This, then, was my new life; it was almost impossible to believe. I was amazed—daily, hourly amazed—that something so wonderful had happened to me. I will retain forever one particularly acute version of this feeling, which seized me sometime in the course of that long second date, when I found myself in the kitchen at three in the morning, making pancakes. We had come downstairs from the bedroom after C., who has the figure of a sylph but, as I had discovered by then, the metabolism of a sixteen-year-old boy, announced that she was famished. Now she was perched on a stool, plate on her lap, serenely devouring her eighth or ninth pancake. A jar of jam sat open on the counter. The faint bakery smell of flour and butter filled the air. Outside the window, the whole scene floated in duplicate, golden in the darkness. My happiness was so enormous that it was like an entire third person standing there beside us.
I had lived, up to that point, an extraordinarily fortunate life. Safety, prosperity, good health, an excellent education, a job I adored, a loving upbringing that had left me at peace with myself and at ease in the world: all of life’s least equitably distributed goods had been mine to enjoy. My portion of suffering—an acquaintance with grief that began too early, the everyday sorrows and fears no one alive can avoid—was modest by any standard, my portion of joy immense. So it was shocking, when I met C., to feel it grow so swiftly and so much. That “watcher of the skies” Keats wrote about was William Herschel, the astronomer who, in identifying Uranus, increased the known boundaries of the solar system by nine hundred million miles almost overnight. Thus did my happiness expand when I met C.
The morning after those predawn pancakes, I woke to an empty bed. When I went downstairs, I saw C. through the big front windows of my house, sitting at the picnic table out on the patio, long since settled into work. She was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt rolled up at the sleeves; there was a cup of coffee at her side and a legal pad in front of her. Her back was to me, and I stood and watched her through the window for a very long time. The night before, in the kitchen, the world with her in it had seemed enchanted—seemed, in its shimmering, small-hour joy, almost unreal. But what I could not stop looking at that morning was the utter ordinariness of the scene: there she was, going about her life in my home, going about her life in my life. The next day, when she went into Manhattan for work, I called my sister and told her that I had met the woman I was going to marry.
* * *
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The story of romantic love, the poet Anne Carson once observed, is always a story about the lover, the beloved, and the differences between them. That is true. But it is also true that the story of romantic love, especially as the lovers themselves tell it, is always a story about the lover, the beloved, and the similarities between them. Both contrast and likeness are inevitable in love, and our culture is conflicted about which matters more. Folk wisdom tells us that opposites attract, while also telling us the opposite of that. “You simply must meet So-and-so,” the would-be matchmaker insists. “You have so much in common.”
What do C. and I have in common? The strange thing about the list I could make is how difficult it is to say which items on it contribute substantially to our happiness and which are insignificant. The first time I got in her car, she started the ignition and Miranda Lambert came blasting out of the radio, because she had left the local country music station turned up to eleven. She was embarrassed, but I was elated, somewhat irrationally. It’s true that I love country music, and also that this preference is shared by relatively few of my friends (and disparaged by plenty of them), but I don’t know why catching her in the act of loving it too should have moved me so much, or felt so promising. In the scheme of things, does anything matter less?
Yes, actually, and we have plenty of those things in common, too: a fondness for thrift stores, a lifetime supply of flannel shirts, a distaste for that alarming pseudo-vegetable known as baby corn. All of this is small-bore stuff, obviously. It has nothing to do with our beliefs about love and commitment, child-rearing and families, ethics and politics, the nature of the self and the origins of the universe. Yet much of life is lived on the small-bore scale, so who’s to say that such things matter less than the deeper visions and values we share? When couples at their weddings celebrate a mutual love of something that seems, at best, peripheral to an enduring partnership—Dungeons & Dragons or bacon or cosplay or the films of Wim Wenders—it is not simply because that thing helped draw them together but because, to them, it feels laden with significance. Even or perhaps especially in its seeming triviality, it is a kind of shibboleth: proof of their rightness for each other, a manifestation of the astonishing improbability of ever finding one’s own bespoke and perfect love. Perhaps that is why, in my experience, you will seldom find a happy couple that does not take pleasure in some seemingly shallow thing they have in common.
Still, even if you and your partner are similar in ways both superficial and deep, you are assuredly not that similar. “Resemblance does not make things so much alike as difference makes them unlike,” Montaigne observed. “Nature has committed herself to make nothing separate that was not different.” And C. and I are, in certain respects, extremely different. Some of those differences I discovered over time, but others I recognized from the beginning. During our first lunch, when I did not yet understand why I was tracking her biography so attentively, I registered, with the same heightened interest I brought to everything else that day, a host of obvious gaps between us: of age, of background, of geography, of religion.
Of these, the last was initially the most striking. On my mother’s side as well as my father’s, I am Jewish—or anyway, as the old joke goes, Jew-ish. When I was young, my parents took my sister and me to synagogue on the High Holy Days, hosted a Seder every Passover, filled all eight days of Chanukah with delight, and saw to it that we celebrated a few other kid-friendly holidays throughout the year, too—Purim, Sukkot, Simchat Torah, Tu B’shvat. I attended seven years of Saturday school (though it was held on Sundays, presumably to avoid competing with field hockey and soccer practice; our temple was so suburban that it was actually called Suburban Temple), and when the time came, I learned a Torah portion and summarily became a Bat Mitzvah.
For some children, all this would have been sufficient to nurture a life of faith. But ours was not a great synagogue, and I was not its greatest student; I completed my ostensible religious education with only a superficial grasp of Jewish history, very little in the way of theology, and nothing at all that could be called faith. Just about the only thing it fostered in me was the sense of being connected to something very old and very fragile, and a love of the traditions that constitute that connection. I still light candles on the Jewish holidays, in the name of my ancestors and out of respect for the notion that each of us is obliged to help dispel the darkness in the world; I am still moved to joy by the Shehecheyanu, that rising prayer of gratitude reserved for special occasions; I am still rendered solemn by the recitation of the Kol Nidre on the Day of Atonement; and very few things can return me to the expansive wonder of my childhood as swiftly as a fragment of Hebrew scripture or the keening beauty of a Hebrew song. The ancient call of the shofar, which lingers in a sanctuary so long after it is sounded, has likewise lingered in me.