I finished a book last week that I am still thinking about a lot, and I think it may have changed/improved my ideas about marriage, and I felt like it was just a really good book to have read, and so I will recommend it to you as well:
(image from Amazon.com)
The Course of Love, by Alain de Botton
It’s a novel, kind of, but it’s more a study of the concept of marriage using a fictional couple as illustration. And in fact, I think you might enjoy it more if you go into it thinking of it as a non-fiction book. It can get a little lofty/preachy, but not too often, and not to such an extent that I couldn’t overlook it; you can tell the author put a ton of thought into the topic and sometimes he just gets a little carried away, that’s all.
This excerpt is from a section about why the author thinks art (such as this book) should take more time to explore what ordinary married life is like:
The ordinary challenging relationship remains a strangely and unhelpfully neglected topic. It’s the extremes that repeatedly grab the spotlight…and so it is hard to know what we should make of, and how lonely we should feel about, such things as immature rages, late-night threats of divorce, sullen silences, slammed doors, and everyday acts of thoughtlessness and cruelty.
He goes on to say that ideally art should be showing this to us, but unfortunately it doesn’t do it often enough or well enough. And so:
We hence imagine that things are far worse for us than they are for other couples. Not only are we unhappy, we misunderstand how freakish and rare our particular form of unhappiness might be. We end up believing that our struggles are indications of having made some unusual and fundamental error, rather than evidence that our marriages are essentially going entirely according to plan.
And I think the book accomplishes its goal to show one such example of one such marriage. I didn’t while reading it identify with all or even most of the aspects of the marriage in question, but of course I wouldn’t: it’s only one example, and the argument is that we need LOTS of examples. And I didn’t necessarily find all the same insights remarkable, but of course I wouldn’t: the author is also only one example of what a person might go into marriage expecting, and what that person might have to learn the hard way. The book ends up being more of a template: here is an EXAMPLE of a marriage, here are some of the KINDS of things that can go wrong, here is the SORT of wrong expectation a person might have, here is the SORT of thing a person might have to learn. From the one example, the author brings up many broader topics that could apply to any marriage.
It can get a little bit depressing to think of one’s spouse feeling so desperately miserable and as if they made the wrong choice to be with us. I found I was happier if I concentrated mostly on the ways in which I myself identified with the story, and not on the ways Paul might identify.
Oooh! I’ve been looking at this! Now I might have to return to the audiobook. Did you read it or listen to it?
I read it. I found small doses worked best. Sometimes I had to re-read something a few times to let it sink in.
I love everything by Alain de Botton, I really feel like he is trying to help me understand my time on this planet and not be so despairing. Also, I LOVE books about regular marriages, the ups and downs. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields = so good.
Hmm. When I’m desperately unhappy about being married, I mainly take issue with the institution. And/or it’s specific permutations. For instance – why do I have to live in the same house as this person FOREVER?? Can’t we have adjoining apartments at some point without it being a THING? (And not just a thing to society, but to my husband). Even if I’m super annoyed about something in particular, I think of it as being crazy that the institution of marriage has made the fact everyone will be annoyed about something in particular a certainty.
Long way of saying, I’ve understood of course that my husband is really freaking annoyed with me sometimes, but I’ve never considered “one’s spouse feeling…as if they made the wrong choice to be with us.”
I suppose that’s how we’ve framed our particular marriage. We both agree that there is no right person. Of course we’re going to be the wrong person for each other sometimes. Hopefully the wrong choice-ness doesn’t rise to the level of divorce, but it’s always going to be there.
PS – I’ve really wanted to read this book! It keeps not being on sale and not being owned by my library. I think I might have to just give up and pay full price.
“why do I have to live in the same house as this person FOREVER??”
This made me laugh. I am struggling right now with the realization that I don’t like to go to bed at the same time as my husband because I like to start my night in bed ALONE. I love it being dark and quiet and still, and getting time to read or write notes to myself or whatever without anyone else taking up space beside me, even if it’s just space breathing. Unfortunately, to make this happen I would have to start going to bed at 9 p.m., and my kids aren’t even in bed at 9 p.m. So instead, I stay up super late so I have time to myself outside of bed, but this is it’s own set of problems and I seriously thought the other night, “I wonder what he would say to separate beds.” (Horrified, he would be horrified. Sigh.)
YES. THIS IS MY PROBLEM. I love sleeping alone. Every part of it. I love getting into a bed that’s just mine, I love reading until I fall asleep, I love someone not draping themselves over me, and on. My husband is horrified if I even fall asleep on the couch staying up too late to be alone.
I don’t need a whole separate apartment (although I’d love it, because our cleaning standards are different – with mine being stereotypically-defyingly lower than his), but I think separate bedrooms would be life changing. It’s not even that he’s worried that other activities that take place in beds would decrease, it’s just “not done.” Sigh.
My stepdad goes to bed around 9 pm every night, and my mom goes to bed at like 2 am. They’ve been doing it for years, and it just works for them.
My husband likes to walk upstairs without saying a word, and I have to ask him if he is planning to stay up there and go to bed, or if he is coming back down. It’s not even that it bothers me if he goes to bed before me, but I would like a goodnight if that is the case. We’ve only been married a few months, so we’ll see if he ever gets it.
I’ve been married seven years now, but the first two years or so, it drove me crazy that my husband wouldn’t say goodnight but would just disappear off to bed. We had a “serious talk” about how he really needed to tell me goodnight because it made me sad. He was like, “What? Oh. Okay. We just never said goodnight in my family.”
my grandparents slept in separate bedrooms my entire life. My grandpa was the stereotypical old man who would freeze to death on the equator, and my grandma was the stereotypical postmenopausal woman who slept with the windows open in the dead of winter.
I was only in high school when my grandma died, and pretty naive, so I suppose it’s possible there were other reasons, but I truly don’t believe so. My grandfather openly wept at her funeral, and this was not a man who ever cried. Everyone always raises their eyebrows when I tell this story and I find it irritating; they loved each other deeply, I TRULY believe this. They just needed their space to sleep. and when you think about it, why have we decided that is so weird?
I’m hugely in favor of having separate rooms, just not for sleeping. When we first got married my husband had been living in a 3BR, and I made it quite clear that I would be claiming the smallest room as my office and painting it purple. This worked out SPLENDIDLY. I had a lovely, feminine space that was all my own…until he decided it was so pleasant in there he moved his desk in too, because he missed me. But it was still mine, and I still got to make all the decisions about that room singlehandedly and leave my projects all over every surface.
Our new apartment is half the size. The spare room is the size of a postage stamp and has to serve as combination his office, my office, tool garage, and general storage. I daydream about having my own room again.
I do really like sleeping near him, though. I just want my own project space.
My ex-manfriend suggested from the start that we would get separate bedrooms once we’d move in together. We never did, and his suggestion is part of the reason… for me it has nothing to do with (societal) expectations (anyway we live in a part of the world where it is very normal for couples to have separate beds or bedrooms), but I just hate the idea of sleeping alone being the default. Having the bed to myself for a night every once in a while? YES PLEASE. Having to wonder whether tonight will be the night my partner will sleep next to me or not? HELL NO. I already hated falling asleep next to him at his house and waking up to find he had moved to the couch – when I want to share my life with someone, I actually do want their face to be the first thing I see in the morning :)
I am a bed nomad in our house and my husband doesn’t seem to mind.
When our first was little we co-slept with her between us; when our second was born we started the same way, but he grew into a squirmer, and it didn’t bother me, plus I needed to be close to breastfeed, but my husband didn’t sleep well so he moved over to sleep with our then-toddler daughter to keep her company. Eventually I ended up in a single bed with our son in his room, with our daughter on a mattress on the floor, then we got one of those beds that can pull out to accommodate two twins together (a king?) so I slept with both our kids there for awhile. When we moved houses the kids ended up just the two of them and I moved back into the queen bed with my husband, then eventually our daughter wanted some space so her brother went into the twin in his own room, and we accordioned the giant bed in my daughter’s room back into a twin.
This “normal” sleeping arrangement lasted about 4 months – until late last March.
Then we got a dog who had grown up in a kennel in a commercial breeding operation. We didn’t want to leave her alone and lonely downstairs, but didn’t trust her to leave the carpeted upstairs to relieve herself at night, so down to the couch on the main level I moved. I’ve pretty much been there ever since, though she is FINALLY becoming more reliably trained to eliminate outside, so over the holidays we all slept in various combinations and permutations in the 3 beds upstairs (depending on who wanted company, what guests were sleeping over, if someone was sick and needed someone to hand to monitor them, etc.), and the dog slept in whatever room I was in without mishap. I’m still not sure what the new norm will be next week with the kids back in school.
This fluidity in sleeping arrangements is possible mostly because we don’t really care what other people think about where we should sleep, but while I can sleep well almost anywhere, I can’t sleep well beside my husband when he snores, which he does often, but not every night, so he’s willing to concede that I shouldn’t have to sleep beside him all the time. Also, in the summer he likes a heavy duvet with a fan blowing on him, and I can’t stand a breeze on my face or heavy covers when it’s hot, so we’re not really compatible with our preferences.
I suspect, in fact, we’d both move around all the time, but the only bed he’s really comfortable is his own. He also says that it’s too small when he has someone else there (me or a kid or two), even though it’s a queen, and he accuses me of cover-thievery sometimes, so I suspect he likes the solitude and the room.
The snoring, the cold air, the fan…you have described my DH’s setup to a tee! Although now the snoring is replaced with a CPAP machine! I love sleeping alone. Love. It. No pity necessary, except for when I go on vacation and have to share a hotel room :)
If it’s only the start of the night that’s the problem, that doesn’t seem like a threatening sort of need (not that you couldn’t have it even if it did feel threatening to you), and not like something a partner who cares about you shouldn’t be able to understand and help you solve for or at least empathize with. My brain jumps to solutions and scripts to try to talk about this because that’s what my brain does, but you haven’t asked for advice so I’m going to try to avoid going into detailed problem-solver mode. Just…it’s reasonable to have needs that aren’t being well met in your current set-up. Maybe if you tell your partner about the needs, he’ll be able to get into problem-solver mode with you and you can make things better together. Either fantasizing quietly to yourself about solutions you’ll never propose *or* trying to have everything completely solved in your head before you bring it up circumvent that process and leave you trying to manage the intersections of your two sets of needs all on your own. I hope that isn’t how things are for you, overall, because it sounds really lonely and stressful.
Interesting. WRT comments above mine, 4 of the first 5 years I was married, my DH and I lived apart (for career reasons), like, far apart — a 10-hour drive — for more months of the year than not. When my co-workers would ask me about my DH and I would mention our setup, if they had been married for <5 years or had small children, they would get this glazed, horrified look on their faces and comment on how hard it must be. If, in contrast, they had been married for 5+ years and did NOT have small children, they would often get this dreamy look on their faces and say something like, "So … sometimes you live WITH your husband and other times you live BY YOURSELF." Sort of as if I'd just told them that I'd won the lottery…
Ha!
We are in year seven of marriage/relationship, and for the last 3 years we’ve had separate bedrooms. And it is bliss. For both of us. It took a while to get over what I thought was the coldness of the arrangement, and obviously private time is a different matter, but we both sleep so much better alone. We joke that we have the Queen’s chamber and the King’s chamber ;)
I want to read this immediately.
I loved this article of him, and I imagine the book is more of this. I find it so reassuring to read/hear about other people’s marriage…stuff — grievances, quirks, head-exploding annoyance, occasional despair. It’s definitely not talked about enough, and as a result carries a lot of shame, which it shouldn’t. We’re all difficult and messy, and that’s ok!
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-will-marry-the-wrong-person.html?_r=0
I think that going into this one thinking of it as non-fiction is a GREAT suggestion. I read it after hearing many, many glowing reviews and felt let down. There were passages that just spoke to me and I wanted to highlight and reread forever… but because I was expecting a novel I was disappointed that where wasn’t really a story arc.
Love this post, and reading the comments. I’ve never read anything by de Botton, but when I worked in the bookstore I always thought his name and the books he wrote looked tantalizingly glamorous and exotic – so I’m really not sure why I never read any. This sounds like a much-needed addition to the canon. And to join the sleep arrangements conversation – I have a friend who has a separate bedroom from her husband and they love it. My own husband has restless leg syndrome, so he goes to bed, I come to bed a little later, then he gets up around three or four and wanders around, usually ending up on the couch downstairs so I get the whole bed to myself for a few hours. He also travels fairly frequently, and while it was really hard when the kids were smaller, at this point I do kind of enjoy my solitary bed time.
I also read the article linked above and was comforted, so will definitely look into the book. We need more of this truth telling. Everywhere I look I see happy couples, I often feel like I’m the loneliest person in my whole city. About the sleeping, my husband stays up until the wee hours so I always go to bed alone. I hate it. Anyway, my grandparents had separate bedrooms for as long as I can remember, so it isn’t as uncommon as you might suspect.
I read this sentence right after you posted this and had to walk away: “It can get a little bit depressing to think of one’s spouse feeling so desperately miserable and as if they made the wrong choice to be with us. ”
Now I have done some deep breathing (WHY did I never CONSIDER that before??? I fully realize I am No Picnic! OMG!). Okay and now I am doing some MORE deep breathing (HOW do ANY marriages SURVIVE???) and… maybe I am not ready for this book. But maybe I NEED it.
And I overstated it a bit for impact. The book balances it better, with many references to how the spouse ALSO feels he/she pretty much can’t live without the other person, the other person is so amazing, etc. The emphasis is more on the idea that we might BLAME various frustrations/incompatibilities/fights/issues on having chosen the wrong person, when ACTUALLY we’d be struggling NO MATTER WHAT. And I worry that Paul, who is not so much the thinking-about-emotions/relationships type, might not come to this conclusion, but might get stuck in the “I’d have no problems if I’d married someone else” trap.