How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

by Mandy Len Catron

Maybe there aren’t many stories about ambivalent breakups because such stories do little to confirm our assumptions about the power of love. Instead, they render love an ordinary experience.

roar. They waved, genuinely delighted, as if we were celebrities. And because we are people who meet others’ expectations, we waved vigorously back. As if yes, we were delighted to be here. And, oh yes,

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. May argued that the

There is a pleasant dailiness to a relationship. A routine, a vocabulary, a preference for the same brand of toothpaste. It’s so small you hardly notice it when you’re together, but its loss is acute. When I was a teenager, I wondered why the biblical verb for having sex with someone was “to know.” I thought it was Bible doublespeak, a way of hiding when righteous people do things the rest of us aren’t allowed to. (Of course Abram knew Hagar, she was his wife’s maid!) It wasn’t until I moved out of our house on Ash Street that I understood: The knowledge you have of another person’s body, that they have of yours; the shifts of sleep; the arches of feet; the scent of the skin at the back of the neck—there is a sweet intimacy in the acquisition of this particular brand of knowledge that must be divinely sanctioned. That this person could become a stranger, that his life could—no, will—keep going right along without you in it, that you will one day not know him, that he will not know you, that you may in fact become unknown, these are difficult propositions. I had been so angry with my parents for giving up. But later I could see that after nearly three decades of marriage, giving up meant choosing, rather bravely, to step into the void.

We all want to be known. We want to confess our greatest accomplishment and our most terrible memory. We want to be heard.

The New “I Do”: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels by Susan Pease Gadoua and Vicki Larson, turned out to be the thing that gave us a sense of control over the process of merging our

“The Accidental Gay Parents” is an episode of The Longest Shortest Time.9 It is ostensibly a show about parenting, though host Hillary Frank admits, “The premise that it’s about parenting is just a way to get at all kinds of stories.” This

such reckless happiness.