I began to learn about love in dancing
school, at age 12. I remember thinking on the first day I was going to fall
madly in love with one of the boys and spend the next years of my life kissing
and waltzing.
During class, however, I sat among the girls,
waiting for a boy to ask me to dance. To my complete shock, I was consistently
one of the last to be asked. At first I thought the boys had made a terrible
mistake. I was so funny and pretty, and I could beat everyone I knew at tennis
and climb trees faster than a cat. Why didn’t they dash toward me?
Yet class after class. I watched boys dressed
in blue blazers and gray pants
head toward girls in flowered shifts whose perfect ponytails swung back and
forth like metronomes. They fell easily into step with one another in a way
that was completely mysterious to me. I came to believe that love belonged only
to those who glided, who never shimmied up trees or even really touched the
ground.
By the time I was 13, I knew how to subtly tilt my head and make my tears fall
back into my eyes, instead of down my cheeks, when no one asked me to dance. I
also discovered the “power room”, which became my softly lit, reliable retreat.
Whenever I started to cry, I''d excuse myself and run in there,
I finally stopped crying when I met
Matt, who was quiet and hung out on the edges of the room. When we danced for
the first time, he wouldn’t even look me in the eyes. But he was cute, and he
told great stories. We became good buddies, dancing every dance together until
the end of school. I learned from him my most important early lesson about
romance: that the potential for love exists in corners, in the most unlikely as
well as the most obvious places.
For years my love life continued to be
one long tragicomic novel. In
college I fell in love with a tall English major who rode a motorcycle. He
stood me up on our sixth date—an afternoon of sky diving. I jumped out of the
plane alone and landed in a parking lot.
In my mid-20s I moved to New York City
where love is as hard to find as a legal parking spot. My first Valentine’s Day
there, I went on a date to a crowded bar on the Upper West Side. Halfway
through dinner, my date excused himself and never returned.
At the time, I lived with a beautiful
roommate. Flowers piled up at our door like snowdrifts, and the light on the
answering machine always blinked in a panicky way, overloaded with messages
from her admirers. Limousines purred outside, with dates waiting for her behind
tinted windows.
In my mind, love was something behind a
tinted window, part apparition, part shadow, definitely unreachable. Whenever I
spotted happy-looking couples, I’d wonder where they found love, and want to
follow them home for the answer.
After a few years in the city I got my dream
job—writing about weddings for a magazine called 7 Days. I had to find
interesting engaged couples and write up their love stories. I got to ask total
strangers the things I’d always wanted to know.
I found at least one sure answer to the
question “How do you know it’s love?” You know when the everyday things
surrounding you—the leaves, the shade of light in the sky, a bowl of
strawberries—suddenly shimmer with a kind of unreality.
You know when the
tiny details about another person, ones that are insignificant to most people,
seem fascinating and incredible to you. One groom told me he loved everything
about his future wife, from her handwriting to the way she scratched on their
apartment door, like a cat when she came home. One bride said she fell in love
with her fiance because “one night，a moth was flying
around a light bulb, and he caught it and let it out the window. I said, ‘That’s
it. He’s the guy. ’”
You also know it’s love when you can’t
stop talking to each other. Almost every couple I’ve ever interviewed said that
on their first or second date, they talked for hours and hours. For some,
falling in love is like walking into a soundproof confessional booth, a place where you
can tell all.
Finding love can be like discovering a
gilded ballroom on the other side of your dingy apartment, and at the same time
like finding a pair of great old blue jeans that are exactly your size and seem
as if you''ve worn them forever. I can’t tell you how many women have told me
they knew they were in love because they forgot to wear makeup around their boyfriend.
Or because they fell at ease hanging around him in flannel pajamas. There’s
some modern truth to Cinderella’s tale—it’s love when you’ve incredibly
comfortable, then the shoe fits perfectly.
Finally, I think you’ve
in love if you can make each other laugh at the very worst times—when the IRS
is auditing you or when you’re driving
a convertible in a rainstorm or when your hair is turning gray. As someone once
told me, 90 percent of being in love is making each other’s lives funnier and easier, all the way to the
deathbed.
Seven years ago I started writing about love
and weddings for the New York Times in a column called “Vows”. And now that I
have been on this bea for so long, a strange thing has happened:I''m considered
an expert on love. The truth is, love is still mostly a mystery to me. The only
thing I can confidently say is this: Love is as plentiful as oxygen. You don’t
have to be thin, naturally blond, super-successful, socially connected,
knowledgeable about politics or even particularly charming to find it.
I''ve interviewed many people who were down on
their luck in every way—a ballerina with chronic back problems, a physicist who
had been 112 he counted disastrous blind dates, a clarinet player who was a
single dad and could barely pay the rent. But love, when they found it, brought
humor, candlelight, home-cooked meals, fun, adventure, poetry and long
conversations into their lives.
When people ask me where to find love,
I tell a story about one of my first job interviews. It was with an editor at a
famous literary magazine. I had no experience or skills, and he didn’t for one
second consider hiring me. But he gave me some advice I will never forget. He
said, “Go out into the world. Work hard and concentrate on what you love to do,
writing. If you become good, we will find you.”
That’s why I always tell people looking
for love to wait for that “I won the lottery” feeling—wait, wait, wait! Don’t
read articles about how to trap, seduce or hypnotize a mate. Don’t worry about
your lipstick or your height, because it''s not going to matter. Just live your
life well, take care of yourself, and don''t hope too much. Love will find you.
Eventually it even found me. At 28, I met my
husband. At a stationery store, I was buying a typewriter ribbon, and he was
looking at Filofaxes. I remember that his eyes perfectly matched his faded
jeans. He remembers that my sneakers were full of sand. He still talks about
those sneakers and how they evoked his childhood—bonfires by the ocean, driving
on the sand in an old Jeep—all those things that he cherished.
How did I know that it was true love? Our
first real date lasted for nine hours: we just couldn’t stop talking. I had
never been able to dance in my life, but I could dance with him, perfectly in
step. I have learned that it’s love when you finally stop tripping over your
toes.
A year after we met, we married.
I have come to cherish writing the
“Vows” column. With each story I hear, I have proof that love, optimism, guts,
grace, perfect partners and good luck do, in fact, exist. Love, in my opinion,
is not a fantasy, not the stuff of romance novels or fairy tales. It’s as
gritty and real as the subway, it comes around just as regularly, and as long
as you can stick it out on the platform, you won’t miss it.
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