Unfortunately, I didn’t engage with the characters and found the plotline too complex. I don’t post negative reviews, so have declined comment.

This story is, in essence quite a simple one - Rabih and Kirsten fall in love, get married, have children and have their happily ever after, right? But love is never that simple - is waxes and wanes from the first flushes of infatuation and lust to the more steady beat of an ongoing relationship. Sometimes that beat fails completely, and the couple has a choice - to stand by and restart, or to destroy and walk away. And can our conditions for Romantic love even survive today, where your childhood and own experiences of being parented and loved shape what you can offer as an adult?

This story is a very conventional approach - a man and a woman and their relationship. But they symbolise a lot more than that. They symbolise two elements of a relationship, anxious and avoidant, secure and mature in turns. They show how a lack of communication, or a lack of understanding about what is actually being communicated, can damage and destroy a person, or make them into something that you hate.

The story is also very simple - it's a reflective approach, largely from Rabih's point of view, that outlines his experiences and thoughts and emotions. But alongside that is the narrator - more of a psychological voice - putting Rabih's thoughts and experiences into context. Occasionally it feels like this voice is interrupting the story that you just want to get on with and read, but it works well as it gives such a clear explanation of WHY people act in a particular way.

That voice as well is an incredibly rational and logical approach, which perfectly offsets the passion and impulsivity of the main characters. The approach is very Freudian too, as the couple gradually reach some level of maturity in their relationship.

And there are lots of great asides and moments shown through Rabih and Kirsten's relationship, ones that any couple, or anyone with an experience of a relationship can completely relate to. I certainly feel like I have some apt quotations to read out at my own hypothetical wedding.

It's quite a short novel - it wouldn't normally take me so long to read. But I had to keep stopping to highlight paragraphs and write down ideas. I guess that is that mark of having read something worthwhile.

Some of this book was quite gripping. A couple meet through work, fall in love and marry. The male charaxcter is still marked mentally by war and childhood bereavement the female to a lesser extent had a loss as a child but is much more bossy than he is.
The only problem is that the author's comments come like those of an old woman on the row behind you in the cinema. It is so frustrating to have the psychological analysis of their actions interrupting the action, spot-on though they are

I put off reading this for a long time.  Early impressions were of pretentious discussions on the meaning of love which did not inspire me with enthusiasm, but once I actually sat down to it, I was very pleasantly surprised.  Part novel, part case study, The Course of Love marks de Botton's first attempt at fiction in over twenty years.  Rabih and Kirsten meet, fall in love and marry, but de Botton points out that this is not the end of their story.  While Jane Austen was content to leave her ladies to assumed wedded bliss, De Botton takes an wide-angle view of love.  Charting sixteen years of a marriage, he describes love as more 'skill than enthusiasm' and considers the everyday vexations and frustrations that can cause couples to stumble on their way round the course.  Despite my misgivings, I found myself completely won over by this deliberately ordinary tale which celebrates the heroism of two people making it through marriage.

Rabih is an architect, Kirsten a surveyor working for Edinburgh Council - they meet at work.  He is Lebanese, she is Scottish.  He is a romantic, shy and insecure.  She is resolutely self-sufficient, defensive.  We know that they love each other, that is not disputed - but they do not truly know their own true selves, so how can they truly understand each other?  Weaving in and out of the history of Rabih and Kirsten's relationship are italicised paragraphs of de Botton's more general observations on relationships and love.  The couple serve to illustrate his points, but while these passages are elegant and stylishly constructed, there were times when they felt a little intrusive, particularly when de Botton was able to make more specific commentary on his characters in the main body of the text.

The novel begins before ever Rabih sets eyes on Kirsten, commencing with a chapter on 'Infatuations' which chronicles how the teenage boy's crushes can come to shape his expectations of relationships.  From there, there is 'Sacred Start', where de Botton contemplates how the 'How We Met' story is asked and recounted so often, but yet how little it can tell anyone about the current state of someone's relationship.  I have been struck by this before with friends, of how a couple's shared jokes and stories are suddenly lost when the relationship dissolves.  The one will snidely declare that they never really liked this or that after all, that the love once so prized was never what it seemed, and the other will simply disappear.  I wished that de Botton had explored more that idea of relationship mythology, of how people can define their relationship by what others think of it.

The idea of the 'sacred start' was another notion which gave me pause for thought.  On a personal note, I met my partner online.  This is an increasingly common experience and when I have been asked how I met him, people are more likely to ask which site than express surprise.  But yet, in meeting someone by arrangement for the purposes of dating, I felt that a lot of de Botton's 'sacred start' is skipped over.  In meeting Kirsten in her professional capacity, Rabih has to wonder whether he is imagining an attraction on her side.  The way towards each other requires both to make a leap and hope that the other responds.  Meeting online removes a lot of this uncertainty and replaces it with another, the hope that the other person will be what their preview implied them to be and that attraction is genuine and not merely a product of the situation.  Wondering whether your expectations and theirs will match.  Our approach to finding a mate is becoming increasingly algorithm based, yet human emotions remain illogical and unpredictable - I did feel a little disappointed that in all his musings, de Botton never ventured into how the internet has changed our route into the course of love.

However, despite these two points which left me wondering, de Botton still uses Rabih and Kirsten to make a plethora of other insights into human relationships.  The politics of laundry, the nonsensical 'blame game', the strains of childcare - all of these put pressure on the love which had begun in such a state of perfection.  As de Botton points out, one of the things that makes these mundane struggles so difficult is 'because they have so seldom seen their struggles sympathetically reflected in the art they know'.  Rows over which set of glasses from IKEA may seem petty, but de Botton unpicks the dispute back to its root, never condemning either side for being upset but also illustrating how hard it can be to articulate these deep down fears which make us act so irrationally in the first place.  We realise then what de Botton's intention really is - to explain, to justify and above all to put these daily disputes which are so absurd into a context that makes it them easier to resolve.  Last year, I read Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage, which Tyler wrote as an exploration of how incompatibility of character can be played out over a long marriage.  De Botton is wiser, he acknowledges that as two separate entities, Rabih and Kirsten are fundamentally incompatible but they love each other and under his direction, they are able to find a way through their stresses and strife and the marriage survives.

There were moments perhaps where de Botton's observations could feel hackneyed - for me, it is a cliché to assume that Kirsten is burdened by her father's abandonment of the family when she was a child and that this has made her a defensive and avoidant adult.  Perhaps simply because he too was male, it felt that de Botton gave more of a voice to Rabih so that the wife was less fully-realised.  My own allegiance was decided by the incident of infidelity - yes, one of the couple is unfaithful.  When asked by their lover about their spouse, the adulterous character responds awkwardly that they are nice and that the lover would like them.  This felt deeply distasteful and although de Botton does offer explanation and mitigation, to me it can only illustrate a crucial weakness of character.  Yet still, even in areas where I could not sympathise, I was transfixed by de Botton's empathy for his characters.  While he may seem to brush aside the power of love in the face of life's challenges, he seems to understand the dogged primal desire for it, for the comfort of someone who will not go away.

I caught myself thinking of those whose love stories are celebrated in our popular culture - how people hark back to the 'She Got Off The Plane' moment in the Friends series finale, as if a pair of people who have been on and off for ten years can actually be said to have a healthy relationship.  Or else there's the couples in Grey's Anatomy who make lengthy eloquent declarations to each other on a weekly basis and then break up for little reason or die.  If it isn't high-adrenaline, word-heavy and likely with a contemporary song playing in a background, how would we ever be able to tell that we are witnessing True Love?  But yet de Botton emphasises how often marriage can mean monotony, as in his fantastic description of parenthood, following the birth of the couple's daughter Esther.   'Neither Kirsten nor Rabih have ever known such a mixture of love and boredom. They are used to basing their friendships on shared temperaments and interests. But Esther is, confusingly, the most boring person they have ever met and the one they find themselves loving the most.'  There is a reason why television has always struggled to incorporate child characters into a narrative - it is not interesting to observe, it takes resolve to see through and keeping hold of a relationship through it all takes remarkable tenacity.

De Botton's book brings out into the light those moments within a relationship that otherwise would leave you wondering - is it just us?  Returning to Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage, the husband in that book ponders how he got married, he had not felt like he knew what he was doing but that now all these years later, other couples seem so assured and yet he feels no more assured.  The Course of Love may at first seem pessimistic in effectively saying this confidence is unachievable, but although Rabih may have to compromise on his romanticism, the novel closes with the sense that his relationship with his wife is that of a solid partnership.  De Botton may gently mock the idealism of hoping for 'a best friend, a lover, a co-parent, a co-chauffeur and a business partner' in one person, but yet despite their imperfections, Kirsten and Rabih finish the novel still together and united.  There has been give and take on both sides as well as forgiveness and they only seem bound the tighter.

If one were to ask Esther or her brother William about their parents, they would most likely dismiss them as dull.  To an outsider, their lives have contained little action.  An ordinary novel would have had to insert some kind of complicating external action to make their stories worthwhile.  But yet we see them as survivors, battle-scarred veterans of the most complicated and confusing part of the human experience; that Rabih and Kirsten's lives are commonplace and their experiences typical only serves to emphasise the point.  I will treasure The Course of Love - in attempting to tackle such an intangible subject, de Botton leaves himself open to easy criticism, but yet I could not but be amazed and awed by one of the most truly honest depictions of love that I can ever remember reading.

Known for his wonderful works of non-fiction, this time de Botton has written a novel that follows the relationship of Rabih and Kirsten over, as the title suggests, the course of their love.

This isn't your typical novel, that's for sure. It reads like a case history in parts, like philosophy in others, and there are other sections where the writing is very lyrical indeed. Whichever genre you think it might fit best, it is a stunning exploration of what it takes to have a successful long term relationship. I think we all know that falling in love is easy. It is the maintaining of that love over the long term, over the course of our lives, that is the real challenge.

Basically, the Romantic notion of love is what sets so many of us up for a fall. Romance is only part of the story. We are ready for marriage, de Botton writes, when we are prepared to love rather than be loved and compatibility, he explains, is an achievement of love - it shouldn't be a precondition.

The exploration of this particular marriage between Rabih and Kirsten covers pretty much everything - disillusionment, loss of desire, adultery, "immature rages, late-night threats of divorce, sullen silences, slammed doors and everyday acts of thoughtlessness and cruelty", as well as the loneliness and fear of being vulnerable that can be felt in long term relationships. Alain de Botton has a voyeur's eye as he zooms in on Rabih and Kirsten, going beyond their physical bodies and into their hearts and minds, where he can see everything and how their past experiences, childhood traumas, their earliest experiences of love and what it meant and how you were supposed to show it, are now playing out in their marriage.

There are many truths in The Course of Love, some of which (having been through a divorce and now having been remarried for nearly a decade) I knew very intimately. Some of de Botton's observations were so accurate they made me squirm a little. I highlighted a lot of passages on my Kindle version!

Ultimately, I came away from reading this wonderful, wise book feeling reassured and comforted. Human beings are complicated and no relationship is perfect. Love can be quite messy, entailing a lot of compromise, and de Botton's stance is that you can only ever really love and make a success out of a long term relationship if you are prepared to accept that your partner isn't perfect and inevitably they will disappoint you. So much of our disillusionment in life comes from expecting people (not just our lovers, our friends and families too) to be mind readers and meet our needs without our ever having to articulate them, so we need to take a bit more responsibility for ourselves and our own happiness, rather than pour all our hopes into one person. Also, the occasional blips that you might worry about are actually far more common than you think (I swear Alain de Botton must have had my living room bugged at one point, as some scenes were very realistic indeed!).

I think this book should be compulsory reading for anyone thinking about getting married. Having got divorced at 26, when I remarried at 29 I think I definitely went into it with my eyes wide open and with realistic expectations - spare yourself what I went through in my first marriage to get to that point, however, and read The Course of Love instead!