Dante’s apparatus is, of course, the human mind, that remarkable machine for making sense of ourselves and the world. We still know only marginally more about it than he did, but what we do know suggests that we should not be altogether surprised by how quickly we can recognize that we have found our beloved. One of the hallmarks of human cognition is the ability to draw sweeping conclusions from limited data, often with incredible speed. Thus do we respond to a sharp sound combined with a sudden shift in the light by leaping away from a falling tree branch; thus do we understand from our sister’s two-syllable greeting on the phone that she is calling with bad news; thus do we walk into a room full of strangers and know from the looks on a dozen unfamiliar faces that something is extraordinarily wrong. Why, then, should we not meet someone new and infer just as swiftly—from a glance, a conversation, a lunch—that we are safe, that there is good news, that something is extraordinarily right?
The naysayers, unappeased, will still doubt our ability to feel so much for a near stranger. Yet that is a miserly take on our human capacities, and one that is inconsistently applied. Not all sudden love is equally suspect, after all; no one questions the overwhelming love parents feel for their children the moment they are born. I don’t mean to suggest that loving an infant and falling in love with an adult are analogous experiences—only that deep mutual understanding cannot be the sole grounds for feeling an overpowering connection to another person. And not all sudden knowledge is equally suspect, either. Countless words have been written in praise of hunches and gut instincts, and while such intuitions can easily lead us astray, even the most conservative epistemologist will grant that on occasion, in ways that can’t all be dismissed as coincidence, they are spectacularly correct. Although we can’t yet explain how we do it, we do sometimes come into many kinds of knowledge almost instantly.
When that knowledge is the knowledge of love, it can change our lives not only with incredible speed but with incredible thoroughness. This is the thing I try to explain to people who are still looking for a partner and despair of ever finding one: not having found love and finding love are wholly incommensurable conditions, yet you can cross from one to the other in a single day. Dante did, the instant he met Beatrice—an experience he later described with perfect concision and, although he normally wrote in Italian, in Latin, to give it its due gravity. Incipit vita nova, he wrote, of the moment of finding love: a new life begins.
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I was nervous before our second date. It seemed entirely possible that C.’s interest in me would have waned by then; it also seemed entirely possible that the exhilaration I had felt on our first date—a wild happiness amplified by the anticipation of more happiness—would evaporate when we saw each other again. At the time, I had a reputation among my friends as being impossibly stubborn about romance. I had dated plenty, but generally briefly; not since college had I been serious about anyone. In my twenties, that was normal enough, especially once I moved to New York. But by my mid-thirties, when more and more people around me had found a partner and settled down, my persistent failure to fall in love had come to seem like a problem. One friend, assessing my tendency to identify within days all the reasons a relationship wouldn’t work out, described my heart as optimized for detecting red flags. Another joked that I was waiting around for the sudden appearance of a female Prince Charming.
Of the two accusations, the latter was closer to the mark. Although it’s true that I could always come up with a reason why someone I’d dated wasn’t right for me, it was never actually the reason. The real reason, in every case, wasn’t the presence of something that made me think no; it was the absence of anything that made me think yes. I had tried, exactly once, to make a relationship work without that strong inner sense of assent—partly because I was trying to take seriously the theory that my romantic pickiness was a means of avoiding the vulnerability inherent in love; partly because it seemed possible that the feeling of certainty could emerge over time rather than being present from the beginning; and partly because that particular relationship seemed, on paper, as if it should work. But it did not, and the effort to pretend that it someday might was uncomfortable for me and terribly unfair to the other person. After we broke up, I promised myself that I would never make that mistake again. Later, when I met C. and the sense of yes rose up in me unbidden, I felt intense relief that I had been right about myself, and right to wait. But hope never materializes anywhere without fear having stowed away inside it, and in the time before our second date, I worried about feeling so much based on so little, and dreaded the possibility that those feelings would evaporate when I saw her again.
And then there she was, one sunny Friday afternoon, standing in my doorway with a bouquet of flowers in her hand. Many years later, she would give me a book by the literary critic Philip Fisher about the feeling of wonder—about, among other things, how we respond to rare and remarkable sights, from rainbows to great works of art to a drop of water under a microscope. In it, he notes that at the moment of suddenly comprehending something new (“the moment of getting it”), people almost always smile. That day, seeing C. in my house again, I smiled and couldn’t stop smiling. What I understood then was that no amount of happiness was out of proportion to the fact of having found her. I took the flowers and set them on the table and stepped into the place in her arms where they had been, and there among the wild clamor of things I felt were two almost contradictory emotions: that nothing in the world could feel more natural; that nothing in the world could feel more astonishing.
Never mind the obvious candidates, things like passion and adoration and anxiety and bliss; the characteristic emotion of falling in love is amazement. The experience is, above all, one of being astounded by what lay in store for you. “I can’t believe you’re real,” lovers say to one another in complete sincerity, as if the beloved were a gryphon or an angel. In many other contexts, a sudden confrontation with the unpredictability of the world leaves us sobered or distraught—as when loss shocks us with how abruptly something we cherish can disappear. But falling in love is the shining flip side of that encounter, an instance of the deep joy we can feel when life surprises us.
Surprises work by revealing what was previously obscured, teaching us something while also, in many cases, exposing how little we know. All throughout that second date with C., I kept thinking about a pair of lines by John Keats: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.” My understanding of the universe rearranged itself when I met C. Almost right away, I recognized that I now knew one of the most important things in life—the person with whom I wanted to share it—while simultaneously recognizing that I knew almost nothing at all about her. That kind of ignorance, unlike many other kinds, isn’t invisible or passive. It is obvious and urgent, and it actively seeks its own eradication: to no small extent, falling in love is a state of yearning for information. If, like Dante, your feelings are unrequited, you will try to glean every last detail you can from afar. If you are luckier, you will make a comprehensive and intimate study of your beloved—of her body, her mind, her heart, her habits, her home, her everything. In its thoroughness and avidity, this thirst for knowledge is representative. In general, any longing in love—physical, emotional, intellectual, existential—is always the longing for more.