How to Fall in Love with Anyone
Mandy Len Catron
27 · –
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At twenty, telling someone what I wanted—not what I was supposed to want, but what I really, genuinely wanted—was the most terrifying thing I could imagine.
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Of course, love has its own scripts, and I’d already started thinking about all the ways these scripts can limit us. We have rigid ideas about when to call, what to say, how much interest to show. And scripts can be deceptive, too: They make it possible to offer the performance of love without much substance behind it.
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When we talk about being a good girl, we usually mean enacting a culturally sanctioned version of girlhood. Being good isn’t the same as being kind or generous. Too often goodness, with all its moral connotation, is depicted as pleasing people in positions of power: adults, teachers, and yes, boys—especially boys with high social status
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Rather than encouraging truly pro-social behavior, it seems that many of our Cinderella narratives actually function to maintain the status quo by reinforcing patriarchal norms.
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I think what my dad was trying to say was that he would support whatever I did to seek my own happiness. But the language of deservingness is hard to avoid. We use it all the time—especially with love. When a friend ends a relationship with a jerk, I inevitably use the mantra of well-meaning friends everywhere: You deserve better.
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It took me a while to realize that part of what bothered me about my dad’s focus on what I deserved was the sense that equating love with deservingness is part of the same ideology that equates deservingness with feminine goodness. And I just didn’t want to be loved for my goodness anymore. I didn’t even really want to be good.
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Gwen and Gretchen, who, Edward says, “have made an art form of marrying well.” Their explicit interest in status, as opposed to Vivian’s pursuit of true love, makes them unlikable. It’s a strange message: If you’re looking for money, you don’t deserve love; but if you’re looking for love, you do deserve money.
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Most of these stories rely on an inherent paradox: True love is the ultimate means of validation and personal transformation, and yet a virtuous woman should never pursue love directly. (Men in persecuted hero roles, on the other hand, are allowed—even expected—to woo their love interests.)
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We often talk about the “boy-crazy years” as if an infatuation with romance is an inevitable phase of girlhood. In an essay called “Love Poems Are Dead,” the poet Morgan Parker writes about her lack of interest in romantic comedies as a teenager: “Maybe this love, this Shakespearean, Kate Hudson love, was not for me. Was not for black girls. Maybe love was another Nancy Meyers ideal, another privilege. Something for people who didn’t have other things to worry about.” She’s right: Being able to worry about whether you will ever experience the kind of love that will change your life is a privilege in and of itself.
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Physicists and engineers and computer scientists often use the concept of a black box to represent what they don’t know. The box indicates an opaque component within a system. They know what goes in and what comes out, but they can only hypothesize about what happens inside it.
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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.”
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The curiosity the happy have about the heartbroken is never quite pure—they are always seeking some confirmation of their own relative safety.
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But now I understand that there are always two breakups: the public one and the private one. Both are real, but one is sensible and the other is ugly. Too ugly to share in cafés. Too ugly, I sometimes think, to even write.
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“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily, we do not need to learn it.”
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I understood how you could leave someone and feel lost without him, and still choose that loneliness over being with him.
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I understood why you might put off telling anyone about your separation: not quite because you feel embarrassment or shame (though likely you are experiencing both, deeply) but because you don’t want to be judged for a decision you have already spent months struggling with. You don’t want to be questioned about something you yourself have little confidence in.
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The sociologists Sharon Sassler and Amanda Jayne Miller found that where couples met was correlated with their sense of support from friends and family.
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I’ve spent a lot of my life on the receiving end of advice about love, though I doubt I’m unique in this. If you have ever been single or unhappily paired—especially if you are a woman—all sorts of people will materialize ready to help you, to fix you, to explain your romantic prospects to you.
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“All those people who get married,” my sister said one day after an argument with her boyfriend, “they must know something.” I wondered about the difference between knowing and believing. I had recently attended a wedding where the new couple left a book on the table with pens and the instruction “Share your best marriage advice with the bride and groom!” Do married people know more about love than the rest of us, I wondered, or do they convince themselves they do by doling out advice?
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Not everyone who eats imagines herself a dietician, but nearly everyone who has loved—which is nearly everyone—presumes to know something about how to do it right. Most advice is given for the same reason homeowners tell you to buy and renters tell you to rent. The goal is not to make someone else’s life better, but rather to assure the advice giver of her own choices. And if you show even the slightest insecurity about your own relationship, advice will arrive often and unsolicited.
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I read an article in the New York Times in which the columnist Arthur C. Brooks cites a study arguing that, when it comes to politics, extremists are the happiest: “Correcting for income, education, age, race, family situation and religion, the happiest Americans are those who say they are either ‘extremely conservative’ ( percent very happy) or ‘extremely liberal’ ( percent).
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Our discomfort with ambiguity is well documented. The psychologist Arie Kruglanski says we all share a desire for “cognitive closure”: to simplify and clarify, to explain how the world works. The higher the ambiguity, says Kruglanski, the stronger our impulse for explanation.
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“To know—and to present what we know as if it’s all we need to know—is deadening, really,” Dinah Lenney says in her essay “Against Knowing.”
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Dr. Arthur Aron’s thirty-six questions for generating interpersonal closeness are ultimately about knowledge: about getting to know someone quickly, about being known. When he published the questions in 1997, his intent was not to make people fall in love, but rather to help them create “sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personal self-disclosure.” The questionnaire has been used to facilitate relationships between police and community members, and to decrease prejudice across ethnic groups.
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Part of what we need from love stories, I think, is to be told what is possible in love. Because stories give us models for how a life can look. In their 1995 essay “Knowledge and Memory: the Real Story,” Roger Schank and Robert Abelson argue that all human knowledge is contained in stories: Everything we know and understand is filed away in the index of narratives we carry around in our minds.
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But what I like about this study is how it assumes that love is an action. It assumes that what matters to my partner matters to me because we have at least three things in common, because we have close relationships with our mothers, and because he let me look at him.
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arthur aron’s questions