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contents
introduction
the exploded star
the myth of the right person
the football coach and the cheerleader
what makes a good love story?
coal miner’s daughter
love in context
girl meets boy
following love’s script
the problem of deservingness
our american obsession with cinderella
the black box
thoughts on the stories we don’t tell
i’m willing to lie about how we met
the tyranny of meeting cute
okay, honey
bad advice from good people
if you can fall in love with anyone, how do you choose?
the pleasures of ordinary devotion
to fall in love with anyone, do this
arthur aron’s 36 questions
acknowledgments
about the author
notes
To Mom and Dad, for showing me how to love
introduction
I’d been writing about the dangers of love stories for five years when my own story became a subject of international interest.
In January 2015, I published an essay in the New York Times’s Modern Love column about a twenty-year-old psychological study designed to create romantic love in the laboratory using thirty-six increasingly intimate questions. I described my subsequent experience re-creating the study with an acquaintance (who later became my boyfriend) one summer night. The editors gave the story a particularly compelling headline: “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This.”
I felt nervous in the week before publication. I knew an article in the Times would mean a few thousand people reading about my three-month-old relationship. But the response was startling: The piece began circulating hours after it appeared online. Within weeks, it had been viewed millions of times.
It was obvious that I’d offered something powerful: the idea that there might be a ready formula for falling in love.
• • •
I didn’t really start thinking about love stories until my parents split up nine years ago, when I was twenty-six. As far as I knew, their marriage was happy. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. I began to wonder what I had missed.
It occurred to me that my struggle to make sense of my parents’ divorce was rooted in the story of how their romance had started, a story I had always loved. My parents met when my mom was in high school in a tiny Virginia coal mining town. She was a cheerleader and she had to interview the new football coach—my dad—for the school newspaper. They quickly became friends and then began seeing each other in secret. Four years after that they were married, along with my mom’s sister and my dad’s best friend, in a double wedding at the Baptist church. It was very American, very Appalachian, and, I always thought, the best love story I knew. When I was young, I told it to anyone who would listen.
Divorce was the wrong ending, one I hadn’t even considered possible. For so long I thought of romantic love as a virtue, a moral triumph, a reward for people who made good life choices. But my parents’ divorce suggested that there were no guarantees in love, not even for the best and most devoted among us, or those of us with the perfect story.
Stories had shaped my hopes for love, but I could see that they were failing me. I decided to learn everything I could about love. I read articles on the neurochemistry of love, the psychology of romantic relationships, the economic history of marriage, and the sociological theories of storytelling. I rewatched the movies I’d loved when I was young, like Notting Hill and Dirty Dancing. I listened to pop songs and read sonnets. I interviewed my grandmother and my parents, surveyed my friends, and borrowed marriage and dating advice books from the library.
For most of my life, I’d conceptualized love as something that happened to me. It isn’t merely the stories we tell about love that encourage this attitude, but the very words themselves. In love, we fall. We are struck, we are crushed. We swoon. We burn with passion. Love makes us crazy or it makes us sick. Our hearts ache and then they break. I wondered if this was how love had to work—or if I could take back some control. Science suggested that I could.
• • •
Watching my piece go viral confirmed something I’d suspected for years: When it comes to love, we prefer the short version of the story. My Modern Love column had become an oversimplified romantic fable suggesting there was an ideal way to experience love. It made love seem predictable, like a script you could follow.
And because of this, I understand why people ask—whether in interviews or at dinner parties—if the man from the essay and I are still together, or whether we plan to get married, or have kids. I don’t blame them for asking. They want proof of love’s script playing out in the real world.
I still love love stories, but I also see the ways in which they limit our sense of what’s possible in love. Love isn’t as simple as our stories make it seem. But its complexity is what makes it so captivating. Writing these essays helped me find a way to write my own script for love—and wrest control from the thing that was controlling me.
the exploded star
the myth of the right person
In early 2010, I signed a declaration of marriage to a man I was thinking of leaving.
“It’s official,” Kevin said as he arrived home from work, dropping a folder on the coffee table next to my slippered feet. “We are now married in the eyes of the Canadian government.”
Inside, signed and notarized, was our statutory declaration of common-law union, just one of many documents required for us to formally immigrate to Canada.
“Well,” I said, without looking up, “I guess we should celebrate.”
I didn’t think we should celebrate.
Kevin said nothing and walked into the kitchen.
It was mid-February, and I was teaching four courses, which meant four classes to plan and four sets of papers to grade. I read papers over coffee in the morning and I fell asleep on the couch with a stack in my lap each night.
I was so grateful that Kevin had taken over the work of our permanent-residency application, carefully printing our names and all our previous addresses in tiny boxes. I knew I should thank him—I wanted to thank him—but instead I stared blankly at his name and signature next to mine. I ran my fingers over the raised seal. We could file taxes together, and if one of us were on life support, the other could decide how long the plug stayed in its outlet. After nine years together, having these legal options made sense. But the irony of this moment was obvious to us both: The documentation confirming our legal union had finally arrived after weeks of indecision about whether we should stay together or split up.
I remember thinking that what my dad said was true: It’s the little things that keep a couple together. Today we are together, I thought, to avoid another mound of paperwork, another two-year wait.
• • •
If pressed, I could not have told you what was wrong with our relationship. We’d always argued, but this was different. It was quiet and sustained, as if our relationship had fallen ill. The illness seemed contagious.
When I woke
up coughing in the middle of the night, I thought of the doctor who’d said the respiratory system was the first thing to erode under long-term stress. I’d been skeptical, but maybe she was right.
Kevin stirred as the bed shook with each rumble of my chest. He rolled against me and stretched a leg across my thighs, wrapped an arm under my chin. “This better?” he murmured, and I realized that, in his sleepy state, he was trying to hold my coughs in with the weight of his body. I inhaled slowly and relaxed my diaphragm. It was better.
Even after a day of sharp-edged silence, he could soothe the effects of the common cold. In the bookstore the week before, I’d sat on the floor with a copy of the psychologist John Gottman’s The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, in which he claimed that long-term partners become physiologically interdependent, regulating each other’s immunity and heart rate. But in a relationship where individual needs aren’t met, partners feel low-level chronic physical and emotional stress, weakening the immune system.1 I wondered which was happening to us.
I tried to count how many days had passed since I’d felt his body against mine—four, at least. Or five? I thought of a cough I’d had years before—the worst I’d ever had. For a week I woke up gasping in the night, an unscratchable itch in my lungs. At first Kevin would wake up, alarmed by the frantic spasms of my body. Then, growing accustomed to it, he’d roll over and sleepily rub my back. “You have to go to the doctor,” he’d whispered between my coughing fits.
We lived apart then, but spent every night together. Even when I was sick, even when we did nothing but sleep. I’d get home from night class at eleven thirty, drop my books on my bed, and bike down the hill to his house. I’d let myself in, tiptoe up to his room, and crawl under the covers beside him. I’d wake up before dawn, pull on my jeans, and ride to the small coffee shop where I worked on Capitol Hill. It was always worth the inconvenience: a few hours of his body pressed against mine in the dark.
I wondered then, as I still sometimes do, what else I have loved as much as I loved his skin, the way it wrapped up his muscles and bones, the softness between his shoulder blades where I placed my lips each night, as we drifted into sleep. That’s how I fell in love with him in college, when we slept belly to back, my nose tucked against his neck, when the daytime was just a placeholder for the night.
• • •
But now I was twenty-nine and I was thinking about getting married and starting a family. And I didn’t know if I wanted to do those things with this man I’d fallen for in college.
This was a problem I had no idea how to solve.
I understood that it was possible to love someone at twenty and not want to spend your life with him. Unlike Kevin and me, most of our friends had moved on from their college relationships. At twenty, I’d assumed we’d move on, too.
And, thanks to my parents’ divorce a few years earlier, I knew it was possible to spend a lifetime with someone and then just fall out of love.
But it had never occurred to me that you could love someone the way I loved Kevin—that you could want to wake up with him every morning and go to bed with him every night—but not know if you wanted to commit the rest of your life to him.
Kevin didn’t really want kids. He didn’t particularly want to get married, though he wasn’t opposed to long-term commitment. If the conflict had been as simple as that—one of us wanted marriage and family and the other didn’t—we might’ve known what to do. Maybe I didn’t want a child that badly, anyway, I often thought. I just wanted the choice. I wanted to be able to have a conversation about it that didn’t turn into an argument. I felt sure that if we solved our other problems, we could negotiate about marriage and family. But it wasn’t quite clear what our other problems were.
I’d injured my knee, and while Kevin went backcountry skiing with friends, I spent my weekends feeding egg cartons to the woodburning stove in our drafty Vancouver bungalow. I walked the dog in the rain. I graded papers.
I could feel my world narrowing as his widened across the mountains of southwestern British Columbia. The night before a powder day, he was giddy. He could barely sleep. I’d never felt so alienated by someone else’s enthusiasm. It seemed selfish to hope he’d stay home with me, so I said nothing. Instead, I booked a week in Costa Rica with friends. While I was gone, I didn’t call. I didn’t email. I wanted him to feel what I’d felt, to know I was having fun, but to be unable to see the precise contours of my days.
Our relationship had started long-distance, and all I wanted—more than I have wanted anything before or since—was to share my days with him. Now that we had that life, I worried that I’d signed a contract with Love that couldn’t be undone. Despite my alienation, I still felt bound to Kevin by that sense of wanting—and by love. I still wanted his time, his company, his attention, his skin. It would be easier, I often thought, if one of us just stopped loving the other.
• • •
“When you see older couples, do you think of you and Kevin?” my friend Liz prompted one day. We were shopping for her wedding dress on a Sunday afternoon when an elderly couple walked by hand in hand.
“No,” I said honestly. “I don’t think of us when I see eighty-year-olds holding hands.” In fact, I usually assumed those couples were on their second or third marriage. But then I backtracked: “Well, I don’t think Kevin is the one person for me in the whole world. But I feel like he’s mine. I can’t really imagine my life with someone else. You know what I mean?”
Liz smiled with her mouth but frowned with her eyes. She did not know what I meant. How could she? She was planning a wedding to someone she never really argued with. Someone she had no doubts about. The certitude of people like Liz annoyed me. People who knew they would spend their life with someone were like people who knew they were going to heaven. It just seemed so audacious, so irrational. But Liz was not irrational. She was a social psychologist, one of my most accomplished academic friends. This pointed to a more likely problem: me. What if I was the irrational one, clinging to a relationship that was obviously doomed? Maybe I was the only one who couldn’t see it.
Did it really matter if I didn’t think of Kevin when I saw a happy elderly couple? Did it matter how often we argued? As long as he came into the bedroom before work and lay down on top of me, stuffing the covers around me, saying, “Wake up, my little breakfast burrito!” and peppering my forehead with kisses, how could I envision my life with someone else? Even if I couldn’t see us together at eighty, I couldn’t bear the thought of waking up alone tomorrow.
A summer earlier, we’d spent our days on a small Greek island, rock climbing every morning and swimming in the Aegean every afternoon. “Man, it must suck to be everybody else,” Kevin said one night as we took the switchbacks up the hill toward the tiny island studio we’d rented. We took the high road bordered with oleander, the long way home. We agreed that we even felt sorry for the people we were before we arrived, with their busy lives that didn’t include gazing at limestone cliffs in the long after-dinner light of June, saying, “Let’s climb that one tomorrow.” Remembering this trip left me gutted by the thought of a life without him. Even the smell of fresh thyme could sideline me. Or the evening breeze as I biked home from work. I’d recall how it felt to climb on our rented scooter and motor around the island to our favorite dinner spot. It was the sweetened, condensed brand of happiness, I thought, with my arms tight around him after a dinner of mackerel and salty cheese salad.
• • •
I often found myself online, clicking through strangers’ wedding albums. I was looking for something: a gaze; a goofy, helpless grin; a face twisted by joy, half smiling, half crying. It was a look I knew from movies, the way Hugh Grant grins at Julia Roberts in the last scene of Notting Hill. I wanted to know if it existed, that happiness beyond doubt, or if it was just a myth.
Occasionally, I saw a glimpse of it, a look that said, I am making the best decision of my life, on a stranger’s Flickr feed or in an acquaintanc
e’s wedding album. The expression was one of excruciating contentment: a groom reaching for his husband’s hand, a bride catching her mother’s eye. It astounded me, this extreme gratitude in the face of lifetime commitment. How unself-conscious these people seemed, how sure.
I read blogs written by stylish thirtysomethings who seemed to have it together. One—a friend of a friend—had written a short note on the occasion of her wedding anniversary. She and her writer-filmmaker husband had married young and, naturally, had three stylish and self-possessed children. Her reflection on her wedding struck me as particularly genuine: “Was it the happiest day of my life? Probably not. Was it the best decision I ever made? Yes.”
Yes, I wrote in my journal. It just got to me, that “yes.” I want to feel like that.
I don’t think I knew what I was looking for at the time, but I can see it now. It had something to do with finding the right person to love: Was the idea of “the one” real or a myth?
After my parents’ divorce, I’d come to understand that even a marriage between the most well-matched people could fail. This possibility had displaced any hope I’d had about finding the perfect person.
I found photos from a friend’s wedding that spring: Kevin and I standing on the bow of a boat at sunset. In one, he lifts me as my hair flies up. His arms are tight around my chest. In another, my head is thrown back in laughter as he turns toward me with a broad smile. It looks as if our teeth are about to bump. The Strait of Georgia glistens in the background. There in my lopsided grin and the deep crinkles around his eyes is the evidence: We were happy, we loved each other. Weren’t those the expressions I’d been looking for?
• • •
On one of my Google binges, I made the mistake of reading Lori Gottlieb’s infamous article in the Atlantic, “Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.”2
How to Fall in Love with Anyone Page 1
