– I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review. –
To be published by Simon & Schuster on 27 Jun 2017
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An insightful, charming, and absolutely fascinating memoir from the author of the popular New York Times essay, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” (one of the top five most popular New York Times pieces of 2015) explores the romantic myths we create and explains how they limit our ability to achieve and sustain intimacy.
What really makes love last? Does love ever work the way we say it does in movies and books and Facebook posts? Or does obsessing over those love stories hurt our real-life relationships? When her parents divorced after a twenty-eight year marriage and her own ten-year relationship ended, those were the questions that Mandy Len Catron wanted to answer.
In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world, Catron deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories. She delves all the way back to 1944, when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her fascinating research into the universal psychology, biology, history, and literature of love. She uses biologists’ research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from in the first place. And she tells the story of how she decided to test a psychology experiment that she’d read about—where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions—and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship.
In How to Fall in Love with Anyone Catron flips the script on love and offers a deeply personal, and universal, investigation.
I chose this book because…
How wonderful would it be if everywhere you looked, you saw love? I have not read the New York Times essay, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” but if it was published in the New York Times, then it must be good, right? After reading a bunch of mysteries and thrillers that were very plot-driven, I wanted to read something more emotional, and this book seems like it fits the bill.
Upon reading it…
Despite writing down why I chose this book before starting the book, I can’t remember what I was looking for. What answer was I hoping to find? Whatever it was, what I found wasn’t what I expected. I didn’t expect such a logical and scientific approach to love, and I mean more than just psychology. This approach to love reminded me of my newfound approach to language when I took my first linguistics course. Fascinating. I often associate love and language with emotions, so to break them down to a science was a refreshing perspective that opened my mind to more ways of critical thinking.
Maybe this scientific/logical/analytic approach really suited me. I have never felt deeply. I have never loved deeply. I’m the kind of person who if you asked for love advice from, I’d probably say, “You should just break up.” On the other hand, Catron has given the topic of love some intense thought, and it seems like she was interested in love stories ever since she was little. Of course when I was a little girl I had my fun with fairytales, but otherwise, I had never given love very much thought.
Whilst reading about love, sometimes I found myself thinking that I needed to think less about it. As an introvert who lives in her head more often than she’d like, I could certainly do with less thinking in life in general (I mean, social/emotional thinking; I welcome as much academic thinking as I can bear and more). But anyways, I found myself thinking that I should think less about love because I was skeptical. For all the scientific analysis in the world, love is a mystery. So what’s the point of dwelling? But even this perspective of love was touched upon in her essays. That, and so many more—all the back and forth and in between, the jumble and mess about love that I never bothered to sort through because I figured I’d wait until whenever I finally fell in love to sort it out.
Catron is so honest and vulnerable in her essays; how can I say that there is anything wrong about them? But more than that, she was thorough with her research, research that felt like stemmed from more than just curiosity but maybe a need, a need to figure out love, this thing that had and has been so important to her from childhood into adulthood, this thing that had, has, and is probably important to many of us as well.
My favourite essay of the collection was “If You Can Fall in Love with Anyone, How Do You Choose?” This essay is a sort of extension of her viral essay “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” the one that was published in the New York Times, which had a 1500 word limit. Both “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This” and Arthur Aron’s infamous 36 questions are included at the end of this collection.
★★★★☆
If you like this book, you might like…
The Art of Living Other People’s Lives by Greg Dybec, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby
In love, we fall.
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.
As far as I could tell, rightness and wrongness were only ever apparent in retrospect.
If I believed love was mundane, I thought, maybe I could take away some of its power.
Even if we didn’t always like each other that much, even if we forgot our promises to be kind and patient, it felt good to know someone as well as we knew each other. It felt good to be known.
Maybe there aren’t many stories about ambivalent breakups because such stories do little to confirm our assumptions about the power of love. Instead, they render love an ordinary experience.
I think many of us want to believe that love cannot be known, that the mysteries of the heart have to remain mysterious.
A better version of love did exist.
My job was not to choose a good person to love, but rather to be good to the person I’d chosen.
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.
I’ve always thought of stories as records, as ways of remembering our lives. And I thought it was our duty to tell them, to keep the past alive in the present—to keep ourselves alive.
I was too young to really understand poverty; I still believed that poor people were happier than the rest of us, because a world in which some people were both poor and miserable seemed too cruel to be real.
As Alain de Botton says in Essays in Love, “The stories we tell are always too simple.” They fail to make space for the mundane, domestic, trivial, annoying parts of life.
If life is hard for everyone, who are you to have everything you need and still say, “This won’t do anymore”?
Occasionally a great shaft of sunlight pushed through the clouds and the dense deciduous foliage. There, you are always in the mountains, not on them.
Our views of love—what we want from it, what we think it should feel like—are rooted in the context of our lives.
This meeting was just one of many situations where I found myself waiting and listening, intent on figuring out who people wanted me to be before showing them anything about who I was.
We’d found each other in the most mundane circumstances. But when we were together nothing was mundane: Everything felt meaningful.
At twenty, telling someone what I wanted—not what I was supposed to want, but what I really, genuinely wanted—was the most terrifying thing I could imagine.
He wanted his experience of the world to be beautiful, and this, above all, made sense to me.
He was, from the first day of our acquaintance, one of those mercurial people whose attention feels like sunlight, something you don’t know you’ve been deprived of until it shines on you, something you’d be smart to store up for the months ahead.
At twenty, I wanted a love story almost as much as I wanted love itself.
And for a few years, having a good love story felt a lot like having good love.
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.
When I went on dates, I had to coach myself: My goal was not to make this stranger from the internet like me; my goal was to find out if I liked him.
You are already interesting. Your life is already good. It’s okay to say exactly what you want, when you want it. And it’s okay to not know.
People still used the phrase broken family then, and I just assumed we didn’t have it in us to break.
We don’t seem to mind a little mystery in the process of falling in love. In fact, I suspect we prefer it. But endings are different. When love ends, we demand an explanation, a why.
I understood why you might put off telling anyone about your separation: not quite because you feel embarrassment or shame (though likely you are experiencing both, deeply) but because you don’t want to be judged for a decision you have already spent months struggling with. You don’t want to be questioned about something you yourself have little confidence in.
Maybe all our worry about how to find love and how to make it last is what keeps us from asking how to be good to one another—and how to love each other well.
Sometimes, after he left, I would turn on the shower and cry loudly, just to get that impulse out of my lungs. I thought if I could hear how sad I was, maybe I could feel it a little less.
I needed to believe love was an ordinary thing.
And I have learned that in conversations about love, there’s often a subtext. Usually this involves the thing we want but are afraid to name, or the thing we want to know but are afraid to ask.
It’s astounding, really, to hear what someone admires in you. I don’t know why we don’t go around thoughtfully complimenting one another all the time.
I know the eyes are supposedly the windows to the soul, but the real crux of this moment, should you ever find yourself trying it, is not simply that you are seeing someone, but that you are seeing someone seeing you.
I resolved to be like that, to let love in, even if I wasn’t sure I was ready.
We all want to be known. We want to confess our greatest accomplishment and our most terrible memory. We want to be heard.
No love story is a short story.
And maybe the best thing about encountering more diverse stories is simply this: They broadened my sense of what was possible.
As we swayed on the pavement, my head on his shoulder, we were only mimicking romance, trying on conventions to see how they felt.
When I am out to brunch with friends and Mark walks by with the dog and waves hello, I blush at the sight of the two of them, worried my friends will see it on my face: such reckless happiness.
I have learned a lot about love from a scientific perspective, but I have come to rely on a more fundamental realization: the knowledge that I can have a good, full life without any guarantees from love. There are so many ways to make a life. Instead of trying to make love last, I’ve decided to take ever after off the agenda.
Most of us think about love as something that happens to us. We fall. We get crushed.
Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be.