The Dream of a Soulmate Part (7)
Specifically the Dream of a Soulmate Infatuations
And yet, we should insist, none of this has anything much yet to do with a love story. Love stories begin not when we fear someone may be unwilling to see us again, but when they decide they would have no objection to seeing us all the time, not when they have every opportunaity to run away, but when they have exchanged solemn vowes promising to hold us, and be held captive by us, for life.
Our understainding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed or love stories to ent way to early. We seems to know far to much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might countinue.
At the gates to the Botanic Garden, Kirsten tell Rabih to call her and admits, with a smile in which he suddently sees what she must have looked like when she was ten years old, that she'll be free any evening the following week.
On his walkh hone to Quartermile, wending through the saturday crowds Rabihis thrilled enough to want to stop random strangers and share his good fortune with them. He has, Without knowing how, richly succeeded at the three central challenges underpinning the Romantic idea of love: he has found the right person, he has opened his heart to her and he has been accepted.
And yet he is, of course nowhere yet. He and Kirsten will marry, they will suffer, they will frequently worry about money, they will have a girls first, then a boy, one of them will have anaffair, there will passages of boredom, they'll sometimes want to murder one another and on a few occasions kill themselves. This will be the real love story.