How to Fall in Love with Anyone

by Mandy Len Catron

  • • •

  Here’s what I know for sure: They met at Pennington High School sometime in the mid-1970s. My mom was sixteen and my dad was twenty-two. It was his first job out of college, coaching football and teaching PE. Mom interviewed him for the school newspaper and they became friends before they were anything more than that. My dad went on one date with my aunt Cindy—the sister who was two years older than my mom. It didn’t go well. Family legend has it that they went to the drive-in diner, where each thought the other was paying for dinner. And when the bill arrived, no one had enough money to pay. Later, Cindy started dating Dan, my dad’s co-coach and best friend.

  My mom took a boy from Jonesville, the next town over, to her senior prom. And my dad, a chaperone, brought my aunt Belinda—the sister who is four years older than my mom. They must’ve become more than friends by then, because after the dance Mom told her date that Belinda had probably had too much to drink and that she needed to get her home. Then she and Dad snuck out together.

  Mom graduated high school and, thanks to Papaw’s military benefits, went to college a couple of hours away. She majored in advertising and kept seeing my dad, and they got married the summer after she turned twenty. It was a double ceremony at the First Baptist Church of Pennington Gap: Mom and Dad and Cindy and Dan. Afterward, there was a short, sober reception in the church basement. When I was a kid telling the story to my friends at school, it always ended triumphantly: “And then they had a double wedding!” People love that ending.

  Mom finished her degree in summer school and Dad took a coaching job in his hometown, a small farming community just off the interstate. Mom found work selling ads at a nearby newspaper and they rented a house just down the road from his mother. Mom says Granny didn’t really warm to her until I was born, but she was pregnant within the year.

  Dad kept coaching, moving around the region until we ended up in the town where I grew up. Once a season, my dad’s and my uncle Dan’s high school football teams played each other. These games were my favorite.

  I always believed there was evidence in my parents’ story about where their lives would take them, about the kind of people we were all going to be. But then, I believed this of every love story. For Cindy and Dan, it has proved to be true. He found work coaching football in a small town down the road and eventually became the high school principal. He’s retired now, but they still go to the Friday night games. Cindy got a job in a clothing store in the Food City strip mall, where she still works, just for fun, a couple of days a week. They moved into a small brick house, where they still live. And once a year, they go on vacation to Hilton Head Island, the place where they spent their honeymoon. They had no children but are devoted to their nieces and nephews. Every year of their marriage has been an echo of the first, altered only slightly by minor health problems or small changes in circumstance. It is, at least from the outside, how I always imagined a marriage should go.

  • • •

  In his book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Jonathan Gottschall argues that we all have an internal sense of story: that storytelling is an innate human skill. We just know, even when sitting around the elementary school lunch table, what makes something interesting. And we choose what to include and what to leave out without stopping to consider why we’re making these choices—or even to notice that we’re making choices at all.

  Gottschall is one of several scholars working in the field of Literary Darwinism, applying the ideas of evolutionary biology to literature. The approach can emphasize generalities at the expense of (relevant) particularities, but it’s produced some interesting ideas about how and why we tell stories. Gottschall points out that stories are only appealing if they contain a predicament. One of those predicaments, of course, is love: how to find it, how to keep it.

  Kurt Vonnegut famously graphed the various structures that can be used to map almost any story. In the “boy meets girl” structure, someone (it doesn’t have to be a boy) comes across something they want (which doesn’t have to be a girl), loses that thing, then, by the end of the story, finds a way to get it back—forever.1

  I like the simplicity of Vonnegut’s structure, but I wanted something more specific. I wondered if I could come up with a list of features present in almost every love story—even those without a happy ending. As it turns out, there are a few basic elements. Here’s what I came up with:

  1. Meetings. The best meetings contain hints of larger forces at work. Ennis and Jack pull up at the same empty trailer, each silently eyeing the other while they wait for the job offer that will change their lives.2 Or the cheerleader goes to interview the new coach because her best friend refuses to do it.

  2. Awareness of love. Maybe it’s love at first sight or maybe it’s unrequited longing. It’s the moment when Elizabeth Bennet reads the letter from Mr. Darcy. Or when Rachel watches that old home video and realizes that Ross has loved her since they were teenagers.3 I always imagined that, in the tradition of all great love stories, my parents felt some immediate connection from the moment they met.

  3. Potential obstacles. The evil queen has given our heroine a poisoned apple. Or the cheerleader is too shy—and too intimidated by social barriers—to pursue the coach, so she sets him up with her older sister instead. As Nicholas Sparks (documented love story enthusiast) says, “If the obstacles confronting the lovers define the story, then what makes a great love story is their willingness to go to almost any lengths to overcome them—whatever the cost.”4 (As a general rule, the more personal the obstacle—shyness, for example, is a more intimate challenge than an envenomed fruit—the more satisfying the eventual resolution.)

  4. Union. It turns out, love is too powerful a force to be muted or stopped. Dragons are slain, obstacles are surmounted, and at last the lovers are brought together, their union bringing them more bliss than they thought possible. Typically, we are left to assume that this happiness continues indefinitely. But even if all is not happily ever after, the union still precedes the tragic ending: Jack and Rose steal away to the back of a car as the ocean liner steams toward its destiny.5

  The predictability of this pattern does not make it less powerful. Its ubiquity does not take away its pleasurability—twenty-five years of watching Sixteen Candles has not dampened this for me. I am still so pleased to discover that Jake Ryan has shown up to wish Samantha a happy birthday. And I still love announcing that the cheerleader and her sister both married football coaches—on the same afternoon, in the same ceremony, no less. These four elements are so familiar that almost any real-life romance can be finessed to fit.

  The story of the cheerleader and the football coach, as I have always told it, fits so neatly into this structure that it really seems possible that some greater force is dictating their lives. Not only do the protagonists get married, as you know all along they will, but there’s a second marriage when Cindy finds someone who is like my dad but perfect for her. The ending is so resolute that it’s almost impossible to imagine the other, real-life ending: the moment when, twenty-eight years and two grown children later, the cheerleader and the football coach will have respectively become the IT director and the supervisor of secondary education, and they will decide they no longer want to stay married.

  • • •

  My parents told my sister and me they were divorcing late one night while I was home visiting for the week. I was twenty-six and had been living in Vancouver for a year. The next morning, as we’d planned to all week, the four of us woke up at 5 a.m. and drove to the Magic Mart parking lot for a hot-air-balloon ride.

  Casey and I watched as our parents stood on either side of the balloon’s widening mouth, holding it steady as fans bloated the envelope, the pink and blue nylon rising upward like a surfacing whale. “Hold her tight now,” barked our pilot, a small woman with a walkie-talkie clipped to her belt. She was confident in her knowledge of this uncommon art and adept at telling us what to do. I remember thinking that my da
d, a man of enthusiastic logistical questions, was probably her ideal client.

  The balloon ride wasn’t the last thing the four of us would ever do together, but that morning I thought it might be. I had no idea how divorce was choreographed. None of us did, but I could see my parents were well practiced at pretending things were okay. The dissolution of their marriage seemed to occupy a distinct space in their brains.

  I hadn’t slept the previous night—or spoken all morning. In a couple of hours I would be leaving for Vancouver. But first we would take the balloon flight they’d won at a fundraiser months earlier. They insisted. I was too angry to refuse.

  Once we launched, I was relieved to discover that the noise from the burner fueling the balloon made talking impossible. I could pantomime normalcy.

  We tapped on shoulders and pointed into the distance. Look at the arts center on the hill, the sprawling warehouses of the county flea market, the limestone quarry with mountains of driveway gravel, the cow ponds, the church steeples. A thick, low-lying fog lingered in the recesses of pastures and tobacco fields. Of course, I remember thinking bitterly, it’s fucking beautiful.

  It was years before I could really see the humor in the situation: Short of knitting matching sweaters, there could be no more wholesome way to mark the end of a marriage than a hot-air-balloon ride. As we cruised low over nearby subdivisions, folks appeared on their back decks in bathrobes, their heads turning upward toward our propane roar. They waved, genuinely delighted, as if we were celebrities. And because we are people who meet others’ expectations, we waved vigorously back. As if yes, we were delighted to be here. And, oh yes, thank you for ordering up the fog and the church bells and the lazy cows. It was just the Appalachia we’d been hoping for.

  When I realized the whims of the air currents were carrying us toward our house, I felt a sudden, panicked ambivalence. There was something funereal about seeing it like this, for the last time. We ascended into the full light of day as we sailed toward it, but the trees’ long shadows obscured the roof. The air pushing up against the small ridge sent us higher. I fumbled with my camera as we gained altitude, desperate to get a shot of the home we had loved, the home the divorce was forcing them to sell. But with my eyes on the camera and the zoom maxed out, I didn’t see the house itself, just an overexposed blur on the camera’s screen.

  Moments later, the basket lurched into the stubble of a cornfield with a thud. The envelope rose again, levitating us once more before landing at an angle and tipping all four of us—and the balloon operator—into a pile on the ground. After a second’s confusion someone laughed, and then we all did, hilariously, uproariously. We were the live studio audience for a mediocre sitcom. We were at the circus watching clowns throw pies. Nothing was funny, really, but we couldn’t stop laughing the manic laughter of people who know it will be a while before they hear themselves laugh again.

  • • •

  There’s a picture of my parents at Casey’s junior prom sitting on my dresser. My dad was the school principal, so they attended as chaperones. They stand by a baby grand piano, flanked by potted ficuses. Mom wears a black one-shoulder shift she took from my closet—a dress far more appropriate for my mom than for the twenty-year-old I was when I bought it. Dad stands tall behind her, looking every bit the guy in charge in his pressed suit. Somewhere off camera, my seventeen-year-old sister is avoiding her parents. Their smiles are unguarded as they inhabit the pose with full sincerity.

  Their relationship was, I’d always believed, a deeply moral one, marked by great kindness and generosity and self-sacrifice. Not only did they have a good story, they were also fundamentally good people. They were the kind of people who stayed married, the kind of people whose lives were suffused with happiness—because they deserved it.

  In the months following my parents’ divorce announcement, as I began to worry that I had really overestimated love as a force in the world, I’d look to the photo as a reminder: They were happy together once—they were happy for a long time.

  I worried that my assumptions about their marriage had prevented me from deeply investing in my own relationship with Kevin, which, though it had great love, often lacked kindness and generosity.

  • • •

  Once I started writing their story down, I could see its problems. For one, I always imagined the cheerleader as a slightly shyer, significantly poorer version of the person I was at sixteen. It helped that she even looked like me, down to the long blond hair we both wore parted in the middle. Once, when I brought a friend home from college, he pointed at the photo of my mom sitting on the field in her Bobcats uniform and said, “Is this you?” The only thing that distinguishes her cheerleading photo from mine—taken twenty years later—is the color of the uniform and the style of the pom-poms (hers are long and stringy; mine are rounder and fluffier). The pose, the setting, the bony arms, and the big grin were all the same.

  In my version of her story she is quiet and well behaved and secretly thrilled by the attention of someone who was so outgoing and charming. Without noticing it, I’d made her like every other demure, passive princess, a girl who found her prince simply by being the right person in the right place at the right time. But my mom never talked about herself that way.

  I’d never asked my dad to tell me his version of the story, probably because I believed love stories were fundamentally about kind, modest young women—about the things that happened to them and the ways those things improved their lives. But one part of the story did come from my dad: the part about asking Papaw for permission to marry Mom. The football coach drove up to the cheerleader’s house one day—the small bungalow where Mamaw still lives—and said to his future father-in-law, “Let’s go for a drive.” This detail stuck with me because, though he died when I was four, I remembered Papaw as an intimidating man.

  My dad’s story was a lesson on decorum and the kind of man who would make a good husband. These conventions seem outdated (and problematically sexist) to me now. But as a kid, the story seemed romantic, an illustration of my father’s sincere intentions. And it would be my job, I knew, to choose someone with a sincere love for me, someone brave enough to face the football coach at his most stern.

  I couldn’t see all the fairy-tale clichés my parents’ story contained: the strict, serious father whose approval the suitor must earn; the lovers sneaking around to be together, taking risks for love’s sake; the poor girl who finds good fortune—not a prince, necessarily, but someone to transport her out of poverty.

  Instead, I saw the familiarity of their story as a testament to its authenticity. It fit the template of a great love story, so therefore, theirs must be a great love—not only true but also long-lasting.

  As Alain de Botton says in Essays in Love, “The stories we tell are always too simple.”6 They fail to make space for the mundane, domestic, trivial, annoying parts of life. I’d been telling a story about who I wanted my parents to be: a story devoid of banalities, where love was big enough to break taboos, important enough to keep secret, powerful enough to transport a young woman to a better life in a new world.

  • • •

  When I was young, my parents were affectionate and playful and always vocal about their love for us. But we never talked about anything uncomfortable—not faith or sex or politics or death. (For many years, my parents didn’t even tell each other who they voted for.)

  We played Wiffle ball in the yard before dinner. We went to sporting events on Friday nights and mulched the flower beds on Saturday mornings. Our intimacy was enacted through touch, play, and a collective imperative to be good people. I felt completely loved, but I also understood that my interior world was mine and theirs was theirs.

  My parents knew for years that their story was at the center of my investigation of love and love stories, but they never asked to read what I was writing. And I never offered to share it. I was also a little bit embarrassed that while they had both moved on to new lives and new loves, there I was, st
ill hung up on that old story.

  • • •

  I was home for Christmas a couple of years ago when my dad handed me a box to take over to my mom’s place. I lifted the lid and saw, among other things, her high school yearbooks. I pulled them out as soon as I got to her apartment.

  As Mom and I paged through the books that night, she pointed out friends and told stories. She let me read the ridiculous things her classmates had scribbled inside the cover. On one page her finger rested on the photo of a pretty girl with dark hair. “That’s Tammy,” she said casually. “Your dad also dated her.”

  Confused, I wondered when that would’ve been, but she didn’t elaborate.

  When we flipped to the photo of the cheerleading team, she named each girl and added, “There’s Tammy again.”

  “Wait a second.” I put my hand on the page as she tried to turn it. “Dad dated another cheerleader?”

  “He even took her home to meet your granny.” She laughed. “I guess I was his second choice.”

  “What? Really?” Mom nodded and kept flipping pages. But I couldn’t get past it. It had never occurred to me that my mom wasn’t the first to go for Sunday dinner at Granny’s. And wasn’t it Love (capital L) or some kind of romantic preordination that made it okay for the football coach to date a cheerleader in the first place? He obviously hadn’t been destined for this Tammy person.

  I couldn’t decide how to feel about the fact that my dad, a man who has always possessed more moral certainty than anyone I know, dated two students at the high school where he worked. Even if he was barely an adult himself, and he really didn’t think it through; even if it was a very common kind of relationship in that place and time (which it was, I know), it was still weird: the discrepancy in power and social standing, the difference in the life experiences of someone who is twenty-two and someone who is sixteen.

  • • •

  I finally decided to call my mom to ask her about the cheerleader and the football coach because I wanted to know more than I could piece together on my own. “I have some questions,” I said. And we talked for a long time.