“Meningitis?” He looked at me over the rim of his glasses. “Okay, no big deal, meningitis.” He scribbled the word meningitis by the question.
“Have you ever been treated for anxiety or depression or other nervous problems?” He paused, looking me up and down. I thought for a moment of the past few months, of this vague awareness that had settled in my gut: that my relationship with Kevin needed to change—or to end? I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t quite unhappy. I was stuck. And the feeling of being stuck seemed to dislodge the mechanism in my brain that enabled me to focus, to do work, to have conversations with friends that weren’t shadowed by the not-happy-but-not-quite-unhappy feeling. Was this anxiety? Should I be treated for it? Could he see it on my face?
“No,” he said decidedly. “You? Very healthy.” For each of the following questions he did the same: read it aloud, then looked me over as if my medical history was written on my skin. Kidney disease? Problems with digestion? Alcohol addiction? Pills or medication? Each time he shook his head. No, no, no, no, he said, circling the corresponding word on the form. Mostly, he was right. Where I did have something to add, he graciously made a note.
He turned to Kevin, deciding to simplify the process: “You say no to all these questions, right?”
“I do,” Kevin said, confident in his own good health. He smiled at me across the table. I grinned back and felt, for the first time in weeks, the thrill of being on the same team.
During the vision test, I got two of the tiniest letters wrong with my left eye. Kevin looked concerned but the doctor just laughed. “We’re not letting you fly a jet plane.” He made the sound of a jet, Pkkkkkoooowwwsshhhh, raising his arms in the air as if he was holding a model plane.
I began to laugh. Kevin joined in, and soon we were all three laughing loudly, the doctor’s girlish giggle only making my shoulders shake harder.
As he wiped his eyes, the doctor put down our charts and removed his glasses one last time. His face turned solemn. “You want to live a long life? I tell you a secret to long life.” He was only looking at Kevin. “Secret to life is two words: Okay, honey.” He laughed again, cracking himself up, but stopped abruptly and gave Kevin a serious expression.
“You learn these words,” he said, pointing at Kevin with his glasses. “You live to be eighty,” he said: a fact. On the table between us he drew two imaginary lines with his index fingers, one representing each of our lives. “First ten years, you don’t remember. Last ten you’re old and sick.” Kevin smiled with eyes wide in an exaggerated attempt at studiousness. “You have a beautiful girl. You do not fight. You make a happy life. You have good health.”
I imagined us laughing about this later. We’d tell our friends how we went in for a medical exam and came out with relationship advice. It would be good, I thought, to have something to laugh about. Even though I knew that Kevin did not subscribe to the “Okay, honey” philosophy, I wondered if he might glean something from the message—something about the value of compromise and shared happiness.
After we left the doctor’s office, we went down to the lab for more tests. We flashed our passports, signed more forms, peed in little cups, and submitted our arms to syringes. At the radiology lab, Kevin pulled out his camera to document my X-ray outfit, a paper shirt over jeans, while I wondered if the slight cough I had could possibly register as tuberculosis on the chest X-ray.
We walked out to our bicycles and I handed him the key to the lock that secured them together. He was going to work and I was heading home to grade papers. Helmets on, we said goodbye.
“Have a good day,” I said, feeling the strain returning to our interaction.
“You too,” he said, as I threw a leg over my bike. When I looked up, he was making a goofy kissing fish face. I laughed and leaned toward him over my handlebars. It was our first kiss in several days. He smiled, jumped on his bike, and headed downtown.
• • •
That day it was easy to imagine that our doctor was directing his relationship advice toward Kevin not out of some outmoded and gendered idea of how relationships work, but because it was obvious from our very brief interaction that I was the one who’d been doing all the compromising. He’d heard it in my heartbeat, read it on the blood pressure gauge: I was the good partner; I needed no advice. But still I longed for it.
I didn’t want genuinely good advice as much as I wanted someone to just step in and fix whatever had broken between us, by making Kevin the kind of partner I thought I deserved.
I spent a lot of time feeling like this—assured that I deserved better and yet bound to Kevin by forces stronger than my own will. I was bound by Citizenship and Immigration Canada but also by the days and months and years we’d known each other, by the good life we’d built together in a new country. And I was bound by love, even if that love was occasionally bitter with self-righteousness.
For a few minutes, the doctor’s advice did fix us: It softened us and reminded us that we were on the same team; it gave us a story to tell.
• • •
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.
When I was younger, I was told I was too shy, too quiet, too unwilling to show someone I liked him. Later I was too self-conscious, too picky, too independent.
It’s hard not to be quiet when you grow up with Seventeen magazine, reading articles like “How to Be a Guy Magnet” and “First Moves, Secret Crushes, and the Worst Thing a Girl Could Do.” Most of the articles can be translated the same way: Being alone is a problem you must solve. (If you are curious, by the way, about the worst thing a girl could do, it does not involve committing a felony. Even if you manage to walk up to your crush without tripping over a chair leg or spilling his drink, you might still “come on too strong” or “be too direct” in showing your interest. Even if you convert your crush into your boyfriend, you may still “nag,” “tease,” or “be too clingy.”)
According to Seventeen, communicating with the opposite sex wasn’t just challenging, it was hazardous. I still remember the horror I felt after reading an article in the Traumarama column about a girl who was talking to her crush while wearing short denim cutoffs. He said something like, “You’ve got a string hanging from your shorts,” then proceeded to pull out her tampon. Of course he ran away in shock, all hope of romance running off with him. It was the ultimate teen horror story: a convergence of bodily fluids, rejection, and public humiliation. I didn’t even stop to consider the logistical details of such a scenario. I was stuck on the message: The risks of even talking to the guy you liked were treacherously high.
I stopped reading women’s magazines sometime in college, well before I ever worked up the confidence to refer to myself as a woman. But it seems their strategies have changed little. On a quick scan of Marie Claire’s website I found “10 Ways to Spot a Commitment-Phobe,” “4 Ways to Boost Your Libido,” and “This Is the Ideal Age Difference in a Relationship.” Some of this advice is based on actual research, which I guess gives it an advantage over the advice of twenty years ago, but still it presupposes a right way to experience love, a formula for romantic success. And I understand why magazines do this: It is not simply that preying on insecurities is a time-honored sales technique, it’s also because this assumption that there is a right way to be in love—and that being in a relationship is better than being single—is at the core of almost all the relationship advice you will ever receive . . . from anyone.
There is a strange morality at work in this advice: Breakups are a kind of failure, an indication that the relationship was “bad”—meaning you, yourself, are bad for not being able to save the relationship, or for not knowing the difference between good and bad in the first place. Either way, you have failed at the goal of coupling.
• • •
“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?
As an unmarried attendee, I assumed no one was asking what I thought they should do.
A few years ago, a friend was trying to decide whether to marry his girlfriend, who was eager to have kids. He decided to spend a couple of months biking down the Pacific Coast, hoping to get some perspective on his relationship.
He met up with his girlfriend in San Francisco. They had a great weekend together. Then he spoke to a newly married friend, Peter, on the phone.
“The important thing about getting married,” Peter urged, “is that you’re choosing to choose.”
The idea here was that there was virtue in committing to someone, regardless of the larger circumstances of the relationship. The commitment itself was redemptive.
“It was this really inspiring speech,” my friend confessed. “And so I ignored my intuition, which was that something was missing from my relationship, even though there was nothing really bad about it.”
And so, despite his ambivalence, he got engaged. Then, a few weeks before the wedding, he got unengaged.
He won’t elaborate much on the details of the engagement or the breakup—because it is, to this day, the thing he feels the most shame about.
Peter got divorced a couple of years later.
• • •
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.
When I began to question my relationship with Kevin, I found the world was full of people just waiting to give me advice.
Don’t go to bed angry, they say. Never fake an orgasm. Keep date night sacred. Communicate more, react less. Buy flowers. You will hear this and wonder how you fell for someone who never once bought you flowers even though you hadn’t thought to want them until that day. You will become self-conscious during sex. You will think, He never says, “Okay, honey.” You will think you are doomed.
Love advice is inherently destabilizing. But it is difficult to resist others’ prescriptions for love—they are like ads for diet pills, showing you two images: Your insecurity is the “before”; their self-assurance is the “after.”
• • •
In her book Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law, the philosopher Elizabeth Brake coined the term amatonormativity, which she defines as “the assumption that a central, exclusive, amorous relationship is normal for humans, in that it is a universally shared goal.”1 That anyone would imply that there is something virtuous about commitment—or that marriage is an effective way of quelling doubt—isn’t surprising. This assumption—that legal union is the highest form of love and that everyone should experience it—is so pervasive it’s almost invisible. It’s why newlyweds get free champagne, and why your spouse can share your dental benefits but your live-in sister can’t.
Amatonormativity enables the illusion of choice in love (Do I marry her or break up with her?) while implying that one answer is evidently superior. There’s little space for reflection or doubt or intuition.
• • •
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’ (48 percent very happy) or ‘extremely liberal’ (35 percent). Everyone else is less happy, with the nadir at dead-center ‘moderate’ (26 percent).”2 Brooks presents this research as if it is surprising, but it seems obvious to me: The more conviction you have, the more sure you are of your place in the world. Unhappiness tends to lie with rumination, with doubt.
When I went to a writing residency at the Banff Centre, a place I imagined would be a hotbed of doubt and rumination, I hoped to encounter a little less certainty about love. But when the subject came up, my new friends proffered chirpy theories about why some relationships worked and others didn’t. Sam, a musician, told me that in heterosexual relationships, the man must love the woman a little bit more. “Just the width of a piece of paper,” he said, “but more.” He told me about meeting his wife, his second wife: “When we first started dating, she went on tour with us,” he said. “And she saw some of the other guys in the band. They were married and she saw them with other women.” He grinned at the group of us assembled for dinner, because by then everyone was listening.
“She didn’t even blink,” he said. “She trusted me from the start. And I don’t know what it is about her, but I would lie down in traffic for my wife. And she knows it. That’s why we’re happy.”
“I have another theory,” said Nanci, a poet. “I think some people are cats, you know, independent roamers. And some are dogs: very loyal and attentive. Two cats will just get bored and wander apart. And two dogs will smother each other. I think you need a little of both in a relationship, that balance of give-and-take.” She said she was a cat but her partner was a dog: “I roam around and he is always there waiting for me.”
John, another poet, told us he once heard a marital-therapist friend of his talking about the demise of the typical relationship. “He said that whatever it is that attracted you to your partner will be the same thing you divorce them for. If you love them for their independence, then that will eventually become the thing you most want to change about them—because they have already fulfilled your desire for an independent partner. And now you want stability, someone to stay home with the kids when they’re sick.”
Another person had a pendulum theory, that relationships oscillate between love and annoyance. When you first meet someone, the pendulum is likely to stick on the love side. But as the relationship wears on, it swings back and forth more freely, eventually sticking on the side of annoyance. The trick was to find someone whose annoying habits were minor enough that you could live with them.
I applied each theory to my relationship in turn. (I loved more: bad sign. I was a dog, but he was a cat: good. I had chosen to share a life with the most independent person I knew: Was I suddenly expecting teamwork?)
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by their theories or my own response: 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.3 The higher the ambiguity, says Kruglanski, the stronger our impulse for explanation.
These theories felt like hostile bacteria, seeking a scratch in the surface of my confidence, a way under my skin.
The more advice I got, the more I began to believe the problem with my relationship was that it was ending. But this wasn’t a problem. It was unpleasant. It made me feel isolated and sad. But the problem had begun years before. The problem was that love had become an equation, and each day I tallied up all I put in and all I got out, and I worried about the imbalance. I focused on Kevin’s flaws, on the advice I knew he needed but was sure he would never take. But I didn’t spend that much time thinking about my own flaws, about all the ways I could be better at love.
My focus on fixing and maintaining the relationship—which was really about finding a way to make
him keep loving me—was a distraction from a bigger question: Even if we did keep loving each other, were we capable of being good to each other (and for each other)? Could we make that choice every day?
It would be a long time before I finally got the advice I needed that winter. I was standing in the kitchen, cooking and listening to a podcast—Dear Sugar—in which the writers Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond regularly give advice.
“Dear Sugar,” a listener wrote. “What do I do if I can’t stand to stay with him but I can’t stand to leave him either? Signed, Can’t Win.”4
“Leave,” I said to the pot of soup on the stove.
“Leave,” said Cheryl Strayed.
No one gave me this advice, but it was the advice I needed: Leave.
No one gave me this advice because it isn’t the kind of advice we like to give.
At the heart of almost all the romantic advice you will ever receive is the presumption that some forms of romance are better—more meaningful, more important, more valid—than others. First of all of these is long-term monogamous commitment.
In a culture that stigmatizes singledom and celebrates commitment, telling someone who is approaching thirty to leave a long-term relationship with someone who loves her, whom she also loves, feels like a mistake.
• • •
Once I was single, I discovered that dating advice wasn’t much different from relationship advice. There were tips about how long to wait to respond to a text message, what to wear and not wear, which topics were appropriate for a first or second date and which should be avoided altogether. It’s not that the advice was terrible, it’s just that it was all directed toward a singular goal: finding someone to spend my life with.
I liked the idea of spending my life with someone, but the more dating advice I consumed, the more confused I felt. I gravitated toward people who possessed qualities Kevin didn’t; they were steady, modest, exceedingly nice. I put so much work into making these guys like me, only to find myself bored a few weeks in. I dated one guy—a super-sweet vegetarian engineer—for a few hopeful months. When he texted one day to ask if he could stop by to talk after work, my heart sank: I was getting dumped. But immediately after that realization, another followed: If we broke up, I could use chicken stock in the stuffing I was making for Thanksgiving dinner that weekend.
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