How to Fall in Love with Anyone

by Mandy Len Catron

  Steve, looking pained, said they were still figuring those things out.

  “You are not telling her the best part,” Joey interrupted, rolling his eyes. About a year after they’d gotten together, Joey had received an email from his long-neglected online dating service, attempting to lure him back. “We’ve found your perfect match,” it said. Joey grinned at Steve. “I opened up the email and there was Steve’s face!” Then, for what seemed like the first time, Steve smiled. He’d gotten the same message, he said, only his had Joey’s photo inside.

  “When we argue,” Joey said, “or when he’s mad at me, I get the printout of the email and I say, ‘You can’t be mad at me. You’re my perfect match!’ ”

  I knew from my own experiences with online dating that these “perfect match” emails were a pretty common technique for luring users back after an extended absence. My perfect match was usually some guy who also liked riding his bike to the beach—imagine that!—someone who inevitably scored high on the site’s attractiveness algorithm, and who the creators of the site hoped I might find attractive enough to reopen my profile. I’d hardly given those messages more than a moment of attention, but as Joey told his story, his gaze at Steve radiated a sense of gratitude, of faith in the order of the universe. A good story had enough, for Joey at least, to soften the real injustice of their experience.

  • • •

  In the long history of the human race, the story of how romantic partners managed to get and stay together has only recently become relevant. As Moira Weigel points out in her book Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, American dating culture didn’t exist until the early twentieth century, slowly gaining acceptance as women entered the public sphere.2 Before dating existed, parents acted as romantic gatekeepers. Even if parents allowed children to choose their own spouses, they exerted huge influence over courtship, which was typically confined to the family home.

  “The story of dating began when women left their homes and the homes of others where they had toiled as slaves and maids and moved to cities where they took jobs that let them mix with men,” Weigel writes. “Previously, there had been no way for young people to meet unsupervised, and anyone you did run into in your village was likely to be someone you already knew.”

  Finally having the freedom to meet and choose your own life partner meant that the mechanics of how that process worked were suddenly a lot more interesting. It’s easy to imagine why telling how-we-met stories became popular. But having some choice over whom to spend your life with also meant having a lot more influence over the course of your own life, which is, admittedly, both empowering and intimidating.

  Improbable meetings are useful plot devices in Hollywood. The screwball comedies of the 1930s and ’40s put the “meet-cute” (what director Billy Wilder referred to as “a staple of romantic comedies back then, where boy meets girl in a particular way, and sparks fly”3) and the subsequent romantic pursuit at the center of the narrative.

  In his book A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema, Paul Monaco cites It Happened One Night as an early example of the genre in which two people are brought together by some improbable circumstance, immediately discover they cannot stand one another, and eventually fall in love despite it all.4 In this case the two meet on a bus: She is a wealthy heiress headed to New York to marry a man her father disapproves of, and he is a reporter hoping to get the scoop on her elopement. The central question at the heart of the movie is who Ellie Andrews should marry now that she has escaped her father’s influence: greedy fortune hunter King Westley or charismatic reporter Peter Warne.

  The popularity of screwball comedies coincides with the larger cultural shift from courtship to dating. And this emphasis on unlikely or surprising partnerships remained a staple of the romantic comedy throughout the twentieth century. From a screenwriting standpoint, the meet-cute is an easy way to engage viewers in the first few minutes of the movie: Two interesting personalities collide—we want to see what happens next. But the trope also implies the action of fate or destiny, bringing together people who might not otherwise have the opportunity to meet. In It Happened One Night, meeting Peter saves Ellie from a potentially disastrous marriage. But she is unlikely to have encountered the roguish, underemployed reporter in her regular rich-girl life.

  The glamorization of unlikely matches and dramatic, fateful encounters encourages us to place a lot of emphasis on meetings.

  When I was a teenager, I had this persistent fantasy that some handsome guy would come into the movie theater just after the previews started and sit in the empty seat beside me. Somehow—miraculously! improbably!—we would fall for each other while sitting in the dark, in silence, watching a movie. By the time the credits rolled, we’d already be holding hands!

  In my small town, I already knew every guy my age, and none of them seemed particularly interested in me, but this fantasy—that fate had something better up its sleeve if I would just be patient—was powerful. Of course I never met anyone in a movie theater, but the promise that fate could be an organizing force in my life—and especially in my very uneventful love life—gave me hope.

  • • •

  An infatuation with kismet doesn’t always serve us well. A good story can sustain a not-so-good relationship.

  A friend of mine, Maria, met her ex-husband in the 1980s on a flight from Vancouver to London. She was nineteen and headed to South Africa to visit her aunt. He was twenty-seven and on his way home from a business trip.

  “He spotted me in the terminal, but I only saw him once he started to walk up and down the aisles of the plane during the flight,” she explained. “Eventually, on one of his circuits around the plane I stuck out my arm and asked him if he was looking for anyone in particular.” As it turned out, he was trying to work up the nerve to talk to her.

  She had a seven-hour layover in London, so they agreed to meet at the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. “He took me for lunch and kissed me in Covent Garden,” she said.

  When she arrived at her aunt’s place, a letter was waiting, asking if he could see her on the return flight. “It was all wildly romantic to nineteen-year-old me. He was older, British, had a fancy British sports car, and seemed perfect for me in every way.”

  Six months later she moved to England to live with him: “It was obvious the minute I got there that it was a huge mistake.”

  She cried every day, she said. “It was hard to reconcile life in a tiny, cold apartment in a small town forty minutes outside of London with how romantic our beginning had been. And hard to admit I’d made a horrible mistake.”

  She says that back then, everyone loved their story, which seemed like enough to stay together. “Crazy reason to spend eight years of your life with someone, I know,” she said, laughing. “But I got a pretty good kid out of it.”

  It does seem crazy, but it’s the kind of crazy that’s usually obvious only in retrospect.

  • • •

  The big-budget romantic comedy—the natural habitat of the meet-cute—seems to have fallen out of fashion in the past few years.

  “Can the Romantic Comedy Be Saved?” asked a 2012 Vulture article.5 The Hollywood Reporter followed up the next year with “R.I.P. Romantic Comedies: Why Harry Wouldn’t Meet Sally in 2013.”6 Then, in 2014, LA Weekly demanded, “Who Killed the Romantic Comedy?”7

  “Men and women are still falling in love, of course,” Amy Nicholson wrote in LA Weekly. “They’re just not doing it on screen—and if they do, it’s no laughing matter. In today’s comedies, they’re either casually hooking up or already married. These are comedies of exasperation, not infatuation.”

  I, for one, am hopeful about stories of exasperation (and hopeful that they won’t exclusively feature monogamous heterosexual men and women). In the era of OkCupid and Tinder and Grindr, the question of how to meet someone is not nearly as pressing as that of how to choose someone—and of when and what, exactly, that relations
hip should look like.

  It is no longer universally acknowledged that any single men are in want of a wife. And, accordingly, the best romantic narratives in popular culture today aren’t about how to find someone to love. Instead, they investigate all the forms love can take over time and what it means to love well. TV shows like Amazon’s Transparent and novels like Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies examine love over the long term, as it morphs and shrinks and grows again, as it bears (or fails to bear) betrayal, suffers from inattention, and endures through grief.

  Hollywood seems perplexed that the meet-cute is no longer packing theaters, but the reason seems obvious: We want our media to mirror our anxieties, and we no longer practice love the way we did in the era of the screwball romance. Maybe instead of telling stories about how we met our partners, we should all share our stories about the limits of love—the times it disappointed us, the apprehensions it couldn’t soothe—and why we chose it anyway, or why we let it go. We don’t need stories to show us how to meet someone—we’ve got apps for that.

  • • •

  A good story can give a relationship momentum, but there’s no evidence that exciting beginnings rule out dull endings, though we act as if they do.

  After I signed up for OkCupid, I realized pretty quickly that even an especially good first date could fizzle into mutual obligation—third, fourth, and fifth dates that were fueled by hope instead of chemistry.

  It is impossible to know exactly what’s going on in someone else’s head, or the circumstances of their life. So instead we make up stories about who they are and what they want, and we imagine the possibility of a future together.

  To be effective—to compel people to get and stay together—how-we-met stories require serendipity, implausibility, the implication of destiny. A story needs to feel special.

  When I first met Kevin, I felt like something special was happening—though I didn’t know exactly what. It didn’t feel like the start of a ten-year relationship. But a moment came months later, when he flew home from South America for my college graduation and our friends’ wedding. It was the beginning of a tale of improbable romance—a story I could tell for years.

  The weeks before he arrived, I was a mess—panicked about graduate school as the rejection letters came trickling in, drinking enthusiastically, dreaming the same plotless dream over and over again: Kevin in the doorway of my dorm room, Kevin in my bed. In my dreams his cheeks were gaunt and stubbly, his long hair cut short. Sometimes he leaned against the doorframe and spoke to me in Spanish, a language I didn’t understand.

  Before I let him into my bed, I’d force Dream Kevin to prove to me that he was real. After so many mornings of waking up to find myself alone under the covers, I’d learned not to trust the dream. But he’d always convince me. He’d pull me in and put his stubbly chin against my cheekbone. He was back, he said, and he missed me more than chocolate chip cookies or indoor plumbing. Then we’d climb under the covers and he would pull me close. And then I’d wake up.

  And then finally he arrived, in the flesh, as his letter said he would. He felt like a stranger—not quite the person in my dream but not quite himself. After a celebratory dinner with our parents, four of us slept in my dorm room that night: my roommate and her boyfriend in her bed, me in my bed, and Kevin on the floor. I lay there and thought about how Kevin had stared at the dessert cart as if it might be hiding an explosive among its cheesecakes and cannoli; unused to the ordinary luxuries of the developed world, he was distrustful of desserts, wary of convenience. I could hear him shifting, still awake, the nylon sleeping bag rustling against his skin. Here was this person I’d thought I’d never see again lying on my floor.

  I knew I should sleep—my family was arriving at eight the next morning for the graduation ceremony—but instead, I climbed out of bed and whispered to him, “Do you want to go for a walk?”

  We spent the night wandering the campus. He told me about his mud house, about how he passed the days hiking in the forest above his home, about intestinal parasites and weeks of eating only rice and eggs and beans. We were sitting on the track sometime before dawn when he looked at me and said, “I think about you. A lot.”

  It felt like a defining moment.

  He said, I think about you a lot, and I paused to take in the details: the way the streetlamps warmed the fog before dawn, the unusual quiet of a college campus at the end of the term, the far-off look on his face, as if he was staring into one of those Andean sunsets he’d written me about. I imagined my real-world adult self one day laughing over a bottle of wine with my real-world adult friends saying, “And to think I thought I’d never see him again.” I thought of the grandchildren we might one day have. They would like this story.

  Years later, I did tell that story to friends over drinks. Doing so reassured me that I was in the right relationship, even though there was a lot of evidence—my vague anxiety, my increasing inability to discern my own desires—to suggest otherwise.

  I think of the how-we-met story as the start of a plot. The more our own experiences match the generic conventions, the more likely we are to assume the plot will extend in predictable ways: love, marriage, happiness. So we overemphasize meetings in hopes they have the power to forecast endings.

  But the abundance of how-we-met stories means we know a lot about falling in love—how it should feel and what we might say or do to influence its intensity and direction—but we don’t have many scripts for making that love last.

  okay, honey

  bad advice from good people

  The doctor, a small, balding Chinese man, called us in from the waiting room on a bright February morning. Kevin and I were in the final stages of our Canadian-residency application. We entered the office together and sat quietly as the doctor pulled his glasses down his nose and inspected our charts.

  We’d been told by our expatriate American friends in Vancouver that the doctor’s visit is just a formality in the permanent-residency ritual. “All they really want,” said Matt, who moved to Canada from Colorado two years earlier, “is to be sure you don’t have the hiv. That, and your money.” HIV, he meant, referring to the blood test. We would also be required to do a pee test and a chest X-ray. But first we needed to meet with a doctor. We thought this might include a blood pressure check, a quick listen to our two beating hearts, a few questions, and the signing of a form. Twenty minutes max. Still, I felt a little nervous. We’d spent the previous two years lettering our lives into lengthy documents, getting fingerprints and police records, writing letters of explanation for any documentation we could not provide. Getting Canadian permanent residency felt like completing a very elaborate scavenger hunt. There was always the possibility of delay, of error, of having to start the entire application again. The medical exam was close to the end of the process (though we couldn’t be sure how close), and we needed it to go right. Our relationship would not survive reapplication. I felt sure of this.

  I smiled expectantly at the doctor.

  “Who’s a professor?” the doctor asked brightly.

  “That’s me,” I said as he directed us to chairs on either side of a small table.

  He sat down between us. “Wonderful,” he said. “So wonderful. My son, he’s a professor, too. Just like you. Very, very smart. Very young. You are very young for a professor,” he said smiling, nodding.

  “Where does your son work?” I asked. In response, he leaned back, removed his glasses, and began detailing the entire history of his son’s educational career: why he hadn’t gone to school at the University of British Columbia, even though his father had wanted him to; why he’d taken a job in the States instead of his hometown in Vancouver; the nice house he could afford to buy in Minneapolis.

  I began to understand that our doctor believed the best and brightest young Canadians had been exported to the US. He liked us—Kevin and me—because we were working against that trend. This was good news, I decided. I didn’t tell him that I was just a sessiona
l lecturer or that my professional status was nowhere close to that of his son, the tenured professor of engineering.

  I looked toward the charts. The doctor put on his glasses and picked them up.

  “You two . . .” He paused, looking at Kevin, then at me. “You like it here.” Not a question, a statement. We like it here.

  And then he removed the glasses again, letting the charts fall back to his side, so he could explain the story of how he and his wife had moved to Los Angeles from China and how, while he was in medical school, they’d made a list of all the cities in North America where they might live and how they’d picked Vancouver in which to start a practice and a family. Not because they had been to Vancouver or knew anyone there—they hadn’t and didn’t—but because of the mountains and the sea. Because their kids could play in the streets. “Not like Los Angeles,” he said. They could’ve gone anywhere, he said. But after thirty years in Vancouver they were happy. We would be happy, too.

  He picked up his glasses. I wondered if he was finally ready to look at our paperwork. But instead of putting them on, he used them to gesture at a blank space behind our heads, as if he was projecting the movie of his life on the wall. He talked and talked and never once stopped smiling. Though I had a mound of ungraded papers to go home to, it was hard to feel impatient in his presence.

  Finally, he picked up our charts again. “Lady first,” he said, putting his glasses on. “I’m going to ask you some questions.”

  I nodded. On the chart was a list of questions the Canadian government had decided a licensed medical doctor must ask every potential immigrant.

  “Have you ever been hospitalized for any reason?”

  It seemed as if, before I could answer, he had already circled the “No” to the right of the question.

  “Actually,” I said, “I had meningitis when I was eighteen and I was in the hospital for a week.”