I told Mark what I was writing. I said I didn’t plan to use his name but that I wanted him to read it before I sent it out. He texted me later that night: “I’m having a beer in your neighborhood and rereading your essay. It’s so good. Stop by if you want to talk about it.”
I didn’t go meet him that night, but we did go to the climbing gym together a few days later. I liked being friends with Mark. Friendship suited us.
Feeling hopeful, I submitted the piece to an online magazine. Six weeks passed with no response.
I decided to try another venue. For years I’d wanted to submit to the Modern Love column in the Times, but the 1,500-word limit meant cutting the essay’s length by half. I was afraid that would ruin the piece. But I also knew that publishing in Modern Love could change a writer’s career.
As I wrote and revised the essay, my relationship with Mark changed. We became friends who saw each other two and three days a week. Friends who went on long hikes with my dog. Friends who said lingering goodbyes. After climbing, we’d talk about the romantic comedy we planned to write. The question was always the same: Would they get together in the end?
Part of what I liked about spending time with Mark was that the stakes felt low. I didn’t know what I wanted, so I didn’t feel stress about finding out what he wanted. I understood that he would be a good match for me, someone worth investing in, before I really developed feelings for him. In my previous experiences with love, the romance had always preceded the friendship. But this was different. The difference felt empowering.
I knew we weren’t dating, though it often felt like we were. Sometimes we talked about this (“It’s weird, isn’t it?” “Yeah, I guess it is.”). I wondered if part of the thrill of spending time with him—apart from the conversation, which was wide-ranging and always interesting to me—was the tension, the question of whether we would get together. Was I really interested in him, or did I just want to know the ending to our story?
In October, we became friends who tried kissing again, just to, you know, see what it would feel like. By Halloween we were friends who were holding hands, friends who had deleted our OkCupid profiles.
I sent the shortened essay to the New York Times on November 18, 2014. In its revised form, it ended like this: “You’re probably wondering if we’re in love. The answer is, I don’t think so. We’re still spending time together—my study partner and I—and we are still, a few months later, in the unusual space we created that night. I don’t know what will become of that space. Maybe, if we choose to pursue it, we will fall in love.”
It felt important that the ending reflect the reality of my experience. Aron’s study hadn’t made us fall in love, but it enabled me to feel close to Mark—and to trust that closeness without trying to define it.
• • •
We were in a bar in a hotel basement a couple of weeks later when Mark told me he loved me. After-work beers with friends had somehow become a night out dancing to ’60s soul music. Bourbon shots arrived in our dark corner of the basement as if of their own volition. We put the glasses to our lips and threw our heads back like twentysomethings. I sat down next to him, on what was either a stool or a table, and he smiled at me and said, “I like you, Mandy.”
“No,” he corrected himself, “I’m in love with you, Mandy.”
True to form, I responded awkwardly, not with reciprocation, but with incredulity: “Are you? How do you know?”
“I just know,” he said happily. “I know what I feel.” I marveled at his confidence, how assured he always seemed of his place in the world. I resolved to be like that, to let love in, even if I wasn’t sure I was ready. It was November and cold and wet in Vancouver, a good month to choose to fall in love.
• • •
If you can fall in love with anyone, how do you choose?
In her essay “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage,” Ann Patchett says you choose someone who makes you better: “It was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my twenty-five years of life: ‘Does your husband make you a better person?’ ”5
I like this idea. You find someone who makes you better (which is no small feat, to be sure)—because you are inspired by his generosity, because he is somehow both fierce and gentle and this shows you a new way to be brave—and then you just choose him. But maybe you don’t choose him once, maybe you have to choose him over and over again. You choose to walk to the apex of the bridge and stare him straight in the eye. And when he says I love you, you choose not to look away.
You have to choose him not knowing whether he will always choose you. This is a brave and scary act. But what other choice do you really have?
• • •
By December, loving Mark came easier to me. I knew I wanted to experience a version of love that did not make me anxious or overly self-conscious or weird, but I was accustomed to drama and conflict. I was better at loving the kind of guy who wasn’t so sure of his feelings for me.
I was relieved to feel the force of my love for Mark growing. I thought, maybe love needs to have its own momentum sometimes, or else it’s just too much work.
I rewrote the last paragraph of my essay and re-sent it to the New York Times: “You’re probably wondering if he and I fell in love. Well, we did. Although it’s hard to credit the study entirely (it may have happened anyway), the study did give us a way into a relationship that feels deliberate.”
I don’t think the slow and fairly typical way we arrived at a relationship is inherently interesting, but it’s worth noting that doing Aron’s study didn’t make us fall in love. Instead, it allowed me to be less guarded with love—and more open to its possibilities.
• • •
After my essay was published, Aron’s thirty-six questions were featured in apps and on blogs, as part of an art installation and on an episode of The Big Bang Theory. The scope of the whole thing really hit me when Mark and I were out for pizza one night and we heard the couple next to us answering the questions.
I got emails from strangers, relaying stories of trying the questions with first dates or friends or longtime partners. Their experiences attest to a shared desire: We all want to be known. We want to confess our greatest accomplishment and our most terrible memory. We want to be heard.
I had spent my life wanting something else, too, something much harder to come by: the knowledge that someone loved me, that they would continue loving me indefinitely.
When Mark and I finally got together, I thought the question “How do you choose?” had been implicitly answered. I thought, I guess, that I was somehow different from the other women he had dated. I thought, because we did the questions and the staring, and because we entered the relationship so deliberately, that we were different. I thought I would never get tired of looking at his face. I thought I had become one of those people who just knew. “How do you choose?” was irrelevant: We had chosen and we hadn’t done it lightly. I wanted that to be enough.
Almost a year later, I was still not tired of looking at his face, but I could also see the dangers of the short version of any love story. No love story is a short story. And ours didn’t end at “We fell in love.” It was strange to see my own story become the kind of myth I didn’t believe in.
I chose to fall in love with Mark because it felt safe. But I did not account for how that love would grow, for what it might be like to be loved by someone so conscientious and calm and kind. I didn’t see then—couldn’t have imagined—how high the stakes would get. He sits on the couch in his underwear and reads me an essay on Hamlet while I fry eggs and think how astounding it is that such a person exists and that he has chosen to love me. Some days I am silenced by the way he inhabits a T-shirt. And then I feel it again, that urge to look away for fear that he will see it in my gaze, how much I really want from him.
the pleasures of ordinary devotion
When I was fifteen, I saw the musical Rent on Broadway. I’d never been to New York�
��or any large city, for that matter. My family still drove an hour to shop for clothes at the Gap, two hours if we wanted something fancy like Banana Republic or Nine West. I’d never ridden in a cab or had a stranger ask me for money on the street. So this trip, with a summer governor’s school theater program, was liberating and electrifying. We could move through this wildly busy, appallingly dirty city without asking anyone’s mom for a ride.
Our group saw two musicals that weekend: Rent and Beauty and the Beast. It wasn’t intentional, but our instructors couldn’t have chosen two more contrasting narratives of love. Prior to that trip, I hadn’t thought much about love beyond the Beauty and the Beast fairy-tale version. Love, as I understood it, was a route to marriage and family and placid lifelong happiness.
But Rent was another story altogether. It was the first time I saw a man kiss another man. It was, I am embarrassed to admit, also the first time it occurred to me that homosexuality wasn’t just—or even primarily—about sex; it could also be about love. Likewise, a character called Angel could dress like a girl and be played by a man and fall in love with a man and respond to the pronouns he and she. For me at fifteen, these revelations were an opening to radical possibilities for love.
The show had just come to the Nederlander Theatre and won a Pulitzer Prize and still featured the original cast. I was starstruck. Moved, scandalized, heartbroken. I bought a T-shirt with a drawing of Angel on the front and I waited outside the stage door to get it signed. I bought the sound track and took it home and memorized every word, shouting along to the songs with friends at parties.
I felt so deeply invested in the lives of these fake people, and in their love stories—which were never going to end in marriage, either because same-sex marriage was still unimaginable or because their lives would be cut short by AIDS or because the institution itself was just not meaningful to them. Rent’s depictions of love, friendship, sex, and gender made me pause to rethink what made love valuable, who could experience it and how. I still aspired to the same cisgendered, heterosexual, monogamous married love my parents had, but I began to understand that these characteristics weren’t requisite to love itself. Other forms of love mattered, they counted. And maybe the best thing about encountering more diverse stories is simply this: They broadened my sense of what was possible.
• • •
Part of what we need from love stories, I think, is to be told what is possible in love. Because stories give us models for how a life can look. In their 1995 essay “Knowledge and Memory: the Real Story,” Roger Schank and Robert Abelson argue that all human knowledge is contained in stories: Everything we know and understand is filed away in the index of narratives we carry around in our minds.
I’ve often thought about this as a persuasive argument in favor of a liberal arts education: The more stories you know, the more you can say and do and understand in the world. But quantity itself isn’t enough. As Rebecca Solnit points out in her essay “Men Explain Lolita to Me,” not all stories are good, and the literary canon, for example, is full of texts (like Lolita) that normalize rape, or marginalize characters and voices and points of view that aren’t white and male. “Art can inflict moral harm and often does, just as other books do good,” Solnit writes.1
The problem with most conventional love stories is that they fail to expand what we know about love. They limit. They prescribe. And it is very easy to consume the same story over and over as you go about your life without even noticing it.
• • •
I’ve encountered a lot of stories that have expanded my sense of love’s possibilities, though I have often had to seek them out. Especially in the last few months of writing this book, which I spent trying to consume as many alternative narratives of love as I could. By alternative, I just mean any narrative that doesn’t follow the “love, marriage, baby carriage” script. I mean any narrative that rethinks the meet-cute or the grand gesture or the idea of love as a necessary form of redemption, that questions the tropes that the cisgendered, heterosexual, monogamous, marriage-minded love stories have come to (over-) rely on.
I wanted the scope of my research to include queer stories and poly stories and stories about people who were asexual. I wanted stories that began after marriage, or after having children, and stories where marriage was, for reasons of circumstance or personal preference, not implicitly assumed to be the ultimate expression of love. I wanted stories that implied love was valuable even if it didn’t last until the end of the story.
I made a Netflix playlist. I asked friends and strangers for recommendations. I downloaded audiobooks. I read essays and novels and I listened to hours of podcasts every day.
The more stories you consumed, I reasoned, the more scripts you had filed away, then the better your chances of making love fit your needs, rather than making your experiences of love fit into the conventional model—which was something I hadn’t had that much success with.
I spent years manufacturing romantic scenarios, believing that love would inevitably follow. There was the night in high school when my friend Jared and I pulled into the empty school parking lot, turned up the Madonna song on the radio, and danced under the sodium streetlights. I’d been so in love with him, something I never bothered to tell him because I was sure he already knew. Everyone knew. And as we danced I thought, This is it: the beginning of our love story. Because I’d seen the movies made for teenagers like me, I knew about the moment when two friends suddenly realize that they are in love.
But our friendship never became a love story. As we swayed on the pavement, my head on his shoulder, we were only mimicking romance, trying on conventions to see how they felt. We spent another year or two doing this: practicing the script of love in quiet moments alone, usually while he was dating someone else.
Eventually I figured it out: Trying to enact the script of love isn’t enough to generate love. And to force love into the narrow parameters conventional love stories have long prescribed doesn’t serve us.
But I am more sympathetic toward my younger self than I used to be: Stories matter; they shape our relationship to the world. And sometimes love (and the vulnerability it demands) is just a little bit easier when you feel there are larger narrative forces at work.
• • •
When my sister and her husband got married, I armed them with a summary of all the research on marriage and happiness: a prescription for Ever After. My wedding gift to them was a book I made myself, illustrated with photos of animal couples—lions nuzzling in the tall grass; chimps face-to-face, legs intertwined—species I knew to be non-monogamous, whose pairings look nothing like a human marriage, but which I chose for their wide eyes and soft fur and the anthropomorphic gestures that invite warm feelings about romantic attachment. I was simultaneously sustaining and dismantling love’s illusions in a single document.
“I know you have lots of happiness ahead,” I wrote in the introduction. I didn’t know, of course, how much happiness—if such a thing is even quantifiable—really awaited them. But I have never wanted anyone to be happier.
Theirs is definitely a “love, marriage, baby carriage” kind of romance. Their wedding met every expectation of the Southern vineyard wedding genre, complete with bluegrass band and a double rainbow that stretched over the Virginia hillside before the ceremony. Despite weeks of anxiety on my sister’s part, anxiety that had nothing to do with the immense commitment ahead and everything to do with the wedding-industrial complex and a self-imposed mandate that every detail exactly match her vision for the day, the whole event went perfectly. I spent the week before the ceremony making table settings and trips to Michaels craft supplies and saying, “I’m not doing this when I get married,” in a way that was, I imagine, annoyingly dismissive.
In truth, if I could gift my sister anything, it would be to have the promise of happily-ever-after perfectly fulfilled. And their proximity to the most normative love stories makes my hopes for them feel more like faith: Of course they ha
ve happiness ahead. But this adherence to convention comes with its own risks. If you fit too neatly into the fairy tale, it’s more likely you’ll be bruised when you bump up against its limitations.
• • •
But what about anyone whose experience of love is not represented in the narratives we typically encounter?
I spoke on the phone with a polyamorous couple who called themselves Bobby and Roxanne. (Polyamory, I should point out, is only one of several variations of non-monogamy.) They were raised in the courtship movement, which was booming in conservative Christian communities in the 1990s. The movement was conceived as an alternative to “secular dating” and emphasized sexual purity leading up to marriage.
“The concept is based on the idea that love is finite and you need to protect yourself from love until you get married,” Bobby explained. He said that in his community, you didn’t date until you were ready for marriage and then, with the guidance of your parents, you entered into a courtship with the expectation that it would become a marriage. He said his brother’s first kiss was on his wedding day. Bobby’s first kiss had come earlier—but not much earlier.
“I held hands with a boy for the first time when I was twenty-three,” said Roxanne.
Now, ten years into their relationship, they have kids and they are still Christian, but they have found “grace” by opening up their marriage. In their case, this meant first exploring sexual encounters with others and then, eventually, ongoing romantic relationships. “We came to understand that sexual desire—and then love—was not a zero-sum game,” Bobby said.
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