Gottlieb presented me with two conflicting ideas. One, which I wanted to agree with, was that there was no perfect person. If this was true, staying with someone I genuinely loved seemed wise. The other idea was that if a woman my age (almost thirty) wanted to have kids (which I sort of thought I did), she’d better find someone to do it with. Soon.
As spring turned to summer, I began to feel that nothing was knowable, especially my own feelings. Sure, we had our problems, but they were pretty small compared to Jane and Mr. Rochester’s. On sunny Saturdays, when we went rock climbing and then for gelato, my constant uncertainty seemed ridiculous. Our life was good. We were good together. Other days we’d argue over dinner (the salmon filet was too small, the rice took too long to cook, we should’ve gotten takeout, you should’ve said that earlier) and I would feel resolved about moving on.
I often thought of my parents. “We just don’t love each other anymore,” my mom had said. “Not like we used to.” Maybe time inevitably corrodes, and love always requires settling, I thought. Perhaps if they’d had the chance, even Romeo and Juliet or Dido and Aeneas would’ve eaten a late dinner in stony silence. If I went through the trouble of moving out and moving on, would I eventually find myself at another table, across from another man, both of us wanting a little bit more? Did all long-term love eventually lead to a series of inadequate salmon dinners?
When I finally expressed my uncertainty about Kevin to my dad, he said, in his usual fatherly way, “Well, honey, I’m sure you’ll make the right choice.”
“But what is a ‘right choice’?” I asked, exasperated. I hated this way of talking about love, but I caught myself doing it, too. The right choice, the right person, the right kind of love, the one. Was it moral rightness or narrative rightness—a good person or a good story? As far as I could tell, rightness and wrongness were only ever apparent in retrospect. Relationships aren’t quizzes you can pass or fail, but we insist on talking about them as if they are.
• • •
When it comes to love, moral rightness seemed simple: Choose Mr. Darcy instead of Mr. Wickham. But Jane Austen said nothing about the guys I was into—people who were intelligent and creative and fun, who disliked authority but really cared about the environment. Who qualified as a good person was just never that clear to me. Not only that, but it seemed like there was no guarantee that a good person would make a good partner.
From a narrative perspective, making the right choice is any outcome that gets you closer to a happy ending: marriage to the right person. I thought of those Choose Your Own Adventure books I loved as a kid. “You and YOU ALONE are in charge of what happens in this story,” they warned at the start. But this wasn’t quite true. You could make choices, but there were only ever two options: If you want to seek a husband who wants a family, turn to page 21; If you are content with a common-law marriage and a very sweet dog, go to page 18. Which ending would be happier?
There is a strange logic to the idea of a soul mate. To believe that such a person exists is to believe that destiny is a real and active force in our lives. But it also means believing that there are wrong people, and wrong choices. Accepting both rightness and choice requires simultaneous investment in the forces of fate and free will.
In a letter to his brothers, the Romantic poet (and notable hopeless romantic) John Keats argued that the greatest artists were capable of inhabiting paradox. He called this “negative capability,” defining it as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” In college, I’d loved this idea. My students liked it, too. But maybe this central tenet of Romanticism—preferring beauty to logic, choosing a good story that relies on a paradox over a dull story that better reflects how the world really works—exemplifies how most of us see the world at twenty-two, the same age Keats was when he wrote that letter. By twenty-nine, I was less taken with Romanticism.
Talking about “rightness” seemed like a way of obscuring more subtle questions—not “Is there someone better for me out there?” but “Why is it so hard to be kind to the person I love?” It seemed like a way of ignoring the fact that we make bad choices all the time, that every life contains a healthy dose of disappointment, and that, even with our best efforts, outcomes can never be fully controlled.
• • •
Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to discover how our neural pathways flood with dopamine when we look at a photo of someone we love. Dopamine itself isn’t love; it doesn’t make us happy. But Fisher and her colleagues believe the presence of dopamine in the parts of the brain associated with reward and motivation—the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus—suggests that love is an innate human drive. I found this immediately reassuring: If the need to love is encrypted in our biology, maybe I was supposed to feel like love was controlling me.
A drive is any fundamental motivator, like sex or thirst. Or, to be biological about it, a brain system “oriented around the planning and pursuit of a specific want or need.”3 Fisher’s research suggests that the mysteries of the heart in fact all reside in the brain, and that romantic love evolved to help direct reproduction—not just in humans but in all mammal species. She also believes the drive for love is separate from the sex drive, though they often work together: While lust inspires us to “seek a range of mating partners,” love “motivates individuals to focus their courtship energy on specific others.” This is evolution’s way of saving our species time and energy.4
I sometimes worried that Kevin was my one great love. Even if I ended things and found someone new, I was afraid any other love would feel diluted somehow. Studying the biological mechanics of love soothed me. The lack of romance in phrases like courtship energy and mammalian mate choice made love predictable and unextraordinary. If I believed love was mundane, I thought, maybe I could take away some of its power.
• • •
When Kevin and I moved to Vancouver, a city where it was relatively common to stay in a long-term serious relationship without getting married, we stopped calling each other “boyfriend” and “girlfriend.” Instead, I introduced him as “my partner, Kevin.” Now, the immigration process had made us spouses. I thought of a spouse as someone who drove a sporty station wagon with a car seat in the back. Someone with a wedding ring and a mutual fund and a belt clip for his cell phone. Kevin was not that kind of spouse. That he never wanted to be a spouse at all had appealed to me at twenty, but now I wondered if a sporty station wagon was so terrible.
Still, I couldn’t tell how much of my desire for a spouse was mine, and how much was what I thought I was supposed to want at my age—I didn’t know what was real and what was scripted.
My spouse and I spent our evenings in the living room, him scanning photographs while I marked papers or wasted time online. Kevin’s mouse click-clicked, and the scanner hummed and buzzed. He’d recently gotten into film photography and spent hours digitally removing specks of dust, adjusting the color and contrast in his latest stack of negatives. When we were getting along, I’d joke that the scanner’s noises were the sound track to my life. “Just think of all the free time you’d have if you got your photos scanned at the lab,” I said. But I suspected he enjoyed the exercise in control. And I loved that about him—that he insisted on shooting film when most people used digital; that he cared about specks of dust, though I wished he cared less about crumbs on the countertop. But isn’t this the problem with falling in love? You can’t find someone who is endearingly annoyed by dust on film but who isn’t annoyingly annoyed by crumbs on counters. You can’t select for meticulous creative output and against dishrag-use tutorials.
I considered all this from my spot on the futon. It was the first piece of furniture we’d ever bought together—for eighty dollars on Craigslist. The fabric was faded, and, like so many other things in our home, covered in dog hair. I found black hairs in the loaves of bread I ba
ked, in the padding of my bras, poking out from under the space bar on my computer. That was life in our tiny house on Ash Street. A good life, even on a quiet Friday night in June, where at least some things, like dog hairs, were certain. And others, like the futon, familiar. When I dared to picture my life without these things, without the scanner’s busy hum and Kevin sporadically turning the monitor my way to ask, “What do you think of this one?” I felt a simmering panic.
• • •
In June, a letter came saying we were official permanent residents of Canada. For months, I’d been telling myself that I wouldn’t make any decisions about our relationship until this letter arrived. That evening the sunlight stretched across the table as we celebrated over pizza and beer and I felt hopeful.
A few days later I woke up to Kevin shouting from the kitchen: “Are we out of granola?”
He knows the answer to this question, I thought. He knows it by opening the cabinet door.
In the summer, Kevin always woke up first, fed the dog, made coffee. I’d linger in bed, half-asleep, until he came to set a hot mug on the windowsill and kiss me goodbye.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, willing myself to the surface of the day. “I just forgot to get some.”
I considered throwing on the dress that lay crumpled on the floor and running to the store. But I was trying to fight this impulse to please him. I pulled the duvet higher instead. I squeezed my eyes tight and imagined a life where, when I forgot to buy something, no one cared. If I ran out of granola while living alone, I thought, I could make eggs. Or oatmeal. I could eat toast and jam or just grab a cranberry muffin from the café down the street. I could stop eating granola altogether and switch to bagels with peanut butter and honey. I could get up early and make pancakes every day if I wanted to.
• • •
I continued researching romantic love—in fields ranging from evolutionary psychology to metaphor theory—and immediately applied whatever I read to my relationship. Sometimes this gave me insight. Often it left me more confused.
I read that in most cases early-stage romantic love—the heart-thumping, fluttering, all-consuming infatuation—doesn’t last long. The details always varied, but each article cited evidence that suggested this kind of love had evolved to last between six months and four years. Helen Fisher called this the “four-year itch,” suggesting that love is an adaptation that helps us focus on one person long enough to conceive and raise a child through toddlerhood. The thinking went that parents who were in love were more likely to cooperate, which meant their offspring were more likely to survive those vulnerable first years.
I liked the idea that the intensity of love had a predetermined tenure. Those couples who stayed together after the four-year mark were still bonded, but they had settled into the pleasantly domestic phase of companionate love. This seemed practical: We couldn’t all stay in passionate love forever, or we’d have a lot of sappy songs but no functional bridges. Companionate love, on the other hand, was characterized by steadiness and teamwork. Companionate love sounded nice.
But this theory didn’t really match my experience. My first couple of years with Kevin, the ones that are meant to be starry-eyed and heady, were disrupted by long stretches on separate continents. Even now, sometimes, as I biked home from night class, I still thrilled at getting there to find him at his desk, kissing his temple, his face, the soft spot just below his earlobe. I craved the feeling of his cheekbone against my lips the same way I longed to scrape the cookie batter from the spatula, crushing sugar crystals between my teeth. It was physical, visceral, not quite erotic but not domestic either. I worried we were like a skipping record, stuck somewhere between the first movement of love and the second.
Sometimes, when we argued and I threatened to end the relationship—which I often did, hoping, I think, to provoke him into either commitment or a breakup—I asked Kevin, wouldn’t he like to start over with someone who never left a dish in the sink? Who always kept yogurt in the fridge and granola in the pantry? But unlike me, he refused to fantasize about a better version of love.
“This is your problem,” he said. “Until you’re sure you actually want to be in this relationship, it’s not going to work.”
“Well, I don’t want to stay together just because it’s too much work to find someone else,” I snapped back.
We discussed the sunk cost fallacy. This economic theory suggests that the more you invest in something, the more difficult it is to abandon, and it could be usefully applied to relationships. It was not a good idea, we agreed, to stay together simply because we had been together so long.
But this was more difficult in practice. Even if we didn’t always like each other that much, even if we forgot our promises to be kind and patient, it felt good to know someone as well as we knew each other. It felt good to be known. The prospect of getting to know someone new—of even finding someone worth knowing—was daunting. The prospect of becoming unknown was paralyzing.
I was almost thirty and I’d never really dated. Kevin and I had become adults together. Who would I become without the gravitational pull of his habits and preferences? Slowly, though, a single impulse began to crystallize: Though we were married according to the Canadian government, I did not want to sign a lease with him in September. The thought of it made me nauseous. I didn’t know where I would live, but I knew that if I had to spend another winter alone while Kevin skied every weekend without me, I’d rather do it in my own apartment.
• • •
In ordinary life, the reasons for leaving someone are not as clear as they are in our stories. There was no ex hidden in our attic, no great betrayal—only a vague but persistent desire for change. The argument was barely an argument, just a disagreement about how we would spend our Saturday. But somehow, over the course of a conversation that resembled a hundred others, I could see that being apart would be just a little bit easier than staying together.
I told him so. And, for once, he agreed.
It was early July, which meant another two months in the bungalow on Ash Street. Neither of us could afford to move out sooner. Because I had never ended a relationship before, I was surprised to see what little bearing it had on our daily routine. It seemed the years of accumulated expectation had obscured a genuine fondness for each other. It felt as if we’d undertaken a new project together, as if, for the first time in months, we were on the same team. And perhaps it was those two months—the space between the decision to move apart and the actual move-out date—that made the decision possible. There was a window in which it might all be undone. We still had each other’s daily company. We didn’t know yet how lonely we would become.
• • •
In Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, Rob (played in the movie by John Cusack) gets dumped by Laura. Confused and distressed, he goes back to each of his exes, hoping to figure out why he can’t make a relationship last. Ultimately, as in countless other books and movies, the heartbroken protagonist finally gets it: He was taking the person he loved for granted. And thanks to this hard-won revelation, he now knows how to be a better partner.
In love stories, people have epiphanies. They don’t know what they’ve got until it’s gone—or at least jeopardized. And then suddenly they do know. And they change. They become more thoughtful and selfless. As an English teacher, I was good at identifying these basic narrative tropes. I was not good, however, at distinguishing between tropes and my own experiences.
After our official breakup, I found myself waiting for Kevin’s epiphany. He would see how much he stood to lose. How much he loved me. And he would become the perfect person for me: Ultra Kevin, Kevin Plus.
When he went to the desert with his parents a few weeks later, Kevin called every night. I longed to be there—with the in-laws who had been so welcoming from the day we met, with Kevin as he sat in a rental car in the hotel parking lot, sipping a beer.
“I miss you,” he said, when we ended each call. I pictured the dusty pav
ement and dramatic horizons of northern Arizona. Did it look the same to him now as it had on our drive to Vancouver four years earlier?
If I am honest, it feels good to know that he needs me, I wrote in my journal. A part of me wants this to be one of those transformative experiences, where we suddenly learn how to be good to each other. To be loving and kind.
I was not convinced that love ever really worked like that, but that didn’t keep me from wishing it would. With one of us in the desert and the other in the rain forest, it was easy to temper our unkindness and selfishness. But changing our habits seemed nearly impossible. The day he came home, we fought over whose turn it was to buy toilet paper.
Missing each other didn’t make us get along better. Insight did not equal improvement.
• • •
Maybe there aren’t many stories about ambivalent breakups because such stories do little to confirm our assumptions about the power of love. Instead, they render love an ordinary experience. I suspect the magnitude and authority we have attributed to love is what kept scientists away from it for so long: Psychologists didn’t really tackle romantic love until the 1970s and ’80s; biologists joined the conversation in the ’90s. I think many of us want to believe that love cannot be known, that the mysteries of the heart have to remain mysterious.
I couldn’t see then how many years it would be before all this thinking about love and love stories would begin to cohere and I’d feel better equipped to make decisions about love. Just before I moved out, I sat in the living room and wrote, I wish I could fast-forward to the moment when this moment has passed, when I am sure that I’m okay, even though I am not on this couch, and I am no longer living on Ash Street. I imagined it like a movie montage, where I might look back with wistful nostalgia, glad that part of my life had passed, but remembering how sweet it had once been.
Now that I am in this moment, I can see that I did do the right thing—and “right” really is the word for it. I am not just okay, but happier. A better version of love did exist. But I moved out of that house with little assurance. Eventually, I would come to see that I’d been thinking of moral rightness in love the wrong way. My job was not to choose a good person to love, but rather to be good to the person I’d chosen. Extraordinary love was not defined by the intensity with which you wanted someone, but by generosity and kindness and a deep sense of friendship. You had to love someone and like them.
How to Fall in Love with Anyone Page 2