It was the least painful parting I’d ever experienced.
How had this happened? I kept wondering. How had I ended up with someone who was apparently less important to me than a side dish? I felt totally out of touch with what I wanted.
After a winter of disappointing dates, I spent Memorial Day weekend at a friend’s wedding. In an incredibly cliché move, I—a bridesmaid—spent the night after the wedding wandering the city hand in hand with one of the groomsmen. We wound our way through an expansive park, scaling playground equipment, testing swings, climbing a steep embankment in our dress shoes hoping to find the best possible view of the city. He showed me the neighborhood where he used to live, the middle school where he coached basketball. He told me about his family, his ambitions. I told him about life in Vancouver and the kind of writer I wanted to be. Then, sometime before dawn, he walked me back to my hotel room and kissed me good night. He was charming and boyish and came highly recommended by both the bride and the groom. But we lived thousands of miles apart.
I wrote him a note when I got home:
Hi David:
I think I needed a reminder that not only am I surrounded by loving, generous friends close by and far away, but also that there are guys like you out there—fun, joyful, sort of exceptional people. So, I’m glad I met you. It was one of the highlights of my weekend.
If you ever find yourself near Vancouver, you should let me know. I’ll be happy to show you the town.
Thanks for the walk—I only got one blister.
It wasn’t love, but it was the best night out I’d had in months. It was a meaningful romantic experience with no future, no expectation, no trajectory.
Romantic advice always sells us on the story that life is most full, most valuable, most rewarding inside a relationship. But my life got fuller outside of a committed relationship. And dating became a lot more fun once I stopped treating it like a job where wife was the ultimate promotion. If my goal was simply to make a real connection with someone for an hour, no matter what came of that connection, I usually had a good time.
• • •
Seven years after Kevin and I met, we finally signed a lease together. It felt momentous. I remember waking up in our bed, in our apartment, and surveying his face in the flat winter light, its angles more familiar than my own. He eyed me sleepily, pushing both palms against my cheeks. “Yes,” he said, “this is it. This is the face.”
It occurred to me then that I had the thing I’d spent my life waiting for: a domestic partner, a shared home.
“Here,” he said, pulling his lips back, pointing to a spot between molar and bicuspid. “This is where the food is getting stuck.” I was familiar with this spot. I looked closely, as if for the first time. “I’ll clean it,” I said, and stuck out a finger.
“Fine, mock me.” He laughed, and pushed me away. “But if you had five new cavities, you’d understand.” I leaned in to kiss his lips, but he parted them, and I kissed his tidy white teeth instead. After seven years, I thought, this is the nature of intimacy.
“Sometimes,” he said once as I peeled gauzy flakes of skin from his sunburned back, “I wonder if we are too familiar with each other’s bodies.” I thought of lancing blisters on his feet, cutting stitches from his chin. I thought of how, after my bike accident, he’d applied Neosporin to the gashes on my hip and thigh and ankle, saying, “You can still see the bone on this one.”
If anything, I wanted to see his bones, the ballooning of his lungs, the red world beneath his skin. When we first met, he sometimes stared at me as if he was looking for my retinas. I wanted to show them to him. It seemed to me there was so much we couldn’t know about each other.
But when I started dating a few years later, that willingness I once had to be pliant, to merge, had somehow evaporated. I just couldn’t summon it. Once I stopped trying to participate in the collective pursuit of happiness through coupledom and just started trying to have a good time, I found it much easier to actually be happy.
“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.”5 I wonder if that sense of certainty about the right way to love, the one peddled by magazines and smug married people and well-meaning doctors, is sometimes deadening, too? Maybe all our worry about how to find love and how to make it last is what keeps us from asking how to be good to one another—and how to love each other well.
if you can fall in love with anyone, how do you choose?
Some people, when they talk about how or why they chose to commit to a life with someone, talk about knowing. They say, “I knew he was the one for me when . . .” They talk about this knowledge as if it was a songbird that alighted on their shoulder one day, a package they were expecting in the mail.
But love has never been intuitive for me. In eighth grade, for example, I had a crush on Eric and I was thrilled to discover he liked me, too. Then, on the way in from gym class one day, he put his arm around my waist. I wanted to be excited, but instead, I panicked. I hadn’t been prepared for him to touch me in that moment. Rather than talking to him about it, I spent the next week avoiding him. After that, I felt months of regret, watching him sit on the bleachers after school with his new girlfriend.
This pattern dominated my adolescence. When anyone I was into seemed into me, I panicked and withdrew, anemone-like, until they gave up and, to my great dismay and relief, moved on to someone else. Maybe this is why I came to prefer unattainable crushes, to pursue people who seemed only sort of interested in me. Even in adulthood, I have always pushed through a period of initial uncertainty—do I really love this person, or am I trying to convince myself that I do?
• • •
I met Mark in a creative writing class I was teaching in February 2011. I was almost thirty and I’d just moved out of the house I shared with Kevin. Though we hadn’t quite ended the relationship, we were trying. And for the first time in years, I started really noticing all the interesting men in my life. I’d been staring so deeply into my failing relationship, sure that I would find a good reason to keep trying, that it wasn’t until I moved out that I took a deep breath and a look around.
Mark was a good writer. He was clever and he liked being clever and I liked that about him. I liked listening as he read his work to the class and I liked how, when he got excited about something, he spoke just a little too loudly. But I liked everyone in that class, and I might not have noticed Mark in particular, except that he’d written an essay about heartbreak. It was in the form of an instruction manual for a toaster oven: “You’ve probably bought the Bertazzoni X25.1 because you’ve broken up with your girlfriend and she has moved out of the house and taken your old toaster oven with her,” it read. “It’s okay, don’t panic.” We were in the same club.
One night I looked across the room at him and I thought, He would probably go out with me if I asked. But I didn’t ask. Even though he was a few years older than me, it seemed weird to date a student. In fact, when I saw him on OkCupid a few weeks later, I blocked him immediately. My face burned at the thought of him—or anyone I knew—seeing my life laid out like that: 5’ 7”, graduate degree, likes rock climbing and reading books. When you see someone you know on an online dating site—the photos they’ve posted, their list of hobbies, the body-type descriptor they selected—you see how they want to be seen by people they want to date. It’s embarrassing—you might as well be holding up a sign that says I WANT TO BE WANTED. And it’s even worse to be seen that way by a student. Like one of those dreams where you show up to teach and suddenly realize you’re naked.
• • •
That same winter, six months after moving out of the house I shared with Kevin, I first read about Arthur Aron’s attempts to create romantic love in the laboratory.1 Aron is a social psychologist who has spent decades studying romantic love, often alongside his wife and colleague, Dr. Elaine Aron. As best I can tell, because it was never formall
y published, the original study worked like this: A heterosexual man and woman entered the lab through separate doors. Each was told that the other was excited to meet him or her. Once inside, they sat face-to-face and spent the next ninety minutes asking each other a series of increasingly personal questions. Afterward, they stared into one another’s eyes, without speaking, for four minutes. I’d read online that two of the participants were married six months later.2
It was a lonely winter, particularly gray and cold—or that’s how I remember it. Some days Kevin and I went out for dinner, or watched TV. Some days we walked the dog in the snow and had sex, but he never stayed over. Sometimes, after he left, I would turn on the shower and cry loudly, just to get that impulse out of my lungs. I thought if I could hear how sad I was, maybe I could feel it a little less. But then I felt bad for my dog, who had no choice but to listen. Being that lonely felt like sitting in a room without a door. But reading Aron’s study opened a small window. I could see another version of love. Maybe it really was as simple as entering a lab alone and walking out with someone new. I was skeptical. But after spending my entire adult life with one person, I felt like this was a useful kind of hope. I needed to believe love was an ordinary thing.
• • •
By fall of 2011, Kevin and I had ended things for good, and I started putting real effort into online dating, which turned out to be kind of fun. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I could find something to talk about with anyone for the amount of time it took to order, drink, and pay for a beer.
I saw a few details of Mark’s life on Facebook and Instagram, but it was another year before I ran into him at the climbing gym. I was single. He’d grown a beard. He said he’d started a writing group with two other members of our class, Lynn and Evan. I said I’d love to join them sometime. As we talked, he sustained eye contact in this way that felt noticeable, like he was really looking at me. It made me nervous, but it also made me want to keep talking to him. As I climbed, I found myself wondering if he was watching. I found myself trying a little harder.
“Mark is kind of cute, isn’t he?” I said to my friend Kirsten in the change room. She nodded. He was cute. Back at home that night, I wondered if he looked at everyone like that. I wondered if he was still on OkCupid.
A few weeks later I got my answer. A photo appeared on Facebook, a selfie: He and a pretty brunette were in the woods, forehead to temple. She gazed at the camera as he gazed at her, his eyes crinkling at the corners. Oh, I thought. Love. Of course.
The French call it coup de foudre, or “the thunderbolt,” that shocking, sudden moment of love. Cupid scratches himself with his own arrow and falls hopelessly for Psyche. Or in the movies the popular girl looks at her nerdy best friend and something changes just behind her eyes. We see her see him, really see him, for the first time. And we know.
But I have never felt love strike like a thunderbolt, never fallen for someone I didn’t really know. When love has come my way, it’s come slowly and strangely, as uncomfortable as it is compelling, a guest I am happy to see but unsure about inviting in. Whenever I saw photos of other people in love, I marveled at their apparent certainty, their confidence in posting it online: hashtag-happy; hashtag-us. When I saw the photo of Mark and the brunette, I was surprised at how disappointed I felt, how suspicious of this girl I’d never met.
A few days later I met Mark and Lynn and Evan for their writers’ group at a pub across town. “I saw your picture on Facebook,” Lynn gushed to Mark when he arrived. “You guys are so cute!”
“Did you see it?” She turned to Evan and me, grinning. I felt my stomach tighten. Not wanting to admit to having noticed, I shook my head no. She pulled it up on her phone. “Aww,” Evan said. Mark blushed. I smiled and looked down at the menu.
And that was that. I turned my attention back to my other crushes—the aloof designer, the funny café owner, the photographer with the handsome dog. Dating—for the first time in my adult life—was confusing, but full of hopeful distractions. I browsed OkCupid the same way I shopped for headphones, opening ten or twenty tabs at a time, perusing each profile for signs of compatibility. I imagined what my life might be like with one guy or another. Would someone who mentioned Proust be kind—or moody and romantic? Did I want to share a bed with a guy who posted a picture of his motorcycle sitting in the driveway or, worse, his new mountain bike in the living room? What about the guy who called himself a “warrior poet, like Hemingway” and “a feminist”? I tried to keep an open mind. But it was hard.
What I really wondered was if I would ever love falling asleep next to anyone the way I loved sleeping next to Kevin. I told myself I could. Love was, after all, just an ordinary thing.
And that’s how I met Tom. His profile mentioned Neil Gaiman and Dostoyevsky—making him seem literate but not too sentimental. It linked to a blog where he posted goofy doodles he made at work. From the moment he sat down across from me on our first date, it seemed as if we were old friends. It was the start of summer, and biking along the beach to his downtown apartment felt like leaving for vacation. We never looked at our phones. We never spent time with his friends or mine. Summer seemed like a good reason to drink too much beer and lie naked on his bed watching YouTube videos with the patio doors open wide. We awoke to cawing seagulls and a 5 a.m. sunrise and I’d roll closer, just to feel my skin against his for half an hour before I biked back to regular life.
But after a few weeks, I started feeling anxious between dates. He was aloof. Sometimes it took a full twenty-four hours for him to respond to a text message. In those hours, I’d review the details of our dates. They had all the signs of real affection: He got up early to make me breakfast and drive me home if it was rainy; he always had my favorite beer in the fridge; when we walked down the sidewalk, he stretched an arm around my shoulders and pulled me close.
After a couple of years of practice, I thought I understood the semiotics of online dating. But Tom was hard to read. He was so at ease, so affectionate when we were together, but when we were apart I wondered if I had imagined it all. I was afraid that this pattern made me like him more. I felt a bit crazy.
In the middle of the summer, I commented on a photo Mark posted on Instagram of our friend Evan standing on the Burrard Bridge. “Hi fellas!” I wrote. Evan wrote back: “Mandy, have you seen the Douglas Coupland exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery?” I said I would check it out. A week later, Mark chimed in: “If you want someone to go with, I’d happily go see it again.”
I immediately said yes.
“Do you think it’s a date?” Kirsten asked.
“I think he has a girlfriend,” I said. “And he was so casual about it.” Besides, I reminded her, I was dating someone. In fact, it seemed like an ideal situation: A trip to the gallery with Mark would be an escape from waiting for Tom’s next text.
I wore a cotton dress and a new necklace. Mark came straight from work in a checked button-down. I remember this because I remember using his shirt to spot him across galleries. I liked seeing him from a distance and thinking, He’s with me. I liked the shape of his shoulders, the way he shifted his weight back on one foot as he surveyed the art. I liked how he smiled at me when we made eye contact from a distance, but I was careful not to look his way too often.
We left the gallery after an hour or two and headed to Coupland’s giant Gumhead outside—a seven-foot-high sculpture of a human head, sitting on the grass, covered in chewed gum. Mark pulled a pack of gum from his bag and handed me a piece. We chewed.
“So . . .” He paused. “Do you want to get a beer or something?”
“Yes,” I said, pulling the gum from my mouth and searching the head for the perfect spot, avoiding his gaze so my flushed cheeks would not betray me.
• • •
We made our way to a nearby bar. I hadn’t had dinner, but now eating seemed unimportant. We ordered the same beer, and before long the conversation turned to love.
I was used to this, talki
ng about love. Just before Kevin and I finally ended things, I started a blog on the topic. The subject fascinated me, but I was surprised to find how often other people wanted to talk about it. Maybe this was because I was fairly candid about my own life, but I’m more inclined to think that most of us are just waiting for a chance to have an honest conversation about love. And I have learned that in conversations about love, there’s often a subtext. Usually this involves the thing we want but are afraid to name, or the thing we want to know but are afraid to ask.
I don’t remember exactly how the question arose, but when Mark said, “I suspect, given a few commonalities, you could fall in love with anyone. And if that’s the case, how do you choose?” I assumed the subtext was the end of his relationship with the girl I’d seen on Facebook. Maybe, I hoped, he also meant me, though I tried not to think about it very hard.
I didn’t know then, and don’t know now, if you can fall in love with anyone. But I have long assumed that you could fall in love (and be relatively happy) with a significant number of people, which makes “How do you choose?” a really good question. If we believe—and I think we should—that there is no soul mate, no single, perfectly compatible person for each of us, then finding a partner requires making choices, and it’s worth considering how to choose well.
I was stuck on the first part of the question: Can you fall in love with anyone? I thought of a guy I’d dated a couple of summers before. We spent our weekends rock climbing and sailing. He was handsome and he loved my dog. I wanted to fall in love with him, but things between us seemed to lack momentum. I hoped that if I stuck it out for a while, my mostly platonic feelings would morph into something romantic. But they never did.
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