voice and a place in the treble section of the choir, she isn’t just sharing a detail of her daughter’s former extracurricular activities; she is—as much as the rules allow—asking Rabih not to ruin Kirsten’s life.

They take the train back to Edinburgh the evening before New Year’s Eve, a four-hour ride across the Highlands in harness to an aging diesel. Kirsten, a veteran of the journey, has known to bring along a blanket, in which they wrap themselves in the empty rear carriage. Seen from distant farms, the train must look like an illuminated line, no larger than a millipede, making its way across a pane of blackness.

Kirsten seems preoccupied.

“No, nothing at all,” she replies when he asks, but no sooner has she uttered her denial than a tear wells up, more rapidly followed by a second and a third. Still, it really is nothing, she stresses. She is being silly. A dunderhead. She doesn’t mean to embarrass him, all men hate this kind of thing, and she doesn’t plan to make it a habit. Most importantly, it has nothing to do with him. It is her mother. She is crying because, for the first time in her adult life, she feels properly happy—a happiness which her own mother, with whom she has an almost symbiotic connection, has so seldom known. Mrs. McLelland worries that Rabih might make her sad; Kirsten cries with guilt at how happy her lover has helped her to become.

He holds her close to him. They don’t speak. They have known each other for a little over six months. It wasn’t his plan to bring this up now. But just past the village of Killiecrankie, after the ticket collector’s visit, Rabih turns to face Kirsten and asks, without preamble, if she will marry him—not necessarily right away, he adds, but whenever she feels it is right, and not necessarily with any fuss, either. It could be a tiny occasion—just them and her mother and a few friends—but of course it could be bigger too if that’s what she prefers; the key thing is that he loves her without reservation and wants, more than anything he’s ever wanted before, to be with her as long as he lives.

She turns away and is, for a few moments, perfectly silent. She isn’t very good at these sorts of moments, she confesses, not that they often happen, or indeed ever. She doesn’t have a speech ready—this has come like a bolt from the blue—but how different it is from what ordinarily happens to her; how deeply kind and mad and courageous of him to come out with something like this now. And yet, despite her cynical character and her firm belief that she doesn’t care for these things—so long as he has truly understood what he wants and has noted what a monster she is—she can’t really see why she wouldn’t say, with all her heart and with immense fear and gratitude, yes, yes, yes.

It tells us something about the relative status of rigorous analysis in the nuptial process that it would be considered un-Romantic, and even mean, to ask an engaged couple to explain in any depth, with patience and self-awareness, what exactly had led them to make and accept a proposal. But we’re keen, of course, always to ask where and how the proposal took place.

It isn’t disrespectful to Rabih to suggest that he doesn’t really know why he has asked her to marry him, know in the sense of being in command of a rationally founded, coherent set of motives which could be shared with a skeptical or probing third party. What he has instead of a rationale is feelings, and plenty of them: the feeling of never wanting to let her go because of her broad, open forehead and the way her upper lip protrudes ever so slightly over her lower one; the feeling that he loves her because of her furtive, slightly surprised, quick-witted air which inspires him to call her his “Rat” and his “Mole” (and which also, because her looks are unconventional, makes him feel clever for finding her attractive); the feeling that he needs to marry her because of the diligent concentration on her face when she prepares a cod and spinach pie; because of her sweetness when she buttons up her duffel coat; and because of the cunning intelligence she displays when she unpacks the psyches of people they know.

There is virtually no serious thought underpinning his certainty about marriage. He has never read any books on the institution; he has in the last decade never spent more than ten minutes with a child; he has never cynically interrogated a married couple let alone spoken in any depth with a divorced one and would be at a loss to explain why the majority of marriages fail, save from the general idiocy or lack of imagination of their participants.

For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing grain business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages there flowed loneliness, rape, infidelity, beating, hardness of heart, and screams heard through the nursery doors.

The marriage of reason was not, from any sincere perspective, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish, exploitative, and abusive. Which is why what has replaced it—the marriage of feeling—has largely been spared the need to account for itself. What matters is that two people wish desperately that it happen, are drawn to one another by an overwhelming instinct, and know in their hearts that it is right. The modern age appears to have had enough of “reasons,” those catalysts of misery, those accountants’ demands. Indeed the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six weeks since they met; one of them has no job; or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it may actually be deemed to be, for apparent “recklessness” is taken as a counterweight to all the errors and tragedies vouchsafed by the so-called sensible unions of old. The prestige of instinct is the legacy of a collective traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable “reason.”

He asks her to marry him because it feels like an extremely dangerous thing to do: if the marriage were to fail, it would ruin both their lives. Those voices which hint that marriage is no longer necessary, that it is far safer simply to cohabit, are right from a practical point of view, concedes Rabih; but they miss the emotional appeal of danger, of putting oneself and one’s beloved through an experience which could, with only a few twists of the plotline, result in mutual destruction. Rabih takes his very willingness to be ruined in love’s name as proof of his commitment. That it is “unnecessary” in the practical sense to marry serves only to render the idea more compelling emotionally. Being married may be associated with caution, conservatism, and timidity, but getting married is an altogether different, more reckless, and therefore more appealingly Romantic proposition.

Marriage, to Rabih, feels like the high point of a daring path to total intimacy; proposing has all the passionate allure of shutting one’s eyes and jumping off a steep cliff, wishing and trusting that the other will be there to catch one.

He proposes because he wants to preserve, to “freeze,” what he and Kirsten feel for each other. He hopes through the act of marrying to make an ecstatic sensation perpetual.

There is one memory he’ll return to again and again in recalling the fervor he wants to hold on to. They are at a rooftop club on George Street. It is a Saturday night. They are on the dance floor, bathed in rapid orbits of purple and yellow lights, with a hip-hop bass alternating with the rousing choruses of stadium anthems. She’s wearing trainers, black velvet shorts, and a black chiffon top. He wants to lick the sweat off her temples and swing her around in his arms. The music and the fellowship among the dancers promise a permanent end to all pain and division.

They go out onto a terrace illuminated only by a series of large candles distributed around the railings. It’s a clear night, and the universe has come down to meet them. She points out Andromeda. A plane banks over Edinburgh Castle, then straightens up for the descent to the airport. In the moment he feels beyond doubt that this is the woman he wants to grow old with.

There are, of course, quite a few aspects of this occasion which marriage could not enable him to “freeze” or preserve: the serenity of the vast, star-filled night; the generous hedonism of the Dionysian club; the absence of responsibility; the indolent Sunday which lies before them (they will sleep until midday); her buoyant mood and his sense of gratitude. Rabih is not marrying—and therefore fixing forever—a feeling. He is marrying a person with whom, under a very particular, privileged, and fugitive set of circumstances, he has been fortunate enough to have a feeling.

The proposal is at one level about what he’s running towards but also, and perhaps every bit as much, about what he’s running away from. A few months before he met Kirsten, he had dinner with a couple, old friends from his days at university in Salamanca. They had a lively meal catching up on news. As the three of them were leaving the restaurant in Victoria Street, Marta smoothed down the collar of Juan’s camel-colored coat and wrapped his burgundy scarf carefully around his neck, a gesture of such natural and tender care that it had the incidental effect of making Rabih appreciate, like a punch in the stomach, how entirely alone he was in a world wholly indifferent to his existence and fate.

Life on his own had become, he realized then, untenable. He had had enough of solitary walks home at the end of desultory parties; of entire Sundays passed without speaking a word to another human; of holidays spent tagging along with harassed couples whose children left them no energy for conversation; of the knowledge that he occupied no important place in anyone’s heart.

He loves Kirsten deeply, but he hates the idea of being on his own with almost equal force.

To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone. This isn’t necessarily our fault as individuals. Society as a whole appears determined to render the single state as nettlesome and depressing as possible: once the freewheeling days of school and university are over, company and warmth become dispiritingly hard to find; social life starts to revolve oppressively around couples; there’s no one left to call or hang out with. It’s hardly surprising, then, if when we find someone halfway decent, we might cling.

In the old days, when people could (in theory) only have sex after they were married, wise observers knew that some might be tempted to marry for the wrong reasons—and so argued that the taboos around premarital sex should be lifted to help the young make calmer, less impulse-driven choices.

But if that particular impediment to good judgment has been removed, another kind of hunger seems to have taken its place. The longing for company may be no less powerful or irresponsible in its effects than the sexual motive once was. Spending fifty-two straight Sundays alone may play havoc with a person’s prudence. Loneliness can provoke an unhelpful rush and repression of doubt and ambivalence about a potential spouse. The success of any relationship should be determined, not just by how happy a couple are to be together, but by how worried each partner would be about not being in a relationship at all.

He proposes with such confidence and certainty because he believes himself to be a really rather straightforward person to live alongside—another tricky circumstantial result of having been on his own for a very long time. The single state has a habit of promoting a mistaken self-image of normalcy. Rabih’s tendency to tidy obsessively when he feels chaotic inside, his habit of using work to ward off his anxieties, the difficulty he has in articulating what’s on his mind when he’s worried, his fury when he can’t find a favorite T-shirt—these eccentricities are all neatly obscured so long as there is no one else around to see him, let alone to create a mess, request that he come and eat his dinner, comment skeptically on his habit of cleaning the TV remote control, or ask him to explain what he’s fretting about. Without witnesses, he can operate under the benign illusion that he may just, with the right person, prove no particular challenge to be around.

A few centuries from now, the level of self-knowledge that our own age judges necessary to get married might be thought puzzling if not outright barbaric. By then, a standard, wholly nonjudgmental line of inquiry—appropriate even on a first date—to which everyone would be expected to have a tolerant, good-natured and nondefensive answer, would simply be: “So, in what ways are you mad?”

Kirsten tells Rabih that as a teenager she was unhappy, felt unable to connect with others, and went through a phase of self-harming. Scratching her arms until they bled, she says, gave her the only relief she could find. Rabih feels moved by her admission, but it goes further than that: he is positively drawn to Kirsten because of her troubles. He identifies her as a suitable candidate for marriage because he is instinctively suspicious of people for whom things have always gone well. Around cheerful and sociable others he feels isolated and peculiar. He dislikes carefree types with a vengeance. In the past he has described certain women he has been out on dates with as “boring” when anyone else might more generously and accurately have labeled them “healthy.” Taking trauma to be a primary route to growth and depth, Rabih wants his own sadness to find an echo in his partner’s character. He therefore doesn’t much mind, initially, that Kirsten is sometimes withdrawn and hard to read, or that she tends to seem aloof and defensive in the extreme after they’ve had an argument. He entertains a confused wish to help her without, however, understanding that help can be a challenging gift to deliver to those who are most in need of it. He interprets her damaged aspects in the most obvious and most lyrical way: as a chance for him to play a useful role.

We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes.

How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.

He asks her to marry him in order to break the all-consuming grip that the thought of relationships has for too long had on his psyche. He is exhausted by seventeen years’ worth of melodrama and excitements that have led nowhere. He is thirty-two and restless for other challenges. It’s neither cynical nor callous of Rabih to feel immense love for Kirsten and yet at the same time to hope that marriage may conclusively end love’s mostly painful dominion over his life.

As for Kirsten, suffice to say (for we will be traveling mostly in his mind) that we shouldn’t underestimate the appeal, to someone who has often and painfully doubted many things, not least herself, of a proposal from an ostensibly kind and interesting person who seems unequivocally and emphatically convinced that she is right for him.

They are married by an official, in a salmon-pink room at the Inverness registry office on a rainy morning in November, in the presence of her mother, his father and stepmother, and eight of their friends. They read out a set of vows supplied by the government of Scotland, promising that they will love and care for each other, that they will be patient and show compassion, that they will trust and forgive, and that they will remain best friends and loyal companions until death.

Uninclined to sound didactic (or perhaps simply at a loss as to how to be so), the government offers no further suggestions of how to concretize these vows—although it does present the couple with some information on the tax discounts available to those adding insulation to their first homes.

After the ceremony, the members of the wedding party repair to a nearby restaurant for lunch, and by late that same evening the new husband and wife are ensconced in a small hotel near Saint-Germain, in Paris.

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.