Much of my time is spent writing about love. Thinking about love. Being in love. But a single perspective is never enough to understand an experience. So for the past few weeks I have been surveying and interviewing the people around me, those I know well and those I don’t, in the hopes of gleaning an understanding which can inform us all. This week: we look at the couples.
All quotes and descriptions are factual and real, because what’s the point of something like this, otherwise? Names are the only things changed to protect anonymity and seek authenticity.
Source: The Art Archive / Alamy Stock Photo
“Love is not just looking at each other, but looking in the same direction,” said de Saint-Exupery, and also one of the people I interviewed for this article. Last week we looked into the abundant pool of singles in and around New York, to help understand something of the search, the hunt, the yearning. It certainly seems like most I talked to were looking for or at potential partners — maybe they needed to hear this!
Maybe we all need to stop looking. I interpret that quote to mean: you won’t find someone to walk the path of life with you if you’re busy looking at the people walking instead of the path itself. Instead you’ll stumble, you’ll get preoccupied with other peoples’ progress instead of your own milestones. And some of the answers this week certainly affirm that. The vast majority of people I spoke with reported they weren’t actively looking for a partner when they met them. In fact, most long-lasting love stories in my notes seem to be somewhat of a happy accident!
I’ve got a friend who secretly married their partner. I only learned of this during a party we were all at during this summer. I don’t even remember if they were wearing rings. After interviewing them for this column, I learned that they both knew they were in love within weeks of seeing each other. Tying the knot was only a matter of ceremony and tax-related bureaucracy. And yes: “We met in the club,” they laughed.
My parents met in front of the White Castle on 125th Street after a night out. Rook, whom I interviewed, said they met their now-spouse in high school chemistry class. Bishop, another interviewee, met their now-spouse in a forum for an old video game. One thing all three of these couples have in common: they didn’t like each other at first! If they had met on a dating app, they probably wouldn’t have even swiped right!
No, seriously, every single couple I interviewed said they wouldn’t have considered their partner a match if they had encountered them on a dating app.
That right there should give you some perspective. By chance the people I interviewed were either in relationships for years or literally married. And everybody reported that they’re happy and in love. This isn’t some peer reviewed scientific study so the results are certainly up for interpretation, but still, I don’t think any of these folks had any reason to lie to me. Consider whatever cause you wish, but the fact is that these happy people didn’t achieve happiness in the way that most of us seek it these days.
I’m not sure if it’s my age group or the fact that I’m in New York, but there seem to be way more singles than folks in relationships these days.
What do couples do, anyway, besides go on romantic dates, frolic in the park, and giggle too loud in movie theaters? “Communicate,” most of the survey answers told me. “Fuck,” a drunken man told me in the basement of KR, beaming, his hand wrapped around his girlfriend’s waist. She laughed and went beet-red but didn’t deny it. “Plan,” said my married friend Knight from grad school, who has three children with her husband and ten years on me. “Laugh,” said my cousin-in-law Alekhine, a new father. “Avoid each other,” said a woman I met outside of a bowling alley in Times Square.
Couples certainly disagree. No one I asked denied having tough times with each other. “It’s always the emotions that get in the way,” an older Black man in Harlem grumbled, shaking his head. His wife, a few paces ahead of us, was cackling and scrolling on her bedazzled phone. “She gets defensive and I get annoyed. It’s the same thing every time. We’re able to see it coming these days. So I know when it happens it’s because she’s looking for a fight!”
On the other side of town, late at night in the West Village outside of a Fashion Week party, a tipsy wife looks at me under half-closed eyes. “So you’re telling me I yell at my husband because my mother yelled all the time? I don’t want to hear that. I was thinking you were going to ask me out.” It wasn’t easy to let her down, and it isn’t easy to admit it, but here it goes: Freud might have been onto something. For everyone I asked, if their relationship didn’t resemble that of their parents’, then it was influenced by them to not resemble. If that doesn’t quite make sense, what I mean is: Yes, Ms. Frizzle, you probably communicate with a loud volume because that’s what you learned is the most effective way to say what you really mean. (And yes she really did resemble Ms. Frizzle.) If your parents were alcoholics and you’re only able to date people who are sober, then yes, you were still influenced by your roots.
I met some of our new Hot Literati interns last night. And one of the first things they told me (after trying to see if I was dating the friend I arrived with) was: “You won’t want to hear this. But I don’t believe in love.”
I wanted to hear it, of course, I eat up people’s vulnerable confessions like I’ve got low blood sugar. And I smiled, because I know this wasn’t a true statement, I know the intern didn’t really even mean it. In therapy-speak we call such a thing negation, in which someone says something they really don’t mean because they just can’t say the truth. In this case the intern really wants to believe in love but has never seen it before. They told me that their father openly cheats on their mother, he laughs about it at the dinner table even. They told me that they’ve been chatting to a guy they met serendipitously on the train for weeks now, but they don’t know why or if they like him. They told me they’ve never seen a healthy relationship before!
And of course, as everyone does when they learn I’m a couples’ therapist (among other things), they asked me for advice. Now I’m sharing it with you. If you haven’t ever seen what real love looks like, then you get to decide what it means for you. That’s why we have imaginations and ideals. That’s why we have so so so many romance novels and films! Romance is one of the biggest genres on the market, always! Love exists and all of us want it! If you want a drop-dead gorgeous partner, then accept nothing less. If you want to be with someone that just needs to rip your clothes off every night, accept only that. It’s actually somewhat of a privileged position to grow up without knowing true love: that means your canvas is open and free for you to fill it with whatever beautiful conception of love that you can dream of.
Remember: perfection isn’t to the goal: continuity is. “Trust your feelings and go with the flow,” most of the partnered said when I asked for advice to single people — but I think that’s part of the problem for the modern single youth, we’re too used to running with our first feeling, even if it contradicts our overall goal. “A marriage is a lot of work!” said a man next to me at Art Bar, and his husband beside him guffawed as he raised his fist. Their fingers were intertwined. “Everything She Wants” had just started playing. I could see their stress in the bags under their eyes but I could see the life in the smile-wrinkles above their cheekbones, too.
Pictured: one of the husbands’ hands, about an hour later.
We’re powerful these days but we’re still animals at our core and few animals are engineered to be solitary. Beyond death and pain our primary fear boils down to being alone. Unloved. Married people have a syndrome I was unfamiliar with until this study: a specific kind of death anxiety that relates to being left alone at the end without their partner. Not one but seven different study participants named this as one of their biggest worries with regards to their relationship. It’s kind of heartbreaking, I felt, how powerless we are to the ruthless rules of this life, and the extent of the beauty we find in between all of the pain.
Maybe you don’t believe in marriage. Maybe you find it difficult to trust people’s intentions. Maybe if you had a 10/10 ask you out tomorrow you’d be too afraid that God is punking you to let it go well. That’s OK. If there’s anything I’ve learned from this survey, it’s that love is never predictable. No one saw it coming when they fell in love, not a single couple. It just happened! The opportunity presented itself and they followed it! You have to put yourself out there again and again and risk being seen, risk rejection, risk vulnerability, it all must be put on the line if we are to ever have a chance at the big Jackpot.
Speaking of… if you’re reading this and you’re in NYC, one such opportunity is hereby presenting itself to you… on September 15th… from 2 to 5 PM Eastern Standard Time… you may want to attend with a book and a cute outfit and an open mind… maybe some dancing shoes… just sayin’…
P.S.: Some of the most amusing answers I received when I asked folks to give advice to single people:
“Get tested so you can [redacted] raw. Suck toes. Be sweet.”
“Intense highs and lows are not love. When you love, you should be striving to be the best version of yourself, the you that is in your partner's eyes. You will [feel] empowered to be that person.”
“Understand that Love is such a vague term you're better not trying to find it until you can explain what your actual goals are”
“Get help from a therapist if you're having trouble with communication, it's not shameful to ask for help!”
“You both have to do a lot to maintain a healthy longterm relationship. But I think it shouldn't feel like work to do so.”
“Don’t search lol. It will come to you when it’s ready”
“Delete the apps and go outside!”
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