When they did divorce, I was furious that they’d hidden whatever went wrong until it was too late to fix it, furious that they believed Casey and I were better off not knowing. I couldn’t see their decision as one they had the right to make; they had inexplicably changed—ruined, I felt sure—our family, while offering no evidence of their unhappiness. At first, I wouldn’t even consider the possibility that maybe I was better off not having to watch their marriage fall apart. I’m still not sure whether their silence was best, but, years later, I would start to understand why they kept their relationship to themselves. I won’t say that divorce made us better, but it did shatter certain illusions we had about ourselves as protected, unbreakable people.
All I knew then was that we were each deeply unhappy in the months that followed. Sometimes I even felt, irrationally, that being unhappy was my duty, as if I could absorb everyone else’s misery by being miserable myself. Looking back, I think of the four of us as subject to the same flash flood, all senselessly bailing water into our own boats in hopes the others might end up on dry land. How, I wondered on the hardest days, could this be preferable to a marriage gone stale?
• • •
I used to imagine that falling in love happened in a single moment, and that I knew exactly when I fell in love with Kevin.
I’d moved to Florida for grad school, but I booked a flight to visit him in South America before the first semester began. We were on an overnight bus, descending from the Andes to the jungle. Kevin was asleep in the seat beside me. His dog Buckley snoozed at our feet. I sat wide-awake, feeling the humidity seep through the cracks in the windows as my skin began to stick to my clothes and my clothes to the carpeted bus seats. I watched as the leaves that emerged from the darkness and brushed against the windows got bigger and bigger. Stock images of jungles ran through my mind. I thought of Marlow sailing up the Congo. I replayed that moment from the movie Anaconda when the snake regurgitates Jon Voight’s limp body, covered in intestinal slime. Then, in half-sleep, Kevin reached over and pulled my hand into both of his.
In retrospect, it seemed like a good moment to fall in love. It had the iconic quality of those pivotal scenes in love stories: a little bit of terror and a whole lot of hope. But I think the truth about falling in love is more mundane. I could’ve picked any number of other moments. The only thing I can say for sure is that there was a time in my life when I knew him but didn’t necessarily love him, and then, a bit later, I felt, more than I’d ever felt anything, as if I couldn’t keep living without him.
We don’t seem to mind a little mystery in the process of falling in love. In fact, I suspect we prefer it. But endings are different. When love ends, we demand an explanation, a why. Just as, when someone gets lung cancer, we prefer to be able to say, “Well, he did work in an asbestos factory.”
The end-of-relationship narrative reminds me of the avalanche reports my friends and I pore over each ski season. When a big slide happens—especially when there are fatalities—someone inevitably sends out the Avalanche Canada write-up, noting the terrain, the conditions of the snowpack, the angle of the slope. We must locate probable cause if we are going to justify spending our weekends in the mountains. Surely there was a warning sign the skiers had missed—the rising surface temperatures, the convexity of the slope, the party’s decisions to split up or stay together. If we can pinpoint a single overlooked risk, we can tell ourselves we won’t become them.
Maybe some black boxes—especially those concerning love or death—are just too big. You can’t solve the problem or make sense of the larger system because there is just too much unknowable information. Just as we are shocked by the death of the Sherpa or ski guide, we are unable to comprehend how those who have loved well, who have been generous and faithful, still find themselves unable to continue loving. Sometimes there is no satisfactory reason why. In divorces and in avalanches, it’s hard to admit that being good and capable and smart still doesn’t guarantee safety.
• • •
Though we don’t fully understand the mechanics of heartbreak, science is getting closer to making sense of this particular human experience by looking at other species, particularly a small rodent known as the prairie vole. Prairie voles, which are sometimes called field mice, are one of the 3 percent of mammals that practice monogamy. They mate for life and are doting, enthusiastic co-parents.
There are 155 species of voles, and yet this particular species manages to fall—and stay—in love. Maybe you are thinking field mice can’t fall in love, but biologically speaking (and, really, according to most definitions), love is the best word for their experience. Part of their scientific significance lies with their close cousins, the meadow voles, who are fairly solitary and promiscuous. Focusing on these two species, scientists are able to explore the biological distinctions that enable (or inhibit) mammalian attachment.
Prairie voles will meet a potential partner, pursue a vigorous courtship, and make a life together. Once bonded, the males aggressively ward off other suitors and protect the nest. Parents cuddle and nurture their offspring. And, like humans, prairie voles have the occasional tryst—they are socially, not sexually, monogamous—but they typically return to their mates. Admittedly, voles only live a year or two, so lifelong vole devotion isn’t quite as challenging or impressive as it is in humans. But even this level of commitment is unusual and, from a biological perspective, significant.
According to Larry Young, a psychiatrist at Emory University, when it comes to love, the primary biological distinction between the prairie vole and the meadow vole is the density of receptors for the neurotransmitters oxytocin and vasopressin in the reward system of the brain. All voles get a dopamine boost after mating, but (thanks to oxytocin and vasopressin) prairie voles remember their mate and associate that mate with pleasure. Most lose interest in other potential mates. In a very real way, these small rodents become addicted to each other. When they are together, they touch and groom each other and their brain chemistry says, “This is good. Keep it up.” In short, Young and others think it’s the structure of the brain—not just the chemicals flowing through it—that predisposes some mammals for long-term pair bonding.1
The brain may be the ultimate black box, but, thanks to continuous developments in neuroscience, it’s rapidly becoming more transparent. Human relationships—and human brains—are far more complicated than those of rodents. Our experiences of love are probably shaped as much by culture as they are by biology (and it’s important to acknowledge that many fulfilling human relationships are not built around monogamy or heterosexual reproduction), but it’s worth noting that we are also influenced by oxytocin and vasopressin. For obvious reasons, we can’t cut open human brains at various stages in the mating process—so for now the prairie vole is our mammalian representative. Love is chemical, it is a kind of craving, and mammals appear to be wired for it. We know oxytocin is released at puberty and during orgasm and birth and breastfeeding. It’s credited for puppy love and postpartum bonding and, most likely, long-term romantic attachment. It’s associated with trust and empathy. It’s probably the reason we snuggle after sex.
Maybe we love each other because we can’t help it, even if our rational minds know better. We pair up, at least for a little while, because we are literally addicted to one another. One often-cited study confirmed that the brain scans of the heartbroken resemble those of people going through cocaine withdrawal.2 Our species is designed for attachment, and these attachments have kept us reproducing and social, an evolutionary asset for bipedal, slow-moving mammals whose young take years to learn to walk and feed and look after themselves.3
Naturally, severing these attachments is painful. Doing so is as ugly and complicated as breaking any other addiction. “We were not built to be happy,” Helen Fisher says, “but to reproduce.”4
In their book The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction, Young and Brian Alexander describe the work of neurobiologist Oliver
Bosch, who has experimented with prairie vole separation.5 Bosch put bonded voles through stress tests after separating them from their mates and found they consistently exhibited signs of depression. The most heartbreaking example is the “forced swim” test. Voles who were separated from their brothers (the control group) paddled manically when dropped into water, which is, apparently, typical rodent behavior: They are capable of floating, but when they are thrown into water, their survival instinct kicks in immediately. But the voles who’d been separated from their female mates didn’t do anything. As Young and Alexander put it, “The males who’d gone through vole divorce floated listlessly as if they didn’t care whether they drowned.”
Of course voles cannot divorce, because marriage is a distinctly human institution—one which has only recently been hitched to love. But knowing that the pain of heartbreak isn’t ours to bear alone is a small kind of solace.
• • •
“Friday nights are the hardest,” my dad said to me once. It was as close as he came to talking about his own loneliness.
For me, it was Sunday mornings. I’d wake up and instinctively reach for my laptop, lingering in bed for hours before noticing I hadn’t made coffee or let the dog out to pee. The rest of the week there were trips to the gym, papers to grade, classes to plan. But Sunday was an expanding universe of quiet in my new apartment. Sunday the duvet was too heavy to lift. The world didn’t beckon.
The apartment was on the main floor of a Vancouver heritage house. It was expensive and far from campus, but it was dog-friendly and not a basement. In the month before I moved out of the house I shared with Kevin, I viewed a lot of basement suites. And each time I entered one, no matter how nice the appliances or how large the windows, I’d have visions of the floor sinking into the damp earth beneath. And each time, panicked, I thanked the landlord and rushed back out into the daylight. I needed a place I felt comfortable coming home to, I thought, so I would be sure to come home.
For the first few months, I could hear Roscoe’s howly whimper inside the house every time he heard the front gate fall shut behind me. He spun in nervous circles at my ankles when I walked in the door, even if I’d only been out for milk and butter. Worrying about his loneliness was easier than thinking about my own. I sat on the couch and hoisted him onto my lap, where he’d sit upright like a little kid, with his hind legs sticking straight out, while I drank a beer and watched an episode of Glee.
All the media I consumed was like that—simple, a little saccharine, the kind of thing Kevin and I would never enjoy together. The kind of thing that required only one emotion at a time. I abandoned everything in my iTunes library (all of which reminded me of him) and listened to the winsome, peppy tunes of Taylor Swift and CeeLo Green instead.
I kept a bunch of cilantro in a water glass above the kitchen sink because Kevin hated cilantro, and buying it made me feel in charge of my life.
When I got into bed at night, I found myself saying the same prayer I’d said as a child: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee, Lord, thy child to keep. I didn’t intend to pray, but like an answering machine clicking on, the prayer ran through my head each time it hit the pillow, an atavism from the time, years before, when I slept alone and said prayers.
I noticed his absence everywhere. My laundry smelled different; without his clothes, there was more lavender, less spice. With no one to remind me to lube the chain, my bike started to creak.
I found I was unsure of my own preferences and opinions. Did I like cilantro or was I just eating it because I could? Should I go back to being a vegetarian now that I was no longer sharing meals with an omnivore? Was I really a rock climber or had I been pretending to be?
Roscoe and I developed a predictable intimacy that I came to rely on. When he woke up hungry, he’d rest his chin by my pillow and watch my eyelids. When he wanted a walk, he’d come sit by my desk and gaze up at me. If I bought a rotisserie chicken, he’d cycle rapidly through every trick he knew—sit, down, roll over, play dead—while I stood under the fluorescent bulb with a flap of oily skin in my hand.
We explored the neighborhood together, gazing in the windows of the Vietnamese grocers and the white-papered glass of the adult video store and the warmly lit living rooms of young families. Eventually we found the school grounds, where other dog owners stood in clumps. I imagined striking up a conversation with some outdoorsy guy who had a beard and a husky, but most of the folks who showed up after work were couples or middle-aged women. They knew nothing about each other, but they knew each dog’s name and whether it was into fetching or chasing and what kind of treats it liked.
I stood among these strangers every afternoon and struggled to make conversation. Still, I preferred their observations on the shininess of Roscoe’s coat—did he have a special brush? Did he eat organic food?—to my friends’ inquiries about how I was doing.
• • •
Sometimes, after, Kevin would come over. We’d watch an episode of Friday Night Lights and have sex, and then we’d lie on our bed—which had become my bed—and talk about how things seemed to be getting harder, not easier. It was such a relief that someone else understood it so exactly: the nausea of consolation; the friends who counseled that “you guys were never a great fit,” as if they’d been hoping us into this state of misery; the pointlessness of grocery shopping when you already had eggs and stale bread. Even my parents, who had separated only three years before, seemed unable to offer more than platitudes. “Things always have a way of working out for you,” my dad said, answering my call from his girlfriend’s house. Didn’t he remember his Friday nights alone? On good days, his return to optimism reminded me that our personalities are only stretched by circumstance, eventually springing back to some semblance of their original shape. Other days I muted the ringer.
That semester, I believed there were two versions of me: the English professor who got up early to put on mascara and blow-dry her hair, and the girl who spent hours watching amateur covers of Adele’s “Someone Like You” on YouTube, desperate for consolation. I believed I could switch between them when I needed to. It would be months before I’d see that wasn’t quite true. That semester my teaching evaluations slid from 4.6 to 3.8 on a five-point scale. Some students mentioned that I was chronically late to class. Others said it seemed as if I’d wanted them to teach themselves. But I wouldn’t read their comments until February. Until then, not knowing any better, I clung to teaching as the one bellwether for my recovery. If I could be animated and put-together in front of the classroom, I thought, surely I’d be that way all the time, eventually.
One night after dinner at a friend’s place downtown, I came outside to discover my car was no longer parked where I had left it. The police kindly informed me that the car had been too close to a driveway and relayed the number for Busters Towing.
I hesitated, then called Kevin.
“A taxi plus the tow and parking ticket will be almost two hundred dollars,” I said, regretting the call as the words emerged from my mouth. Could he come pick me up? He sighed and I could feel us both deflating. Didn’t I know the terms of our contract had changed?
He dropped me at the towing company, where I climbed out of the car and stood in the rain while he looked at me without pulling away, the windshield wipers alternately hiding then revealing his face. I hadn’t thanked him, I realized, or told him good night. He was waiting. I had forgotten, somehow, that I wouldn’t be driving home to him.
I walked over and he rolled down the window and I leaned in, unsure of the appropriate gesture: a hug? A kiss on the cheek—or the lips? Our foreheads touched, pulled back, and touched again in indecision. I shoved my arms in the window awkwardly, getting him wet with my raincoat. “Thank you,” I said quietly.
At home, I started the shower and poured myself a scotch. This is the low point, I thought as I sat on the bathtub floor—meaning the night and the parking ticket and Kevin and the whiskey glass on the edge of the tub.
I ca
lled him the next day to say I thought we should take some time apart, recognizing the irony of calling someone to tell him I wouldn’t be calling him anymore.
It went on like that for a while—on and off, seeing other people, seeing each other. A couple of friends went through breakups around the same time, and I’d give them practiced, rational advice that I couldn’t follow myself: Sometimes you just know things aren’t working; sometimes you just have to make a change. They’d agree, sounding resigned, maybe even a little hopeful. I didn’t tell them what I’d found on the other side of resigned and hopeful—the abiding sense of loss, the dreams where you wake up feeling fat-eyed and hollow-chested and it’s a moment before you realize that it wasn’t you sobbing—it was Dream You, because Dream Kevin stole your bicycle, because he hid your mail, because Dream You felt so betrayed by these small acts of spite. And you wake up relieved that it wasn’t real, but still you are angry, exhausted, already dreading the next night’s sleep.
• • •
The other well-known black box is the airplane flight recorder. Modern black boxes, which are actually orange for visibility amid the wreckage, are capable of recording thousands of parameters of flight data, things like acceleration, altitude, engine performance, cabin pressure. Microphones in the cockpit record voice and ambient noise. A typical flight on a Boeing 787, for example, will return several terabytes of data.
Though the recorders themselves are often mangled in a crash, the internal CSMU (crash-survivable memory unit) is designed to withstand extreme heat and pressure. Engineers shoot them from air cannons and cook them at two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. They are virtually indestructible units of explanation, allowing the National Transportation Safety Board to assemble a “most likely” scenario for the media and for the families of those lost in the crash.
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