Matchmaking for Beginners

by Maddie Dawson

“The subversive truth about love is that it really is the big deal everyone makes it out to be, and it’s not some form of security or an insurance policy against loneliness. It’s everything, love is. It runs the whole universe!”

You need to forget what society has told you about life and expectations, and don’t let anybody make you pretend. You are enough, just the way you are—do you hear me?

‘Whatever happens, love that.’”

Maybe that’s why the universe sent him to me: we’re counterbalanced. The universe always likes things to have a balance to them.

There is so much fear to wade through before you get to love.

He doesn’t get domestic life, the way you can be glad for such stupid, simple things.

If there is any worse sentence than the one that starts, ‘I love you, but—’ then I don’t know what it is.”

He looks at me with his new tragic expression and says he’ll be in touch if I want him to be, which makes me laugh a high-pitched, maniacal laugh and fling the butter dish across the room. I think of how proud Natalie will be when she hears that I’m not putting up with being treated this way, that I am actually throwing crockery. And then I start to cry, because I know that I am supremely unlovable in a very deep, unfixable way.

Three weeks later, I come home from work to find a letter from an online divorce site. I drink two glasses of wine, turn our engagement picture toward the wall, and then I sign the papers that say I promise not to love him anymore.

“We are all broken,” I say to him. “And we all still have to dance.”

The angel of death, you messed everything up. You came for the wrong person. Somewhere, I know, a baby must be being born—a life arriving and a life leaving. And I feel both things, the joy of both. Houndy is gazing at me through the mists, Houndy so close he can still reach out and touch me. He’s sorry. He’s happy but he’s sorry. And me saying, don’t worry I’m coming soon please wait for me Houndy love wait because I’ll be there I promise.

“Do you—do you think you’re going to suffer?” he says. “Oh, my darling, I have decided not to suffer,” I tell him. “Suffering is optional.”

we are all vibrational beings in physical bodies, and thoughts actually become reality so you have to make sure you’re thinking about what you want and not about what you don’t want.

It’s a messy, forgiving, rambunctious house, filled with love and mischief. There have been so many good times here, and perhaps you already know the truth that good times beget other good times. And so there are plenty more to come.

Think of me here, welcoming you. Will you do that? See me on the rooftop, or sitting at the beat-up kitchen table drinking tea, or out on the street talking to the people who come by. I’m the car horns, the bus that rounds the corner, the subs over at Paco’s across the street. I am all of it. And you are, too, although you may not know it yet.

“You know, when you watch people like that live, you start to realize that the rest of us are just counting off the days until we die. They were the experts at life.”

Love is everything there is.

WHATEVER HAPPENS, LOVE THAT