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

by Mandy Len Catron

The certitude of people like Liz annoyed me. People who knew they would spend their life with someone were like people who knew they were going to heaven.

Even if I couldn’t see us together at eighty, I couldn’t bear the thought of waking up alone tomorrow.

The right choice, the right person, the right kind of love, the one. Was it moral rightness or narrative rightness—a good person or a good story? As far as I could tell, rightness and wrongness were only ever apparent in retrospect. Relationships aren’t quizzes you can pass or fail, but we insist on talking about them as if they are.

we make bad choices all the time, that every life contains a healthy dose of disappointment, and that, even with our best efforts, outcomes can never be fully controlled.

Companionate love, on the other hand, was characterized by steadiness and teamwork. Companionate love sounded nice.

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.

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.

Maybe we each need our own creation myth, some way to say to everyone else: Here is how I came to be in the world, which is really a way of saying, I belong.

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. When conservatives pine for “traditional family values,” they are in fact nostalgic for a brief and relatively recent moment in the long history of marriage.

Initially, marriage provided a way for people to secure resources and fulfill those basic needs. Later, the companionate marriage redefined the institution as one that met higher needs such as belonging, love, and self-esteem. Now, in the twenty-first century, we don’t just want reliable co-parents and monogamous sex; we want our partners to support our self-expression and foster our personal growth—the things at the very top of Maslow’s hierarchy. Increasingly, we see marriage as an important tool in constructing a fulfilling life.

research suggests movies can have real influence on how we think about the world. One recent investigation into romantic comedies found that they normalize stalking behaviors by framing even extreme persistence (throwing pebbles at a girl’s bedroom window, loitering outside a woman’s office, pestering her friends) as romantic.

romantic fantasies may “teach women to depend on men for economic and social rewards.”

But I’d still never had a serious boyfriend. And my insecurity about this shadowed my social life. Being chronically single felt like an enormous liability. It wasn’t so much that I desperately wanted a boyfriend—it was more that I desperately wanted the social value of being someone’s girlfriend. How else would people know that I was interesting?

In other words, fiction makes us better. I want this to be true. I want to believe there is a great moral arc in human history and that our stories are ever pointing us toward our best selves.

happy endings “make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is.”

When we talk about being a good girl, we usually mean enacting a culturally sanctioned version of girlhood. 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.

Most of these stories rely on an inherent paradox: True love is the ultimate means of validation and personal transformation, and yet a virtuous woman should never pursue love directly. (Men in persecuted hero roles, on the other hand, are allowed—even expected—to woo their love interests.)

You are already interesting. Your life is already good. It’s okay to say exactly what you want, when you want it. And it’s okay to not know.

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.

I had enough in common with the protagonists of every movie I loved—I was white, thin, straight, conventionally feminine—that it was easy to empathize with these characters. It did not occur to me that other people—many other people—did not automatically see themselves in these stories.

when a couple relays the narrative of how they met; repeating the story is also a way of establishing the legitimacy of their relationship for others.

Maybe instead of telling stories about how we met our partners, we should all share our stories about the limits of love—the times it disappointed us, the apprehensions it couldn’t soothe—and why we chose it anyway, or why we let it go. We don’t need stories to show us how to meet someone—we’ve got apps for that.

we overemphasize meetings in hopes they have the power to forecast endings.

Love advice is inherently destabilizing. But it is difficult to resist others’ prescriptions for love—they are like ads for diet pills, showing you two images: Your insecurity is the “before”; their self-assurance is the “after.” •

Amatonormativity enables the illusion of choice in love (Do I marry her or break up with her?) while implying that one answer is evidently superior. There’s little space for reflection or doubt or intuition.

The more conviction you have, the more sure you are of your place in the world. Unhappiness tends to lie with rumination, with doubt.

we all share a desire for “cognitive closure”: to simplify and clarify, to explain how the world works.3 The higher the ambiguity, says Kruglanski, the stronger our impulse for explanation.

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.

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?

it is capacious in the daily way that any expression of love might also express trust, doubt, regret, resignation, humor, self-congratulation, or sacrifice. Love can contain all of this, but love stories rarely do.

the knowledge that I can have a good, full life without any guarantees from love. There are so many ways to make a life. Instead of trying to make love last, I’ve decided to take ever-after off the agenda. Knowing this—that I want to share my life with Mark but that my life will be good even without him—has made loving him much easier—and lighter.

And so this is not a happy ending. Love stories have endings, but love itself is ongoing and continually warped and renewed by the people who do the loving.

I love you has the capacity to carry us somewhere or nowhere. It is the only solution we can offer to the problem of love.

Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be.