Name: A Novel To Help Our Love Lives
Uploaded: 2025-06-19T16:56:06.000Z
Duration: 2 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

There's an odd thing about love novels that doesn't tend to get talked about much.

Most of them are about how relationships start.

They spend their time tracking how a couple gets together.

The excitement is all around the issues of will they or won't they.

And then when finally they do get together, there's often not much else for the novelist to do except assure us in so many words that they'll live happily ever after.

Or else the characters get killed off in some gruesome way, you know the kind of thing, her body is found floating in the canal, he's hacked up and put in the ice box.

What's far harder to find, however, is a love novel that's about how most of our love lives actually go.

Which is neither quite happily ever after, nor disaster, death, prison and outright heart rending calamity, but something in the middle.

We need such novels, because novels are like road maps we use to make sense of things that happen to us.

So imagine a novel that looked not so much at the start of love, but how love developed, matured and grew over time.

A novel that wasn't gruesome or catastrophic, but was deeply, sometimes hilariously honest about how actual relationships really are.

A novel that gave us a sense we weren't alone with the complexities of love, a novel in which you'd constantly recognize your own experiences expressed beautifully and crisply.

A novel where the characters were sympathetic, but didn't seem unrealistic or sentimental, a novel that wanted to be fun and gripping, but also eye opening and mind expanding, a hopeful, generous novel that showed you that love was ultimately a skill, not an enthusiasm.

And one we can all learn and get better at through understanding.

That's what Alain de Botton, the guy behind the channel, you'll know his voice, has produced.

A deeply original and entertaining novel called The Course of Love.

Those of you who've enjoyed his mind here will love what you read.

You can order it here in the US and here in the UK.