The Course of Love: A Novel

for his relationships to work, he will need to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place. He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.

Romanticism is a philosophy of intuitive agreement. In real love, there is no need tiresomely to articulate or spell things out. When two people belong together, there is simply—at long last—a wondrous reciprocal feeling that both parties see the world in precisely the same way.