Specifically the Dream of a Soulmate Infatuations

Kirsten suggests a trip to Portobello Beach, half and hour away by bicycle on the Firth of Forth. Rabih is unsteady on his bike, rented from a shop that Kirsten kow off Princess Street. She has her own a cherry-red model with twelve gears and advanced brake calipers. He does his best to keep up. Halfway down the hill, he activates a new gear but the chain protests, jumps and spins impotently against the hub, Frustration and a familiar rage surge up within him. It'll be a long walk back up to the shop. But this isn't Kirsten's way bike upside down, reverses the gears adjusts the rear deralileur. Her hands are soon smudged with oil, a streak of which ends up on her cheek.

Love means admiration for qualities in the lover that promise to conrrect our weaknesses and imbalances; love is a search for completion.

He has fallen in love with her calm, her faith that it will be OK, her lack of a sense of persecution, her absence of fatalism- thers are the virtues of his unusual new Scottish friend who speaks in an accent so hard to understand that he has to ask three times for clarification on her use of the word temporary. Rabih's love is a logical response to the discovery of complementary strenghts and a range of attributes to which he aspires. He loves from a feeling of incompleteness - and form a desire to be made whole.

He isn't alone in this. Albeit in different areas, Kirsten is likewise seeking to make up for deficiencies. She didn't travel outside Scotland until after university. Her relatives all come from the same small part of the country. Spirits are narrow there: the colurs greym the atmosphere provincial, the values self - denying. She is, in response, powerfully drawn to what she associates with the South. She want light, hope, people who live through their bodies with passion and emotion. She reverse the sun while hating her own paleness and discomfort in its rays. There is a poster of the medina in Fez hanging on her wall.

She is excited by what she has learn about Rabih's background She finds it intriguing that he is the son of a Lebanese civil - engineer father and a German air-hostess mother. He tell her stories about a childhood spent in Beirut, Athens and Barce-lona, in which there were moments of brightness and beauty and now and then, extreme danger. He speaks Arabic, French German and Spanish; his endearments (playfully delivered) come in many flavours. His skin is olive to her rosy White. He crosses his long legs when he sits and his surprisingly delicate hands know how to prepare her makdous, tabbouleh and Kartoffelsalat. He feeds her his words.

She, too, is looking for love to rebalance and complete her.

Love is also, and equally, about weakness, about being touched by another's fragilitties and sorrows, especially when (as happens in the early days) we ourselves are in danger of being held responsible for them. Seeing our lover despondent and in crisis, in tears and uable to cope, can reassure us that, for all their virtues, the are not alienatingly invincible. they, too are at points fonfused and at sea, a realization which lends us a new supportive role, reduces our sense of shame about our won inadequacies and draws us closer to each other around a shard experience of pain.

Read Part 9