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

Originally from Appalachian Virginia, Mandy Len Catron now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her writing has appeared in the The New York Times, The Walrus, and The Rumpus as well as literary journals and anthologies. She writes about love and love stories at The Love Story Project (TheLoveStoryProject.ca). She teaches English and creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Her article “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This” was one of the most popular articles published by The New York Times in 2015. How to Fall in Love with Anyone is her first book. 

How to Fall in Love with Anyone the exploded star

the myth of the right person

In early 2010, I signed a declaration of marriage to a man I was thinking of leaving.

“It’s official,” Kevin said as he arrived home from work, dropping a folder on the coffee table next to my slippered feet. “We are now married in the eyes of the Canadian government.”

Inside, signed and notarized, was our statutory declaration of common-law union, just one of many documents required for us to formally immigrate to Canada.

“Well,” I said, without looking up, “I guess we should celebrate.”

I didn’t think we should celebrate.

Kevin said nothing and walked into the kitchen.

It was mid-February, and I was teaching four courses, which meant four classes to plan and four sets of papers to grade. I read papers over coffee in the morning and I fell asleep on the couch with a stack in my lap each night.

I was so grateful that Kevin had taken over the work of our permanent-residency application, carefully printing our names and all our previous addresses in tiny boxes. I knew I should thank him—I wanted to thank him—but instead I stared blankly at his name and signature next to mine. I ran my fingers over the raised seal. We could file taxes together, and if one of us were on life support, the other could decide how long the plug stayed in its outlet. After nine years together, having these legal options made sense. But the irony of this moment was obvious to us both: The documentation confirming our legal union had finally arrived after weeks of indecision about whether we should stay together or split up.

I remember thinking that what my dad said was true: It’s the little things that keep a couple together. Today we are together, I thought, to avoid another mound of paperwork, another two-year wait.

·  ·  ·

If pressed, I could not have told you what was wrong with our relationship. We’d always argued, but this was different. It was quiet and sustained, as if our relationship had fallen ill. The illness seemed contagious.

When I woke up coughing in the middle of the night, I thought of the doctor who’d said the respiratory system was the first thing to erode under long-term stress. I’d been skeptical, but maybe she was right.

Kevin stirred as the bed shook with each rumble of my chest. He rolled against me and stretched a leg across my thighs, wrapped an arm under my chin. “This better?” he murmured, and I realized that, in his sleepy state, he was trying to hold my coughs in with the weight of his body. I inhaled slowly and relaxed my diaphragm. It was better.

Even after a day of sharp-edged silence, he could soothe the effects of the common cold. In the bookstore the week before, I’d sat on the floor with a copy of the psychologist John Gottman’s The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, in which he claimed that long-term partners become physiologically interdependent, regulating each other’s immunity and heart rate. But in a relationship where individual needs aren’t met, partners feel low-level chronic physical and emotional stress, weakening the immune system.1 I wondered which was happening to us.

I tried to count how many days had passed since I’d felt his body against mine—four, at least. Or five? I thought of a cough I’d had years before—the worst I’d ever had. For a week I woke up gasping in the night, an unscratchable itch in my lungs. At first Kevin would wake up, alarmed by the frantic spasms of my body. Then, growing accustomed to it, he’d roll over and sleepily rub my back. “You have to go to the doctor,” he’d whispered between my coughing fits.

We lived apart then, but spent every night together. Even when I was sick, even when we did nothing but sleep. I’d get home from night class at eleven thirty, drop my books on my bed, and bike down the hill to his house. I’d let myself in, tiptoe up to his room, and crawl under the covers beside him. I’d wake up before dawn, pull on my jeans, and ride to the small coffee shop where I worked on Capitol Hill. It was always worth the inconvenience: a few hours of his body pressed against mine in the dark.

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, when we slept belly to back, my nose tucked against his neck, when the daytime was just a placeholder for the night.

·  ·  ·

But now I was twenty-nine and I was thinking about getting married and starting a family. And I didn’t know if I wanted to do those things with this man I’d fallen for in college.

This was a problem I had no idea how to solve.

I understood that it was possible to love someone at twenty and not want to spend your life with him. Unlike Kevin and me, most of our friends had moved on from their college relationships. At twenty, I’d assumed we’d move on, too.

And, thanks to my parents’ divorce a few years earlier, I knew it was possible to spend a lifetime with someone and then just fall out of love.

But it had never occurred to me that you could love someone the way I loved Kevin—that you could want to wake up with him every morning and go to bed with him every night—but not know if you wanted to commit the rest of your life to him.

Kevin didn’t really want kids. He didn’t particularly want to get married, though he wasn’t opposed to long-term commitment. If the conflict had been as simple as that—one of us wanted marriage and family and the other didn’t—we might’ve known what to do. Maybe I didn’t want a child that badly, anyway, I often thought. I just wanted the choice. I wanted to be able to have a conversation about it that didn’t turn into an argument. I felt sure that if we solved our other problems, we could negotiate about marriage and family. But it wasn’t quite clear what our other problems were.

I’d injured my knee, and while Kevin went backcountry skiing with friends, I spent my weekends feeding egg cartons to the woodburning stove in our drafty Vancouver bungalow. I walked the dog in the rain. I graded papers.

I could feel my world narrowing as his widened across the mountains of southwestern British Columbia. The night before a powder day, he was giddy. He could barely sleep. I’d never felt so alienated by someone else’s enthusiasm. It seemed selfish to hope he’d stay home with me, so I said nothing. Instead, I booked a week in Costa Rica with friends. While I was gone, I didn’t call. I didn’t email. I wanted him to feel what I’d felt, to know I was having fun, but to be unable to see the precise contours of my days.

Our relationship had started long-distance, and all I wanted—more than I have wanted anything before or since—was to share my days with him. Now that we had that life, I worried that I’d signed a contract with Love that couldn’t be undone. Despite my alienation, I still felt bound to Kevin by that sense of wanting—and by love. 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.

·  ·  ·

“When you see older couples, do you think of you and Kevin?” my friend Liz prompted one day. We were shopping for her wedding dress on a Sunday afternoon when an elderly couple walked by hand in hand.

“No,” I said honestly. “I don’t think of us when I see eighty-year-olds holding hands.” In fact, I usually assumed those couples were on their second or third marriage. But then I backtracked: “Well, I don’t think Kevin is the one person for me in the whole world. But I feel like he’s mine. I can’t really imagine my life with someone else. You know what I mean?”

Liz smiled with her mouth but frowned with her eyes. She did not know what I meant. How could she? She was planning a wedding to someone she never really argued with. Someone she had no doubts about. The certitude of people like Liz annoyed me. People who knew they would spend their life with someone were like people who knew they were going to heaven. It just seemed so audacious, so irrational. But Liz was not irrational. She was a social psychologist, one of my most accomplished academic friends. This pointed to a more likely problem: me. What if I was the irrational one, clinging to a relationship that was obviously doomed? Maybe I was the only one who couldn’t see it.

Did it really matter if I didn’t think of Kevin when I saw a happy elderly couple? Did it matter how often we argued? As long as he came into the bedroom before work and lay down on top of me, stuffing the covers around me, saying, “Wake up, my little breakfast burrito!” and peppering my forehead with kisses, how could I envision my life with someone else? Even if I couldn’t see us together at eighty, I couldn’t bear the thought of waking up alone tomorrow.

A summer earlier, we’d spent our days on a small Greek island, rock climbing every morning and swimming in the Aegean every afternoon. “Man, it must suck to be everybody else,” Kevin said one night as we took the switchbacks up the hill toward the tiny island studio we’d rented. We took the high road bordered with oleander, the long way home. We agreed that we even felt sorry for the people we were before we arrived, with their busy lives that didn’t include gazing at limestone cliffs in the long after-dinner light of June, saying, “Let’s climb that one tomorrow.” Remembering this trip left me gutted by the thought of a life without him. Even the smell of fresh thyme could sideline me. Or the evening breeze as I biked home from work. I’d recall how it felt to climb on our rented scooter and motor around the island to our favorite dinner spot. It was the sweetened, condensed brand of happiness, I thought, with my arms tight around him after a dinner of mackerel and salty cheese salad.

·  ·  ·

I often found myself online, clicking through strangers’ wedding albums. I was looking for something: a gaze; a goofy, helpless grin; a face twisted by joy, half smiling, half crying. It was a look I knew from movies, the way Hugh Grant grins at Julia Roberts in the last scene of Notting Hill. I wanted to know if it existed, that happiness beyond doubt, or if it was just a myth.

Occasionally, I saw a glimpse of it, a look that said, I am making the best decision of my life, on a stranger’s Flickr feed or in an acquaintance’s wedding album. The expression was one of excruciating contentment: a groom reaching for his husband’s hand, a bride catching her mother’s eye. It astounded me, this extreme gratitude in the face of lifetime commitment. How unself-conscious these people seemed, how sure.

I read blogs written by stylish thirtysomethings who seemed to have it together. One—a friend of a friend—had written a short note on the occasion of her wedding anniversary. She and her writer-filmmaker husband had married young and, naturally, had three stylish and self-possessed children. Her reflection on her wedding struck me as particularly genuine: “Was it the happiest day of my life? Probably not. Was it the best decision I ever made? Yes.”

Yes, I wrote in my journal. It just got to me, that “yes.” I want to feel like that.

I don’t think I knew what I was looking for at the time, but I can see it now. It had something to do with finding the right person to love: Was the idea of “the one” real or a myth?

After my parents’ divorce, I’d come to understand that even a marriage between the most well-matched people could fail. This possibility had displaced any hope I’d had about finding the perfect person.

I found photos from a friend’s wedding that spring: Kevin and I standing on the bow of a boat at sunset. In one, he lifts me as my hair flies up. His arms are tight around my chest. In another, my head is thrown back in laughter as he turns toward me with a broad smile. It looks as if our teeth are about to bump. The Strait of Georgia glistens in the background. There in my lopsided grin and the deep crinkles around his eyes is the evidence: We were happy, we loved each other. Weren’t those the expressions I’d been looking for?

·  ·  ·

On one of my Google binges, I made the mistake of reading Lori Gottlieb’s infamous article in the Atlantic, “Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.”2

Gottlieb presented me with two conflicting ideas. One, which I wanted to agree with, was that there was no perfect person. If this was true, staying with someone I genuinely loved seemed wise. The other idea was that if a woman my age (almost thirty) wanted to have kids (which I sort of thought I did), she’d better find someone to do it with. Soon.

As spring turned to summer, I began to feel that nothing was knowable, especially my own feelings. Sure, we had our problems, but they were pretty small compared to Jane and Mr. Rochester’s. On sunny Saturdays, when we went rock climbing and then for gelato, my constant uncertainty seemed ridiculous. Our life was good. We were good together. Other days we’d argue over dinner (the salmon filet was too small, the rice took too long to cook, we should’ve gotten takeout, you should’ve said that earlier) and I would feel resolved about moving on.

I often thought of my parents. “We just don’t love each other anymore,” my mom had said. “Not like we used to.” Maybe time inevitably corrodes, and love always requires settling, I thought. Perhaps if they’d had the chance, even Romeo and Juliet or Dido and Aeneas would’ve eaten a late dinner in stony silence. If I went through the trouble of moving out and moving on, would I eventually find myself at another table, across from another man, both of us wanting a little bit more? Did all long-term love eventually lead to a series of inadequate salmon dinners?

When I finally expressed my uncertainty about Kevin to my dad, he said, in his usual fatherly way, “Well, honey, I’m sure you’ll make the right choice.”

“But what is a ‘right choice’?” I asked, exasperated. I hated this way of talking about love, but I caught myself doing it, too. The right choice, the right person, the right kind of love, the one. Was it moral rightness or narrative rightness—a good person or a good story? 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.

·  ·  ·

When it comes to love, moral rightness seemed simple: Choose Mr. Darcy instead of Mr. Wickham. But Jane Austen said nothing about the guys I was into—people who were intelligent and creative and fun, who disliked authority but really cared about the environment. Who qualified as a good person was just never that clear to me. Not only that, but it seemed like there was no guarantee that a good person would make a good partner.

From a narrative perspective, making the right choice is any outcome that gets you closer to a happy ending: marriage to the right person. I thought of those Choose Your Own Adventure books I loved as a kid. “You and YOU ALONE are in charge of what happens in this story,” they warned at the start. But this wasn’t quite true. You could make choices, but there were only ever two options: If you wa...