Mark’s landlord stopped by with a goodbye gift. Then, while he was upstairs vacuuming, she popped her head back in. I paused the podcast and pulled out my earbuds. “You are very lucky,” she said, glancing up the stairs. “He is a nice guy.”
“I know.” I smiled. “I am.”
As I scrubbed and listened, I thought about my own impending domesticity. I thought about the process of negotiating a life with someone—about the challenges Mark and I encountered in deciding when and whether to live together, which suddenly seemed pretty trivial next to the things Trystan and John were negotiating.
I wondered what felt so compelling about Trystan and John’s story and I came back to this idea that it doesn’t focus so exclusively on a single kind of love. It models love’s capaciousness while still acknowledging its limitations.
In The Argonauts, Nelson writes that parenting “isn’t like a love affair. It is a love affair. Or, rather, it is romantic, erotic, and consuming—but without tentacles. I have my baby and my baby has me.”10
After my sister’s sweet grumpy Labrador Hines was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, she and her husband were heartbroken. “I can’t imagine our relationship without him,” she said to me. There was love before the dog, and love for the dog, but each love has been transmuted, deformed, and reconstructed by the other.
I am interested in stories in which love is bringing something to bear on love.
There’s a great example in my Netflix queue: Meet the Patels, a movie in which an Indian-American guy, Ravi, consents to let his parents help find him a wife. His quest for a life partner is wrapped in his love for his sister (the film’s co-director, who is usually hidden behind the camera) and his parents, and his love for his Indian heritage, and for all the millions of Patels in India and in America.
There’s Carrie Brownstein’s memoir Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, in which her relationship with Corin Tucker, which was founded on their shared love of music, doesn’t last—but the band they formed together, Sleater-Kinney, starts touring again twenty years later. Or Patti Smith’s Just Kids, where what begins as a romance between Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe continually re-forms itself over their years together—as intimate friends, temperamental roommates, artistic collaborators, muses, caretakers. Ultimately Smith’s book serves as a kind of extended elegy to Mapplethorpe, memorializing their love in all its incarnations.
John and Trystan’s romance is never presented as having clear boundaries that separate it from their love for the children they come to parent. But the show doesn’t romanticize; it is very honest about how hard it has been for the couple to care for children who have been physically abused, and about everything these shifting roles—uncle, father, co-parent, partner—bring to bear on their relationship.
I called Hillary Frank to ask about how she’d managed to feature so many compelling, nuanced love stories on her show. “There are so many different types of families and there are single parents, but a lot of times kids are being raised by two people, whether they’re together or not,” Frank said. “So that’s an integral part of the story: Is there love there? Is romance still in the picture? Even if it’s a single parent, there’s usually a narrative about romantic love.” She said that you can’t tell stories about family without telling stories about all kinds of love.
Frank said she’s looking for stories that make her “see the world just a little bit differently.” She reminded me of an episode about a couple—friends of hers—who had an unplanned pregnancy, a miscarriage, and then a divorce.11 He moved to a yurt in the desert, while she stayed in San Francisco. Some time passed and, after running into each other at a wedding, they eventually decided to have a child together. Frank describes them as “happily divorced.” What makes the story so interesting is that it rejects most presumptions about how and when and under what circumstances people decide to make a family—and it explains the nuances of that rejection.
Also, the stories on Frank’s show are generative. The Accidental Gay Parents were listeners before they were guests on the show. Frank says that listeners have created a community to share their own stories in the comments section of the show’s website: “Telling one story generates a whole slew of other stories that are sometimes very obviously related to the story we told in the podcast and sometimes they’re not,” she said, adding, “There’s very little trolling. So I think there’s a real desire for people to share stories like these—alternative-family stories—in a safe space.” I wonder if podcasting also lends itself to nuanced, capacious, self-reflexive love stories because it is such a young medium; its conventions are not yet fixed.
The stories I love are aspirational but not interested in the validation of a single individual through chosenness. When I say I want more alternatives to the dominant narrative of love, I mean we need more stories that enlarge love without fetishizing it.
I am reluctant to admit this about my own relationship, for fear of its power to fetishize or to reinforce clichés, but after only a month of living together, I have come to love Mark with this new force that scares me. But this shouldn’t be surprising—the more tightly our lives are intertwined, the greater the risk. What to do about the problem of love? I wrote in my journal.
I thought I loved him a year ago, and I did. But now that love has a different tenor. It is deeper and rounder. It has accounted for the smell of his running shoes and the sharp edges of my impatience and the dog’s shifting loyalties, and all the demands of another body occupying a space that used to be mine. I like this version of love better.
“Maybe it’s too much,” I told him as we lay on the bed on a warm Saturday afternoon, naked and drifting in and out of sleep. “Too much love?” he asks. I nod.
The first month of living together was comprised of so many individual moments of stress: the stress of writing a book, the stress of disarray and half-empty boxes, the stress of herding two lives (or three if you count the dog, which you should) into one space. I heard myself say, “Our life is so good.” And I realized that so many things have been transformed by this new pronoun: our. We bought a new table, walnut with nice legs, good lines, the kind of table you expect to have for a long time, an investment. A table of connotation. “Eventually you just want to buy a kitchen table with someone,” he said to me months earlier, when things were rocky, when living together was beyond the horizon. I guess we’ve arrived at that time.
“How about the couch over there.” He gestures. “And the table there?”
I stand silent, looking back and forth between the two spaces. Roscoe wanders over and lies on the rug, trying to rest until we pick it up again and move it a few feet toward the door.
I’ve already told Mark the couch feels weird there, but he wants to try again. His eagerness to try, to imagine, to rearrange, has left me mute.
“Hey,” he says, walking over to me. “I love you.”
I laugh, and relent. I pick up my end of the couch.
• • •
So many individual moments of stress, and yet I don’t think of the time as stressful—I think of it as joyful. There is joy in taking turns reading the Atlantic over breakfast. Joy in finding new names for the dog: Tenderloin, Chicken Chunk, Potato, Monkey, Goose, Noodle, Sweet Pea, Enchilada. Someone is here, at home with us. Someone I love and whose company I love.
The night we wrote our contract I was so focused on my autonomy, on my separate life, which I wanted to protect and maintain, and now I am content to be in this space, our space. The rapidity of this change has caught me off guard.
I am besotted and embarrassed at my own good luck, at the capaciousness of my love for him. Still, I know I guard parts of myself.
“A studied evasiveness has its own limitations,” Nelson writes in The Argonauts, “its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The
pleasures of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisions constitute a life.”12
What to do about the problem of love? These are the revisions of my life. But it is ripe with the pleasures of ordinary devotion.
• • •
When I was trying to decide whether to stay in my relationship with Kevin, I knew, in a factual, theoretical way, that I could fall in love again. But I couldn’t have predicted my own capacity for happiness in love, which I finally feel with conviction in the depths of my body. When I am out to brunch with friends and Mark walks by with the dog and waves hello, I blush at the sight of the two of them, worried my friends will see it on my face: such reckless happiness. I don’t believe that I deserve this more than anyone else. I do not think it is the best or only way to practice love. I harbor no illusions about its duration or irrational optimism about the nature of the love that inspired it. I know that love is an ordinary thing, even as it insists otherwise.
Someone recently asked me if I’d learned whatever it was that I set out to discover when I started writing this book. And to be honest, I think I set out to find a way to make love last. A guarantee.
I have learned a lot about love from a scientific perspective, but I have come to rely on a more fundamental realization: the knowledge that I can have a good, full life without any guarantees from love. There are so many ways to make a life. Instead of trying to make love last, I’ve decided to take ever-after off the agenda. Knowing this—that I want to share my life with Mark but that my life will be good even without him—has made loving him much easier—and lighter.
And so this is not a happy ending. Love stories have endings, but love itself is ongoing and continually warped and renewed by the people who do the loving.
This ending is just an occasion to pause and confess that I cannot disentangle the work of writing about love from the action of loving Mark. And I cannot separate either of those things from the abstraction of that love as we have shaped it or its inflections as we express it, little I love yous setting sail bearing all our best intentions.
If there is any special capacity to our love story, it is that it has borne the weight of this book. And the writing of this book, which has been an ordinary and pleasurable devotion, has brought its whole weight to bear on the vessel of our love story, in both its public and private variations.
I love you has the capacity to carry us somewhere or nowhere. It is the only solution we can offer to the problem of love.
The following essay by the author originally appeared in the New York Times’s Modern Love column in January 2015.
to fall in love with anyone, do this
by mandy len catron
More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes.
Let me explain. Earlier in the evening, that man had said: “I suspect, given a few commonalities, you could fall in love with anyone. If so, how do you choose someone?”
He was a university acquaintance I occasionally ran into at the climbing gym and had thought, “What if?” I had gotten a glimpse into his days on Instagram. But this was the first time we had hung out one-on-one.
“Actually, psychologists have tried making people fall in love,” I said, remembering Dr. Aron’s study. “It’s fascinating. I’ve always wanted to try it.”
I first read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup. Each time I thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I felt stuck. So, like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter.
I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.
“Let’s try it,” he said.
Let me acknowledge the ways our experiment already fails to line up with the study. First, we were in a bar, not a lab. Second, we weren’t strangers. Not only that, but I see now that one neither suggests nor agrees to try an experiment designed to create romantic love if one isn’t open to this happening.
I Googled Dr. Aron’s questions; there are 36. We spent the next two hours passing my iPhone across the table, alternately posing each question.
They began innocuously: “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” And “When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?”
But they quickly became probing.
In response to the prompt, “Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common,” he looked at me and said, “I think we’re both interested in each other.”
I grinned and gulped my beer as he listed two more commonalities I then promptly forgot. We exchanged stories about the last time we each cried, and confessed the one thing we’d like to ask a fortuneteller. We explained our relationships with our mothers.
The questions reminded me of the infamous boiling frog experiment in which the frog doesn’t feel the water getting hotter until it’s too late. With us, because the level of vulnerability increased gradually, I didn’t notice we had entered intimate territory until we were already there, a process that can typically take weeks or months.
I liked learning about myself through my answers, but I liked learning things about him even more. The bar, which was empty when we arrived, had filled up by the time we paused for a bathroom break.
I sat alone at our table, aware of my surroundings for the first time in an hour, and wondered if anyone had been listening to our conversation. If they had, I hadn’t noticed. And I didn’t notice as the crowd thinned and the night got late.
We all have a narrative of ourselves that we offer up to strangers and acquaintances, but Dr. Aron’s questions make it impossible to rely on that narrative. Ours was the kind of accelerated intimacy I remembered from summer camp, staying up all night with a new friend, exchanging the details of our short lives. At 13, away from home for the first time, it felt natural to get to know someone quickly. But rarely does adult life present us with such circumstances.
The moments I found most uncomfortable were not when I had to make confessions about myself, but had to venture opinions about my partner. For example: “Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner, a total of five items” (Question 22), and “Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time saying things you might not say to someone you’ve just met” (Question 28).
Much of Dr. Aron’s research focuses on creating interpersonal closeness. In particular, several studies investigate the ways we incorporate others into our sense of self. It’s easy to see how the questions encourage what they call “self-expansion.” Saying things like, “I like your voice, your taste in beer, the way all your friends seem to admire you,” makes certain positive qualities belonging to one person explicitly valuable to the other.
It’s astounding, really, to hear what someone admires in you. I don’t know why we don’t go around thoughtfully complimenting one another all the time.
We finished at midnight, taking far longer than the 90 minutes for the original study. Looking around the bar, I felt as if I had just woken up. “That wasn’t so bad,” I said. “Definitely less uncomfortable than the staring into each other’s eyes part would be.”
He hesitated and asked, “Do you think we should do that, too?”
“Here?” I looked around the bar. It seemed too weird, too public.
“We
could stand on the bridge,” he said, turning toward the window.
The night was warm and I was wide-awake. We walked to the highest point, then turned to face each other. I fumbled with my phone as I set the timer.
“O.K.,” I said, inhaling sharply.
“O.K.,” he said, smiling.
I’ve skied steep slopes and hung from a rock face by a short length of rope, but staring into someone’s eyes for four silent minutes was one of the more thrilling and terrifying experiences of my life. I spent the first couple of minutes just trying to breathe properly. There was a lot of nervous smiling until, eventually, we settled in.
I know the eyes are the windows to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected.
I felt brave, and in a state of wonder. Part of that wonder was at my own vulnerability and part was the weird kind of wonder you get from saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes what it actually is: an assemblage of sounds.
So it was with the eye, which is not a window to anything but rather a clump of very useful cells. The sentiment associated with the eye fell away and I was struck by its astounding biological reality: the spherical nature of the eyeball, the visible musculature of the iris and the smooth wet glass of the cornea. It was strange and exquisite.
How to Fall in Love with Anyone Page 20
