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

by Mandy Len Catron

I thought of romantic love as a virtue, a moral triumph, a reward for people who made good life choices.

I’d conceptualized love as something that happened to me.

It isn’t merely the stories we tell about love that encourage this attitude, but the very words themselves. In love, we fall. We are struck, we are crushed. We swoon. We burn with passion. Love makes us crazy or it makes us sick. Our hearts ache and then they break.

It’s the little things that keep a couple together.

It was quiet and sustained, as if our relationship had fallen ill.

the respiratory system was the first thing to erode under long-term stress.

in a relationship where individual needs aren’t met, partners feel low-level chronic physical and emotional stress, weakening the immune system.

I wondered then, as I still sometimes do, what else I have loved as much as I loved his skin, the way it wrapped up his muscles and bones, the softness between his shoulder blades where I placed my lips each night, as we drifted into sleep. That’s how I fell in love with him in college,

I just wanted the choice. I wanted to be able to have a conversation about it that didn’t turn into an argument.

I still wanted his time, his company, his attention, his skin. It would be easier, I often thought, if one of us just stopped loving the other.

What if I was the irrational one, clinging to a relationship that was obviously doomed?

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.

Even if I ended things and found someone new, I was afraid any other love would feel diluted somehow.

If I believed love was mundane, I thought, maybe I could take away some of its power.

I couldn’t tell how much of my desire for a spouse was mine, and how much was what I thought I was supposed to want at my age—I didn’t know what was real and what was scripted.

You can’t find someone who is endearingly annoyed by dust on film but who isn’t annoyingly annoyed by crumbs on counters.

I was trying to fight this impulse to please him.

Companionate love sounded nice.

My first couple of years with Kevin, the ones that are meant to be starry-eyed and heady, were disrupted by long stretches on separate continents.

Even if we didn’t always like each other that much, even if we forgot our promises to be kind and patient, it felt good to know someone as well as we knew each other. It felt good to be known.

The prospect of getting to know someone new—of even finding someone worth knowing—was daunting. The prospect of becoming unknown was paralyzing.

I was almost thirty and I’d never really dated. Kevin and I had become adults together. Who would I become without the gravitationa...

In ordinary life, the reasons for leaving someone are not as clear as they are in our stories.

We didn’t know yet how lonely we would become.

In love stories, people have epiphanies. They don’t know what they’ve got until it’s gone—or at least jeopardized. And then suddenly they do know. And they change.

A part of me wants this to be one of those transformative experiences, where we suddenly learn how to be good to each other. To be loving and kind.

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. Everything looks normal.

Ease. That’s what he has, she thinks. He’s easy.

His lack of self-consciousness is expansive.

“If the obstacles confronting the lovers define the story, then what makes a great love story is their willingness to go to almost any lengths to overcome them—whatever the cost.”

the manic laughter of people who know it will be a while before they hear themselves laugh again.

“The stories we tell are always too simple.”6 They fail to make space for the mundane, domestic, trivial, annoying parts of life.

Today my dad and my mom live separately and alone with their dogs. They both seem pretty happy with the lives they’ve made. But I’m sure it isn’t the life they imagined when they bought the ring and the china.

The best stories offer us an ordered world: a place for everyone, a sense that things happen for a reason, the promise that suffering is never arbitrary.

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.

I loved Kevin, but I knew that if we stayed together, I might never get married or have kids. I didn’t want to change my life as much as I wanted to rewind it and do the love part differently. If I could do it over, I would just pick someone whose ideas about marriage and family looked more like mine in the first place.

Unfortunately, the gold in his mouth was not indicative of the gold in his wallet:

when you look throughout history and across cultures, our extraordinarily high expectations about love, marriage, and sex are “extremely rare.”

we have to invest a lot more time and energy in our relationships if we expect to get so much out of them.

Who was I to feel dissatisfied in a relationship with someone I loved?

In a community that values contentment over pickiness, you must also be satisfied with your spouse. Calling something not good enough is a kind of betrayal. And you are not simply betraying the person to whom you made that lifetime commitment; you are also, in a way, betraying your community and family. If life is hard for everyone, who are you to have everything you need and still say, “This won’t do anymore”?

felt immense guilt about this, partly because I believed it was my job to be happy.

We were good at pointing out each other’s weaknesses.

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.

When I looked into the future, I couldn’t tell if Kevin would be there or not, so I couldn’t invest in our love.

self-reliance can be as powerful as any institution.