More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I remember thinking that what my dad said was true: It’s the little things that keep a couple together. Today we are together, I thought, to avoid another mound of paperwork, another two-year wait.
Gottlieb presented me with two conflicting ideas. One, which I wanted to agree with, was that there was no perfect person. If this was true, staying with someone I genuinely loved seemed wise. The other idea was that if a woman my age (almost thirty) wanted to have kids (which I sort of thought I did), she’d better find someone to do it with. Soon.
Relationships aren’t quizzes you can pass or fail, but we insist on talking about them as if they are.
Companionate love, on the other hand, was characterized by steadiness and teamwork. Companionate love sounded nice.
We discussed the sunk cost fallacy. This economic theory suggests that the more you invest in something, the more difficult it is to abandon, and it could be usefully applied to relationships. It was not a good idea, we agreed, to stay together simply because we had been together so long.
Missing each other didn’t make us get along better. Insight did not equal improvement.
My job was not to choose a good person to love, but rather to be good to the person I’d chosen. Extraordinary love was not defined by the intensity with which you wanted someone, but by generosity and kindness and a deep sense of friendship. You had to love someone and like them.
Deciding to break up, I thought, was like learning a star had burned out in a distant galaxy, even though you can still see it in the sky: You know something has irrevocably changed, but your senses suggest otherwise.
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
In real life, the beginning of a story rarely predicts its ending—no matter how many times you tell it.
In her book Marriage: A History, the historian Stephanie Coontz points out that marriage has only relatively recently become so inextricably connected with love.3 For most of human history, the institution was used to manage resources, unite families, and amass wealth; few would consider making a social or political alliance based on something as precarious as romantic love.
you can appreciate something (or even someone) while also recognizing its limitations.
Only in the face of death does commitment—in this case I am thinking of marriage—really become meaningful. We have one life, limited in its duration; to really invest in another person is to simultaneously sacrifice all the other potential people or investments of time. Lifetime commitment, however flawed and prone to failure it may be, instills a greater capacity for love than does simply waking up each day and deciding that, yes, you still want to be with someone.
I always read her choice to live alone for so long after Papaw’s death as an act of devotion to him, when it seems more likely she was devoted to someone else: herself. If the institution of marriage really is failing, maybe it’s because it is no longer the only—or even the best—model for how to make a happy life.
And even though I’d gotten a scholarship to attend Roanoke College, a small liberal arts school, I felt so fraudulent in my interactions with upperclassmen that I only spoke when spoken to.
My cheeks burned with that old shame of wanting someone who does not want you. I didn’t want to look at them, but I felt as if everyone was watching me to see if I was looking, which made the not looking that much harder. I finished the game, told my friends I had an upset stomach, and left.
Imagining Brian with that girl—someone so likable that I hated not being able to hate her
I felt uncomfortable about wanting so much from someone who, as far as I could tell, owed me very little. I’d asked for nothing and he’d promised nothing.
We love the Cinderella story because we all have fantasies of being recognized, and because it’s easy to see ourselves in protagonists who are overlooked not in spite of their goodness but because of it—because their defining attributes are modesty and loyalty and a willingness to put others’ needs before their own.
It’s also worth noting that watching someone else fall in love, especially if that person is fictional, is deeply pleasurable.
I believed not only that single people were missing out on what was the profound life experience, but that they were also missing some essential, if amorphous, human quality: desirability.
Being good isn’t the same as being kind or generous. Too often goodness, with all its moral connotation, is depicted as pleasing people in positions of power: adults, teachers, and yes, boys—especially boys with high social status.
Love is the means by which Cinderella and Vivian and Sixteen Candles’s Samantha get what they want: status, wealth, recognition. But these characters are rewarded for not seeking love, for cultivating silent crushes and earnest longing.
A quick glance around shows that the loved are not always virtuous and the virtuous are not always loved. But our love stories make this difficult to remember.
Being able to worry about whether you will ever experience the kind of love that will change your life is a privilege in and of itself.
“We are still wired to see marriages as the (happy) endings to women’s stories,” writes Rebecca Traister in her 2016 book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation.14 Traister points out that our assumptions about single women are often guided by “an unconscious conviction that, if a woman is not wed, it’s not because she’s made a set of active choices, but rather that she has not been selected—chosen, desired, valued enough.”
We don’t seem to mind a little mystery in the process of falling in love. In fact, I suspect we prefer it. But endings are different. When love ends, we demand an explanation, a why.
But now I understand that there are always two breakups: the public one and the private one. Both are real, but one is sensible and the other is ugly. Too ugly to share in cafés. Too ugly, I sometimes think, to even write.
I understood why you might put off telling anyone about your separation: not quite because you feel embarrassment or shame (though likely you are experiencing both, deeply) but because you don’t want to be judged for a decision you have already spent months struggling with. You don’t want to be questioned about something you yourself have little confidence in.
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.
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.
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.
The more conviction you have, the more sure you are of your place in the world. Unhappiness tends to lie with rumination, with doubt.
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.
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.
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.
maturity has taught me that even obligation can be a form of love.
