How to Fall in Love with Anyone Quotes

“Extraordinary love was not defined by the intensity with which you wanted someone, but by generosity and kindness and a deep sense of friendship”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“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.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“My job was not to choose a good person to love, but rather to be good to the person I'd chosen.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“It reminds us that love isn’t something that happens to us — it’s something we’re making together.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“Love stories have endings, but love itself is ongoing and continually warped and renewed by the people who do the loving.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“Traister points out that our assumptions about single women are often guided by “an unconscious conviction that, if a woman is not wed, it’s not because she’s made a set of active choices, but rather that she has not been selected—chosen, desired, valued enough.” But these assumptions are misguided. She points out that while there are some drawbacks to a single life, there are just as many ways to be lonely, unhappy, disappointed, or bored within a marriage. For many women, a life of independence and autonomy is at least as rewarding as marriage.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“Mark says that when I am frustrated his I love you means it's okay for me to be frustrated - a reminder that my feelings are situational and temporary. "And because I love you even when you are annoyed and I want you to know," he adds.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“If the institution of marriage really is failing, maybe it’s because it is no longer the only—or even the best—model for how to make a happy life.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“The Cinderella narrative is so ubiquitous–and so integrated into how we think about love–that it’s easy to dismiss. I spent years thinking someone would notice me eventually as long as I dedicated myself to being good and sweet and modest and basically unnoticeable. When I started my first serious relationship, I didn’t notice that my boyfriend’s goal was to become an interesting person through having interesting experiences; whereas I hoped to prove my worth by being loved by the most interesting person I knew: him.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“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'?”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“Do married people know more about love than the rest of us, I wondered, or do they convince themselves they do by doling out advice?”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“Hollywood seems perplexed that the meet-cute is no longer packing theaters, but the reason seems obvious: We want our media to mirror our anxieties, and we no longer practice love the way we did in the era of the screwball romance. 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.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“John, another poet, told us he once heard a marital-therapist friend of his talking about the demise of the typical relationship. “He said that whatever it is that attracted you to your partner will be the same thing you divorce them for. If you love them for their independence, then that will eventually become the thing you most want to change about them—because they have already fulfilled your desire for an independent partner. And now you want stability, someone to stay home with the kids when they’re sick.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“I read an article in the New York Times in which the columnist Arthur C. Brooks cites a study arguing that, when it comes to politics, extremists are the happiest: “Correcting for income, education, age, race, family situation and religion, the happiest Americans are those who say they are either ‘extremely conservative’ (48 percent very happy) or ‘extremely liberal’ (35 percent). Everyone else is less happy, with the nadir at dead-center ‘moderate’ (26 percent).”2 Brooks presents this research as if it is surprising, but it seems obvious to me: The more conviction you have, the more sure you are of your place in the world. Unhappiness tends to lie with rumination, with doubt.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“The prospect of becoming unknown was paralyzing.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“I always read her choice to live alone for so long after Papaw's death as an act of devotion to him, when it seems more more likely she was devoted to someone else: herself. If the institution of marriage really is failing, maybe it's because it is no longer the only -- or even the best -- model for how to make a happy life....

...If I've learned anything from Mamaw, it's that self-reliance can be as powerful as any institution.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“our species’ most basic needs (food, shelter, safety) must be met before we can pursue more sophisticated emotional or social desires like prestige and creative fulfillment. 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.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“Not everyone who eats imagines herself a dietician, but nearly everyone who has loved -- which is nearly everyone -- presumes to know something about how to do it right. Most advice is given for the same reason homeowners tell you to buy and renters tell you to rent. The goal is not to make someone else's life better, but rather to assure the advice giver of her own choices.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“Love didn't happen to us. We're in love because we each made the choice to be.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“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. Better than normal, even, on a summer afternoon in a hammock.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“Romantic love is capacious. And I mean that not in the mystical sense - it cannot contain anything or everything and it is never without conditions - but rather 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.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“I have already learned that everyone likes an amicable breakup. It's easier when you are not required to empathize with someone else's grief.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“Romantic love is capacious. And I mean that not in a mystical sense- it cannot contain anything or everything and it is never without conditions- but rather 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”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays

“Being content with what you have when you have, say, eight children living on one salary and no indoor plumbing is what makes a hard life bearable. Not reaching or wishing for more makes it just a little easier to do what's required to keep folks healthy and fed. Mom wants told me that, though she knew, objectively, that they were poor, it never felt that way, because there were no wealthy people to compare themselves to.”
― Mandy Len Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays