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

by Mandy Len Catron

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. I wondered if this was how love had to work—or if I could take back some control. Science suggested that I could.

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.

sunk cost fallacy.

If I am honest, it feels good to know that he needs me, I wrote in my journal. 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.

• • • In his book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Jonathan Gottschall argues that we all have

Charles and Ben Hur and Pennington,” Mamaw once

specialized mirror neurons allow us to feel love’s neurochemical effects without actually falling in love ourselves.5 Iacoboni and others believe these neurons explain our ability to experience pleasure and pain secondhand, and may even be the cellular basis for empathy.

I waited for boys to call, to grab the check, to make the first move. I said no even—especially—when I meant yes. The more I liked someone, the more I pretended not to like him. I now know that this is a terrible strategy,

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. If my goal was simply to make a real connection with someone for an hour, no matter what came of that connection, I usually had a good time.

Once I stopped trying to participate in the collective pursuit of happiness through coupledom and just started trying to have a good time, I found it much easier to actually be happy.

“To know—and to present what we know as if it’s all

If we believe—and I think we should—that there is no soul mate, no single, perfectly compatible person for each of us, then finding a partner requires making choices, and it’s worth considering how to choose well.

I spent two whole days reading Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts

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 lives.5

Brokeback Mountain,

In other words, our dominant script for love is so powerful that it has the capacity to absorb and heteronormalize queer stories.