Concept
The Courage to Love
The courage to love is The Courage to Be Happy's approach to love, which it treats as the hardest of Adler's three life tasks: seeing love not as a feeling we fall into or a destined person we find, but as a decision made again and again that moves the subject of a life from 'I' to 'we'.
Adler held that every adult faces three life tasks: work, friendship and love. Kishimi and Koga rank them by difficulty. Work relationships can run on conditional trust because a shared goal holds them together. Friendship asks for unconditional trust, with no task to bind it. Love asks the most, because it ties two lives together. From there the book makes two claims. First, there is no destined partner; waiting for the right person can be a way of avoiding the task, since no real person matches the fantasy. Second, love begins with a decision and is built through decisions renewed on ordinary days. The deepest claim is that love moves the subject from 'I' to 'we', and the authors define self-reliance as exactly this break from self-centredness. The separation of tasks still applies: the other person's feelings and choices are theirs. That is why the decision takes two; when harm continues in a relationship, the task is protecting yourself, not loving harder.
A real-life example
Cengiz, deputy chief physician at a hospital in Samsun, kept putting off real conversations with his wife until 'things calm down at work'. He finally listed what he was waiting for and saw that none of it was truly necessary. He took Wednesday evenings off the on-call rota, and those evenings they now cook together.
How to use it
- 1Before you give your closest relationship your full attention, write down what you are waiting for and cross out what is not truly necessary.
- 2Set aside one regular hour a week for that relationship and protect it like a work meeting.
- 3Say what you need once and clearly, and leave the other person's answer to them.