The kiss was thrilling and satisfying, and it seemed to close whatever gap there was between us. He’d finished all his classes and gotten his Peace Corps assignment; he would leave in February. Until then, he was renting a furnished room from a friend, a drafty space that had once been a screened-in porch. A few days before my flight, I went to stay with him there and we had sex.
I had this idea that sex would be the appropriate physical expression of our closeness, that it was a significant gesture, something I wanted to offer him. I didn’t think about pleasure. I was nervous and awkward, and when it was over, he rolled away from me. “I feel like I just hurt someone I really care about,” he said to the wall. He meant Helen.
I lay there quietly, wondering why he’d wanted to do it in the first place, wishing he would just turn over and stretch his arms around me like he had all semester. Kissing—and now sex—had turned out to be a poor substitute for his affection. I stared at the wood-paneled walls, the giant American flag that hung above the headboard, the shelves on which he stacked his few clothes. The January air seeped through the paneling as I stayed very still and thought about how different we were, how poorly equipped I would be to pick up and move to a small village in the middle of nowhere. I felt glad that I’d gotten to know Kevin and also stunned by the difference between what I’d imagined for our last night together and what was actually happening.
I understood that he wanted my sympathy in that moment or that, at the very least, he wanted me to somehow soften the guilt he felt about Helen. Only months later, when we were both living in other countries, did I finally get angry about this. In the early-morning hours, I’d dream that Kevin was lying next to me in bed. In the warmth of the duvet and the haze of half-sleep, I was always happy to see him. But then I’d wake up furious. Furious with him for daring to show up and furious with myself for summoning him there. I’d love to say that I learned something from how badly Kevin and I had left things—something about how intense feelings do not absolve us of our obligation to be honest and kind. Or something about how I was allowed to demand more from love—I didn’t have to be satisfied with a series of inconsistent romantic gestures.
But the truth is that I was hurt by that night for a long time. Sometimes I think that in all the years we spent together, I never quite got over it. I never stopped blaming Kevin for my own passivity in our earliest months together.
• • •
Years later, I was out for drinks with my friends Molly and Claire, when Claire asked how Kevin and I met, saying it seemed like we’d been together forever.
“We were so young.” I nodded, remembering how—eight years earlier—I’d been quite sure that whatever Kevin and I were doing was temporary.
I told them about the nylon shorts that hit at mid-thigh and how I thought he was probably an exchange student and how, back in the dorm an hour later, it dawned on me: He was the guy from Linguistics class, the photographer for the newspaper whom I’d had a crush on.
“I don’t know why, but I felt like I had to talk to him immediately,” I said. “So I went out to the quad, lingered around the cookie table until he walked past, and then I told him we needed someone to take pictures for the paper, which wasn’t quite true. Luckily the editor and I were good friends. And when I told him later that I’d found a photographer, he said, ‘Sure, you can give him his assignment when you roll over in the morning.’ Wink, wink. I think I turned bright red. But I got Kevin’s number.”
I loved telling the story of how Kevin and I met. It smoothed out the ambiguities, reminding me of our long history.
I told them about how he let me braid his hair the first time we hung out. Claire giggled, trying to imagine him with round cheeks and shoulder-length hair, looking like some European hippie. I explained how, when we parted ways a few months later, I really believed I’d never see him again. People always love this idea—that a short campus fling could become an enduring romance. And it felt that way then: lifelong, fixed. I’d loved him for most of my adulthood, and though we never discussed how long we would stay together, it was difficult to look toward the future and not see him there.
I was good at telling our story because I’d been crafting it from the day Kevin and I met. I’m in love, I wrote in a message to my best friend Erin the evening I asked for his email address. I was in my dorm room, looking out the window to where he sat with friends on the quad. I typed these words before I’d even spoken to him. It didn’t matter that I was not actually in love. It only mattered that he existed, that he seemed unlike everyone I knew, and that I’d come up with a way to talk to him. All of that had happened and I needed to tell someone. He was, from the first day of our acquaintance, one of those mercurial people whose attention feels like sunlight, something you don’t know you’ve been deprived of until it shines on you, something you’d be smart to store up for the months ahead.
I told them about a lot of things but not about Helen, not about the way he plunged his hand into the cookie batter and then offered it to me, palm to my face, leaving me unsure whether I should remove the sticky dough with my fingers or my mouth. I didn’t tell them about how lonely I was months later when the two of us were living new, separate lives, or how desperately I checked and rechecked my email for signs of his loneliness.
I did not tell them how I’d recently stormed out of our apartment and sat in the driver’s seat of my car, crying and thinking about my parents—about how much resolve it must’ve taken them to end their marriage. I wanted to tell a neatly packaged story. I wanted to feel like I had found the right person and love had come easily.
• • •
Once we finally made a life in the same city, Kevin and I often declared our love. We were giddy, absorbed in one another. We made our commitment explicit, but still we rarely discussed our expectations: about fidelity or marriage or sex or the future. It was years before I learned how to identify my own desires and voice them confidently, as if they were equal to his.
I wish I could call the twenty-year-old I was and say: You are allowed to be hurt by someone who holds your hand during a movie but refers to your relationship as a friendship. You are allowed to say simply and directly, What do you want out of this?
We are all looking for signs of what to make of our experiences of love, and often the conventional gestures from the script of love—whether they be bouquets of flowers or a declaration of exclusivity—are what help us navigate these experiences, especially in the earliest stages of love, when direct communication feels so risky.
At twenty, I wanted a love story almost as much as I wanted love itself. I didn’t have a script to make sense of those first few months with Kevin, but over time I learned how to edit out the doubt and ambiguity and shape our lives into a classic girl-meets-boy story: a variation on the familiar form, giving myself some of the agency I wished I’d had.
Maybe I accepted less than what I wanted—from Kevin and from love—because he offered enough to tell a good story. And for a few years, having a good love story felt a lot like having good love.
the problem of deservingness
our american obsession with cinderella
On our family road trips, I got the back bench of the minivan, where I’d stretch out and read John Grisham novels for hours at a time, and Casey, four years younger, got the middle, where she’d play with Barbies and occasionally pop her head over the seat to get my attention.
One day, we were on the road, somewhere far from Hollywood Boulevard, when my sister, who was six, said to me, “Mandy, guess what Barbie’s job is?” I watched Ken walk up to Barbie, give Barbie some money, and leave. Then Skipper strolled up, also handing over cash before going on her way.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s Barbie’s job?”
“She’s a hooker!” Casey proclaimed.
We’d seen Pretty Woman for the first time when I was in the fifth grade and Casey was in the first. We owned the movie on VHS, and added it to our regular rotation
, along with Aladdin and 101 Dalmatians. I didn’t quite get prostitution and I wasn’t savvy enough to see the movie as a modernization of the Cinderella story, but I understood the basic premise: There was a woman who had very little and a man who could offer her a lot. Where my sister saw a businesswoman, I saw a princess.
• • •
I don’t remember the first time I read “Cinderella,” or saw the movie, but one doesn’t have to make any special effort to know the story. It is so ubiquitous that you learn it by cultural osmosis. The news reports that Hillary Clinton “pulls a Cinderella” when she loses a shoe on a staircase in France. “A Cinderella story” may refer to the tale of an underdog basketball team that sweeps the whole tournament, or of a small tech startup that’s become the darling of Silicon Valley. These are not, strictly speaking, perfect matches for the story’s basic tropes, but they illustrate the pervasiveness of the tale as cultural reference point.
“Cinderella” has real cultural staying power. It is probably the most popular of all folktales. Historians have found stories of persecuted heroines with missing slippers in Egypt, the Philippines, Korea, and China, to list just a few. In 1893, folklorist Marian Roalfe Cox catalogued 345 variations of the tale, categorized as type 510A in the Aarne-Thompson system for indexing folktales, though today’s scholars estimate there are as many as three thousand. The 1950 Disney animation was based on Charles Perrault’s “Cendrillon,” from his 1697 collection of tales. “Cendrillon” introduced the magic pumpkin, the fairy godmother, and the pantoufle de vair—or “fur slipper”—which was later mistranslated as verre, or “glass.”1 The Italians have “Cenerentola,” by Giambattista Basile, and the Germans have “Aschenputtel,” from the Brothers Grimm.
When I think about the movies I loved when I was young—the ones I watched over and over—most of them rely on some essential Cinderella tropes. There’s Dirty Dancing, in which—spoiler alert—good-hearted but naive daddy’s girl Baby helps Penny to get an abortion at the expense of her own reputation and becomes a pretty good dancer while winning Patrick Swayze/Johnny Castle’s heart. Then there’s Sixteen Candles, in which totally ordinary redhead Samantha is forgotten on her birthday in the chaos of her sister’s wedding. Luckily, all is redeemed when she discovers that (contrary to the social mechanics of any real-world high school) the hunky senior guy she has a crush on has dumped his conventionally hot but totally shallow girlfriend and made her a birthday cake. There’s Sabrina (from both the titular 1954 and 1995 movies), the chauffeur’s daughter, who longs for sophistication from her home above the garage. Then she goes to Paris and returns looking grown and glamorous, captivating both brothers from the wealthy Larrabee family.
And the protagonists don’t have to be women. There’s Jack, the rakish young artist who lives below deck on the Titanic and happens to look strikingly handsome when wealthy Rose sees him in a tuxedo and with his hair combed back. And there’s bumbling bookstore owner Will, who catches the eye of the most famous movie star in America in Notting Hill.
In every case, some essentially good person is noticed—and ultimately loved—by someone who is not merely extraordinarily attractive, but who in fact has the highest social status in the whole hotel, or ship, or rustic Catskills resort. Thus the hero/ine not only wins romance but also disrupts the entire class system and gains the social (and often financial) standing he or she deserved all along. We love the Cinderella story because we all have fantasies of being recognized, and because it’s easy to see ourselves in protagonists who are overlooked not in spite of their goodness but because of it—because their defining attributes are modesty and loyalty and a willingness to put others’ needs before their own.
The Cinderella narrative is so ubiquitous—and so integrated into how we think about love—that it’s easy to dismiss. I spent years thinking someone would notice me eventually as long as I dedicated myself to being good and sweet and modest and basically unnoticeable. When I started my first serious relationship, I didn’t notice that my boyfriend’s goal was to become an interesting person through having interesting experiences; whereas I hoped to prove my worth by being loved by the most interesting person I knew: him.
• • •
When I tell people I think love stories make us worse at being in love, they are quick to agree. Most cite the trope of “happily ever after,” a constant across fairy tales and romantic comedies alike, which conveniently ignores the day-to-day reality of negotiation and commitment that defines long-term love. But the fact that so many people regularly point this out suggests that most of us know relationships take work.
It is easy to argue that anyone who uses a fairy tale as a template for a relationship is hilariously naive. Yes, it is unrealistic that any man will choose a bride after a single night of dancing. And it is even more absurd to think this man would identify his life partner using footwear—or that anyone can possibly dance until midnight in shoes made of glass. (In the most recent movie version of Cinderella, the slippers, made by Swarovski, were so unwearable they could only appear on the actress Lily James’s feet via the magic of CGI.) While we are all capable of identifying elements of fantasy that don’t translate to real life, the real problems with these narratives are more subtle than their lack of realism—and thus more insidious.
Movie critics agree that the 1990 release of Pretty Woman ushered in a new era of romantic optimism in Hollywood. If a prostitute and a businessman could make it work, not to mention earn $460 million at the box office, then maybe any two attractive white people could. I came of age in this era of unlikely lovers overcoming relatively surmountable obstacles, and while I’d like to believe I knew the difference between Hollywood fantasy and real life, research suggests movies can have real influence on how we think about the world.
One recent investigation into romantic comedies found that they normalize stalking behaviors by framing even extreme persistence (throwing pebbles at a girl’s bedroom window, loitering outside a woman’s office, pestering her friends) as romantic.2 This kind of research gets a lot of publicity, likely because rom coms are the genre we most love to hate (which the media critic Chloe Angyal suggests is because the romantic comedy is the only movie genre “made for and about women”).3 Most interestingly, perhaps, the psychologists Laurie Rudman and Jessica Heppen found that implicit romantic fantasies (that is, fantasies the participants weren’t consciously aware of) were correlated with lower personal aspirations in college-age women.4 According to the authors, romantic fantasies may “teach women to depend on men for economic and social rewards.”
It’s also worth noting that watching someone else fall in love, especially if that person is fictional, is deeply pleasurable. In his book Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and Why We Connect with Others, the neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni argues that specialized mirror neurons allow us to feel love’s neurochemical effects without actually falling in love ourselves.5 Iacoboni and others believe these neurons explain our ability to experience pleasure and pain secondhand, and may even be the cellular basis for empathy. They’re why, when Swayze says, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” I still can’t help but grin, as if he’s talking about me.
Often, we empathize with the characters in the movies we watch because our brains are reacting as if their experiences are our own. When they kiss, the cells that fire in our brains are the same ones that fire when we kiss. Your pleasure in watching rom coms isn’t merely vicarious—you aren’t just imagining how that kiss might feel; in some ways, you’re actually feeling it.
Sometimes I think the biggest problem with these movies is not their content but the intense emotions they evoke. The pleasure of early-stage romantic love is so powerful, and so neurochemically intoxicating, that we can’t help but aspire to a real-life version of what we feel while watching a movie.
• • •
In middle school, my best friend’s mother told me that I didn’t have a boyfriend not because I was too shy or too passive or too afraid
of doing the wrong thing or just simply too young to worry about love at all . . . but because I was “too smart.”
“Boys are intimidated by girls like you, right, sweetie?” she said to her daughter who, at age twelve, was already going on unchaperoned dates. It was the first time I realized that other people noticed how boys reacted to me. Being smart was okay with me—it earned me the approval of adults, which was my major life goal at age twelve. But if my friend’s mom had somehow noticed that boys weren’t that into me, then maybe other people had, too. I began to see the girls in my class as belonging to one of two groups: girls boys wanted to date, and the rest of us. Somehow, I’d fallen into the wrong group.
This fear—that something about me was fundamentally unappealing to boys—followed me into my teen years. In high school, I turned waiting for boys’ attention into a high art. I showed boys I was likable by watching their crappy band rehearse or listening to long guitar solos on the phone late at night or going to their ball games. It never occurred to me that I could be likable because of my own interests, not in spite of them. If I liked someone, my first instinct was to never talk or make eye contact with him again. Instead I loitered. I hoped.
I waited for boys to call, to grab the check, to make the first move. I said no even—especially—when I meant yes. The more I liked someone, the more I pretended not to like him.
I now know that this is a terrible strategy, but at the time I believed—because dozens of Cinderella stories had told me so—that being good was enough, and that someone somewhere would simply understand my shyness without me ever having to explain it, and they would love me for it. I didn’t actually need to do anything but wait.
By the time I got to college, I was thriving by almost every measure: I had close friends and loving parents and a scholarship to a small liberal arts program. But I’d still never had a serious boyfriend. And my insecurity about this shadowed my social life. Being chronically single felt like an enormous liability. It wasn’t so much that I desperately wanted a boyfriend—it was more that I desperately wanted the social value of being someone’s girlfriend. How else would people know that I was interesting? I believed not only that single people were missing out on what was the profound life experience, but that they were also missing some essential, if amorphous, human quality: desirability.
How to Fall in Love with Anyone Page 9
