The Course of Love

Teaching and Learning

Rabih’s job carries on, though proper security remains elusive. Most of his and Kirsten’s friends get married and start to have children, and their social life evolves to become ever more concentrated around other couples. There are half a dozen or so that they see on a regular rotating basis, usually at one another’s houses over supper or for lunch (with babies) on the weekend.

There is warmth and companionship among them but also, beneath the surface, a fair amount of comparison and boasting. There are frequent competitive allusions to jobs, holidays, house-improvement plans, and the first children’s milestones.

Rabih affects a defiant, thick-skinned stance with regard to the jostling and the scorekeeping. He frankly concedes to Kirsten that they aren’t the highest-status couple, but then quickly adds that it doesn’t matter in the least: they should be pleased with what they have. They don’t live in a small gossipy village; they can go their own way.

It’s almost one in the morning on a Saturday, and they’re in the kitchen, clearing up the dishes, when Kirsten remarks that she learnt over pudding that Clare and her husband, Christopher, are going to be renting a place in Greece for the whole summer: a villa with its own pool and a garden with a sort of private olive grove. She’ll be there the whole time, he’ll commute down. It sounds out of this world, she says, but it must cost a bloody fortune—unimaginable, really; it’s astonishing what a surgeon can earn these days.

For Rabih, the comment niggles. Why does his wife care? Why aren’t their own holidays (in a small cottage in the Western Isles) enough? How could they ever afford anything even approaching the cost of a villa rental on their salaries? This isn’t the first such statement she’s made in this vein. There was something a week or so ago about a new coat she’d reluctantly had to renounce; then an admiring account of a weekend in Rome that James had invited Mairi on; and, only yesterday, an awestruck report about two friends’ sending their children to private school.

Rabih would love for her to relinquish this tendency. He wants her to take pride in herself without reference to her place in a meaningless pecking order, and to appreciate the nonmaterial richness of their life together. He wants her to prize what she has rather than ache for what is missing. But because it’s well past his bedtime and this is an inflammatory topic around which he has plenty of his own anxieties, his proposal comes out in a less nuanced and less persuasive form than he might have wished.

“Well, darling, I’m so sorry I’m not a high-rolling surgeon with a villa.” He can hear the sarcasm in his voice—he knows at once the effect it will have, but he cannot stop himself. “Shame you’re stuck here in the slums with me.”

“Why are you having a go at me? And so late as well,” retorts Kirsten. “I was just saying they’re going on holiday, you dober, and immediately, out of nowhere, in the middle of the night, you switch to attacking me—as if you’d been waiting to pounce on me. I remember a time when you weren’t always so critical of things I said.”

“I’m not critical. I just care about you.”

The very concept of trying to “teach” a lover things feels patronizing, incongruous, and plain sinister. If we truly loved someone, there could be no talk of wanting him or her to change. Romanticism is clear on this score: true love should involve an acceptance of a partner’s whole being. It is this fundamental commitment to benevolence that makes the early months of love so moving. Within the new relationship, our vulnerabilities are treated with generosity. Our shyness, awkwardness, and confusion endear (as they did when we were children) rather than generate sarcasm or complaint; the trickier sides of us are interpreted solely through the filter of compassion.

From these moments, a beautiful yet challenging and even reckless conviction develops: that to be properly loved must always mean being endorsed for all that one is.

Marriage lends Rabih and Kirsten an opportunity to study each other’s characters in exceptional detail. No one in their adult lives has ever had as much time to examine their behavior in such a constrained habitat and under the influence of so many variable and demanding conditions: late at night and dazed in the morning; despondent and panicked over work, frustrated with friends, in a rage over lost household items.

To this knowledge they bring ambition for the other’s potential. They can at points see important qualities that are lacking but which they believe could be developed if only they were pointed out. They know better than anyone else some of what is wrong—and how it might change. Their relationship is, secretly yet mutually, marked by a project of improvement.

Contrary to appearances, after the dinner party, Rabih is sincerely trying to bring about an evolution in the personality of the wife he loves. But his chosen technique is distinctive: to call Kirsten materialistic, to shout at her, and then, later, to slam two doors.

“All you seem to care about is how much our friends are earning and how little we have,” he exclaims bitterly to Kirsten, who is by now standing by the sink, brushing her teeth. “Hearing you talk, anyone would think you were living in a hovel with only bearskin pelts for clothes. I don’t want you to have this anxiety about money anymore. You’ve become maddeningly materialistic.”

Rabih delivers his “lesson” in such a frenzied manner (the doors are slammed very loudly indeed) not so much because he is a monster (though it would be unsurprising if a disinterested witness were, by this point, to reach such a conclusion) as because he is feeling both terrified and inadequate: terrified because his wife and best friend in the world seems unable to comprehend a pivotal point about money and its relationship to fulfillment; and inadequate because he is incapable of providing Kirsten with what she now appears very much to want (fairly enough, he believes deep in his heart).

He badly needs his wife to see things from his point of view, and yet has effectively lost any ability to help her do so.

We know that, when teaching students, only the utmost care and patience will ever work: we must never raise our voices, we have to use extraordinary tact, we must leave plenty of time for every lesson to sink in, and we need to ensure at least ten compliments for every one delicately inserted negative remark. Above all, we must remain calm.

And yet the best guarantee of calm in a teacher is a relative indifference to the success or failure of his or her lesson. The serene teacher naturally wants for things to go well, but if an obdurate pupil flunks, say, trigonometry, it is—at base—the pupil’s problem. Tempers remain in check because individual students do not have very much power over their teachers’ lives; they don’t control their integrity and are not the chief determinants of their sense of contentment. An ability not to care too much is a critical aspect of unruffled and successful pedagogy.

But calm is precisely what is absent from love’s classroom. There is simply too much on the line. The “student” isn’t merely a passing responsibility; he or she is a lifelong commitment. Failure will ruin existence. No wonder we may be prone to lose control and deliver cack-handed, hasty speeches which bear no faith in the legitimacy or even the nobility of the act of imparting advice.

And no wonder, too, if we end up achieving the very opposite of our goals, because increasing levels of humiliation, anger, and threat have seldom hastened anyone’s development. Few of us ever grow more reasonable or more insightful about our own characters for having had our self-esteem taken down a notch, our pride wounded, and our ego subjected to a succession of pointed insults. We simply grow defensive and brittle in the face of suggestions which sound like mean-minded and senseless assaults on our nature rather than caring attempts to address troublesome aspects of our personality.

Had Rabih picked up some better teaching habits, his lesson might have unfolded very differently. For a start, he would have made sure both of them went straight to bed and were well rested before anything was tackled. The next morning he might have suggested a walk, perhaps to King George V Park, after they’d picked up a coffee and a pastry to have on a bench. Looking out at the large oak trees, he would have complimented Kirsten on the dinner and on a couple of other things, too: perhaps her skill at dealing with the politics in her office or her kindness to him over a package she’d posted for him the day before. Then, rather than accuse her, he would have implicated himself in the behavior he wished to focus on. “Teckle, I find myself getting so jealous of some of those types we know,” he would have started. “If I hadn’t gone into architecture, we could have had a summer villa, and I would have loved it in a lot of ways. I’m the first one to adore the sun and the Mediterranean. I dream of cool limestone floors and the smell of jasmine and thyme in the garden. I’m so sorry for letting us both down.” Then, like a doctor lulling the patient before jabbing the needle: “What I also want to say though—and it’s probably a lesson for both of us—is that we’re very lucky in a host of other ways that we should at least try not to forget. We’re lucky that we have one another, that we enjoy our jobs on a good day, and that we know how to have a lot of fun on our rain-sodden summer holidays in the Outer Hebrides in a crofter’s cottage that smells a little of sheep dung. For my part, so long as I’m with you, I’d quite frankly be happy living on this bench.”

But it isn’t just Rabih who is a terrible teacher. Kirsten isn’t a star student, either. Throughout their relationship, the two of them fail conclusively at both tasks: teaching and learning. At the first sign that either one of them is adopting a pedagogical tone, the other assumes that they are under attack, which in turn causes them to close their ears to instruction and to react with sarcasm and aggression to suggestions, thereby generating further irritation and weariness in the mind of the fragile “instructing” party.

“Rabih, no one has ever in my life said anything to me about my being materialistic,” responds Kirsten (in bed, ever more exhausted), deeply offended by the suggestion that she has noticed and envies her friends’ lifestyles. “In fact, only the other day, on the phone, Mum remarked that she’d never met anyone as modest and careful with money as me.”

“But that’s slightly different, Teckle. We know she only says that because she loves you and you can do absolutely no wrong in her eyes.”

“You say that like it’s a problem! Why can’t you be just as blind if you love me?”

“Because I love you in a different way.”

“What way is that?”

“A way that makes me want to help you to confront certain issues.”

“A way that means you’re going to be nasty!”

He knows his intentions have spun catastrophically out of control.

“I really do love you. I love you so much,” he says.

“So much that you’re always wanting to change me? Rabih, I wish I understood. . . .”

Harsh lessons allow pupils to fall back on the comforting thought that their instructor is simply crazy or nasty and that they themselves must therefore be, by logic, beyond criticism. Hearing an unreasonably extreme verdict can make us feel, consolingly, that our partner could not possibly be at once vicious and, in some small way, perhaps also right.

Sentimentally, we contrast the spousal negativity with the encouraging tone of our friends and family, on whom no remotely comparable set of demands has ever been made.

There are other ways to look at love. In their philosophy, the ancient Greeks offered a usefully unfashionable perspective on the relationship between love and teaching. In their eyes, love was first and foremost a feeling of admiration for the better sides of another human being. Love was the excitement of coming face-to-face with virtuous characteristics.

It followed that the deepening of love would always involve the desire to teach and in turn to be taught ways to become more virtuous: how to be less angry or less unforgiving, more curious or braver. Sincere lovers could never be content to accept one another just as they were; this would constitute a lazy and cowardly betrayal of the whole purpose of relationships. There would always be something to improve on in ourselves and educate others about.

Looked at through this ancient Greek lens, when lovers point out what might be unfortunate or uncomfortable about the other’s respective character, they shouldn’t be seen as giving up on the spirit of love. They should be congratulated for trying to do something very true to love’s essence: helping their partners to develop into better versions of themselves.

In a more evolved world, one a little more alive to the Greek ideal of love, we would perhaps know to be a bit less clumsy, scared, and aggressive when wanting to point something out, and rather less combative and sensitive when receiving feedback. The concept of education within a relationship would thus lose some of its unnecessarily eerie and negative connotations. We would accept that in responsible hands, both projects—teaching and being taught, calling attention to another’s faults, and letting ourselves be critiqued—might after all be loyal to the true purpose of love.

Rabih never does manage to control himself enough to get his point across. It will take a lot of time, and many more years of insight, before they properly master the art of teaching and learning.

But in the meantime Rabih’s criticism of his wife on the materialistic score is blunted by one seismic humbling development. Five years into their marriage, at a highly auspicious moment in the real estate market, Kirsten manages to sell their flat, secure a new mortgage, and acquire, at a very advantageous price, a light and comfortable house a few streets away, in Newbattle Terrace. The maneuver brings out all of her skills as a financial negotiator. Rabih observes her, up late at night checking different rates and up early sounding tough on the phone with estate agents, and concludes that he is exceptionally lucky to be married to a woman so obviously adept at dealing with money.

Along the way he also realizes something else. There may indeed be a side to Kirsten that is unusually alive to how others are doing financially and which aspires to a certain level of material comfort. This could be seen as a weakness, but insofar as it is one—and Rabih isn’t even sure it is—it is intimately related to a strength. The price that Rabih must pay for relying on his wife’s fiscal talent is having to endure certain associated downsides as well. The same virtues that make her a great negotiator and financial controller can also render her, sometimes—most particularly when he feels anxious about his career—a maddening and unsettling companion with whom to consider the achievements of others. In both scenarios, there is the same attachment to security, the same unwillingness to discount material criteria of success, and the same intelligent concern for what things cost. Identical qualities produce both amazing house deals and insecurities around status. In her occasional worries about the relative wealth of her friends, Kirsten is, Rabih can now see, exhibiting nothing more or less than the weaknesses of her strengths.

Going forward, once they have moved into their new house, Rabih endeavors never to lose sight of those strengths, even at times when the weaknesses to which they can give rise are especially apparent.