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

by Mandy Len Catron

Did all long-term love eventually lead to a series of inadequate salmon dinners?

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.

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

The movement was conceived as an alternative to “secular dating” and emphasized sexual purity leading up to marriage. “The concept is based on the idea that love is finite and you need to protect yourself from love until you get married,”

The pleasures of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisions constitute a life.”12