I have spent most of my life in the camp that regards love as, basically, a meteorite—something that comes to us suddenly and out of nowhere; something that we find, when and if we do, by sheer luck. I don’t mean to say that I believe in this model of finding love to the exclusion of all others, but I know why I prefer it. For one thing, it reflects a fundamental truth about love, which is that it is out of our control. There are few things in life harder to explain than why we fall for this person and not that one, and few things harder to alter by sheer force of will. For another, it means that there is no reason to organize one’s life around the pursuit of love and, therefore, no reason not to organize it around work or friends or travel or volunteering or whatever else you choose to do with your time—an expansive, autonomous, fulfilling vision of life for which I am grateful, not least because it has historically been denied to women.
Finally, and perhaps most saliently, I myself have only ever found love by pure chance. At one point, single and well into my thirties, it occurred to me that the things that made me happy in the short term—holing up at home reading, heading out alone on long trail runs, vanishing into the quiet of my work—were never going to lead me to the things I wanted in the long term: a partner, children, a home full of people I loved. That was a sobering realization. By that stage of my life, the solitude I cherished was already shading more and more often into loneliness, and with increasing frequency I found myself warding off sadness about not having a family of my own. Now, for the first time, I felt real fear that I would never find one.
And so, breaking with my own lifelong habit, I began actively looking for romance, recruiting friends and family to the cause and testing the waters of online dating. The former were sympathetic and took my request seriously, but they were also useless. One of them eventually told me, wisely, that my closest friends would never help me find a partner; if they knew that person, they would have already introduced us. Love lurked in more distant circles, an asteroid that needed to be nudged out of its orbit; she suggested that I enlist the help of new friends, friends of friends, colleagues, casual acquaintances—excellent advice that I didn’t have the heart to follow. My extremely short-lived foray into online dating, meanwhile, produced results laughably far afield of love. In its mixture of comedy, futility, and awkwardness, the experience was like getting halfway into a pair of jeans in a dressing room and realizing that they are wildly too large or small. It did not take long to give up and revert to my former habit of stifling my sadness and ignoring the problem.
But I am hardly a statistically significant sample, and I have watched those around me find love in all kinds of ways: by searching for it; despite searching for it elsewhere; despite not searching for it at all. I have one friend who responded to a breakup by going on fifty first dates, and another who responded by moving home to be near her family and focus on them and on work. Both are now happily married. I know people who quash with steely finality any attempt to help them find love, and others who mobilize an entire search party to scour the landscape for a likely partner. And I know people who search for love as I briefly tried to do, and as we search for so many things these days: online, via any of the countless companies that have proliferated for that purpose.
How those companies themselves generate matches is its own mystery, since the algorithms they use are proprietary. One way or another, though, they codify what is obvious about looking for love: to turn up a potential mate, we must somehow narrow the search area, impose upon the giant pool of possibilities some restrictions with respect to geography or physiology or taste in TV shows or preferences about household pets. One difficulty with doing so, as almost anyone who has ever tried online dating can tell you, is that no matter how numerous and specific such constraints may be, they will still screen in plenty of terrible matches. But the more serious problem is the opposite one: those same constraints, the ones that we ourselves select, may screen out someone perfect—because, in matters of love, we have no real idea of what we are looking for. Or, rather, we have a great many ideas, any of which may be wrong.
This is a problem, because it is surprisingly difficult to recognize something when we have a mistaken idea of it in our head. We know this from everyday experience, as when we scan our shelves for a book and fail to find it because we are picturing an orange cover when in fact it is blue. In much the same fashion, we sometimes initially overlook our future partner. One of the great tropes of falling in love—in books, in movies, in life—is that we failed to notice it even though it was right there in front of us. We may have known the person, even for years, but barely registered her existence; we may have been good friends, even best friends, yet never considered the possibility of anything more. We may even have felt passionately about the right person but in the wrong direction, as Elizabeth Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, initially despised Mr. Darcy.
The quest for romance, in other words, raises Meno’s second question as well as his first—not just how to look for love, but how to know when we have found it. The answer doesn’t seem particularly mysterious when two people are already acquainted; over time, they get to know each other better and come to feel that they belong together. In such cases, love emerges, like a photograph, from exposure. But in other, stranger cases, it materializes more like the flash. Of all the enigmatic things about love (its origins, its purpose, the strange and dictatorial selection process over which we, its subjects, have so little say), perhaps the most baffling one is this: sometimes, we seem to know right away that we have found it—even if it turns out to be nothing like what we were looking for, even if we weren’t really looking for it at all.
* * *
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We met on Main Street. C. had driven two hundred and fifty miles to get there, although not to see me; she was on her way from her home in Maryland to a week in Vermont, followed by a wedding in upstate New York, and the town where I lived made a convenient stopping point. A few months earlier, a mutual friend had introduced us by email and, meaning nothing much by it, told us that we would adore each other. We’d exchanged polite notes, and later that spring, while planning her road trip, she realized she would be passing nearby. She suggested lunch; I named a local café. When the appointed time came, I walked to town, ducked my head in the door to make sure she hadn’t already arrived, then stepped outside again to wait.
This was in the middle of May, on a day that had dawned chilly but was rapidly turning beautiful. In front of me, the street wound down toward the Hudson River; behind me, the summit of an eastern spur of the Appalachian Mountains was just starting to leaf over into a pale springtime green. That morning, I had gone for a run up there, on a trail that tracked upward alongside a stream until it reached a rocky peak with a view west across the river to the Catskills and south almost all the way to Manhattan. I had moved away from New York City nearly ten years earlier, which meant that, to my considerable surprise, I had now lived in this town with its backdrop of hills longer than anywhere else since childhood. That’s what I had been thinking about—the pleasing but also somewhat arbitrary nature of my home—during my run. I don’t remember what I was thinking about standing there on Main Street before I looked up and saw C. walking toward me.