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

by Mandy Len Catron

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.