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One unhelpful stereotype in love is that we need to be rescued, but your pattern was the opposite: you needed to be the saviour. Why do you think you fell into trying to fix partners?
No one asked me to fuss over trying to make someone happier — that's a dysfunctional thing that was on me. But it also meant that if there was something unkind about another person, I’d think, oh, I’ll just fix that too.
For me it feels easier to be active. It’s harder to sit back and not feel panicky - which is obviously a trust thing - so I fuss and fuss and fuss. I took a cooking class with my mother once, and when the chef who was teaching the class came over I was poking at everything with my wooden spoon. She said, ‘Stop bothering it,’ and she was right, I was ruining the meal by tending to it too much. And it was the same in love. But maybe that’s also a mask, because I'm not sure I trust myself or I'm comfortable with what I want. Maybe if I'm very busy, I won't have to figure that out.
I found it interesting that you fell into a trap of confusing tastes and identity. Those times when you thought, if someone doesn’t like that band maybe they’re not right for me. How was that unhelpful in love?
I was being a snobby jerk! It's that phase of developing your own taste where you think, I'm in my early 20s and I know that I love Lou Reed, and if other people don't like Lou Reed that's an issue. Your new sense of identity is very fragile, so you're less able to [allow] someone else to do it a different way. Those are just boxes we put people in.
A word I think about a lot is ‘legible’. It's easy to show other people in your life that you are happy, or that they don't have to worry about you anymore, if what you've got going on with someone is legible and visible. Maybe it’s, Oh, they both love this band. They both like baseball. Or the gender roles make sense in a way the culture understands. And when the way your genders are together isn't a thing that people know about, then you have to work harder to say, ‘Hey, this is my happiness. This is what it looks like and it’s real, even if you don't see it.'
As you’ve grown older, have you been able to move away from choosing people based on those boxes?
As with most things, yes, and then I went too far to the other side. I became so tolerant of people being completely different from me that in one of my relationships, although the other person was wonderful, I woke up one day and [realised] I didn’t like any part of our life together. None of the ways we spent our time, or ate food, or talked to each other were how I wanted to live, even though they were necessary to living my life with that person. I’d talked myself into thinking, well, a good person would be okay with this. So now I'm back at a place where I'm dating someone who also likes being outside. We share a lot of musical tastes and it's nice. So who knows? I never figure anything out, it's different every time.
It’s hard to think about why we fall in love. I’m not sure anyone fully understands why anyone loves anyone, because it feels so specific, as if there are a thousand parts of someone which somehow work with and alongside a thousand parts in you, even though they’re all moving. It’s like all these pieces working together and changing, somehow moving forwards, and not everyone sees that process. It feels like a strange miracle to me still!
That's absolutely it, it is so specific. Maybe the more wonderful it is the harder it is to understand, because it's so fine-tuned to parts of yourself that even the people who know you pretty well haven't found yet.
Or even that you haven’t found yet. Because so many pieces of yourself and the other person are changing, and you might not even encounter some of them until years later.
Yes, and that's not scary to me, the idea that a person could change and surprise you. I feel that way about authors whose voices I love so much. Who knows what they're going write next? I have no idea, but I know I love their voice and I love the way they see the world. So if Lauren Groff writes about a nunnery or a commune or an actor or a swimmer, it doesn't matter. The rest of it can change and I'm still onboard. And I feel like that's what I hope for in love too.
That's such a good way to describe it. At the end of the book you write about the family you’ve created with your friends. It seemed like that love story appeared at the same time as you were letting go of the fantasy of living the life your grandparents or parents had?
That family was always there. For a lot of people, their chosen family - their friends; their love stories that are not romantic, whether it's a house, a person, a group, a community - they're always there, if you're lucky. And I'm very lucky.
My therapist says, ‘CJ, you're very good at maintaining long-term, beautiful friendships for years. You take care of each other, you love each other, it's all very healthy. Have you considered that some of those tools might be useful elsewhere?’ In my mind I thought those were different tools, but they’re not.
And so I put that towards the end, not because those people suddenly, magically appeared to save me, but because I decided to start naming them as a love story. I wanted to say, if you wish to be partnered and you are not, don’t feel there’s no love in your life, because there’s tonnes of it. But also, if you are a person who wants to be partnered and you find a partner, if you’ve acknowledged all the different kinds of healthy love around you, there’s less pressure on your relationship to do everything.
Unless you grow up seeing different, diverse, healthy examples of relationships, it's hard not to feel there's only one way to do it. What's been good for me is to see that we build [love stories] ourselves. This is the scary part: there’s no way to do it that's available to us that we can just find and take. You have to make it yourself, otherwise you're wearing someone else's clothes, and that's no good.
So it’s important to you to name these other connections as love stories, because they haven’t been recognised in that way?
Exactly. There are so many good things in our lives, and the way we experience the joy and the meaningfulness of them is diminished, because they're not part of legible cultural narratives around what a happy life looks like. It’s very easy for someone to look at me in a time in my life when it’s like, oh she’s single, and maybe she’d like love in her life someday, how sad. But I don’t think it is sad. Here I am off to the beach with my friends who are helping me through grieving my grandmother. Here is this family coming over to cook dinner in my house of students and colleagues. And here's my tiny niece who is yelling to me about a creature she found in the sea. There's power in saying, ‘That's love.’ I would like for people to see those loves and value them for themselves. And for others to understand that too, so it doesn't have to be that every time they see their single friend, they say, ‘I'm sure it'll work out some day.’ Because I'm not living for some day. This is my life, and it's beautiful.
In one essay you wrote about how initially when your sister had a baby there was a part of you that feared you would be left outside the walls of their home. I love the way that ended, with you realising it was the stories we’ve been told about motherhood as a walled place, with everyone else shut out, that led to that fear. And actually the reality has been the opposite – ‘an unwalled state of motherhood’. Did that surprise you?
Oh, it’s the best. I love my niece so much, and she loves me so much, and I love my sister so much. I know people aren't always this lucky. Family is complicated, but if you can find new ways to make it work for you, then it’s beautiful.
I think part of the fear when people become parents is attached to the fear of thinking, can you be friends with people whose lives look different to yours? I have friends who I’ve had for years, and our lives are very different these days, but those friendships are maybe the most valuable to me. They don’t just [exist] because we live in the same town or do the same thing — although that’s another meaningful kind of relationship. I think you can relate to people whose lives look differently. It takes more work, because you’re not on the same schedule and you’re in a different life phase. But you don’t just have to be in dynamics with people who have all the same things as you.
And isn’t that impossible anyway, given how much our lives are constantly changing?
People find it threatening sometimes. It’s like, you made different choices, or I made different choices… does that mean I’m doing it wrong? Does that mean you’re doing it wrong? Do I need to prove that my way of doing it is okay? And it’s when someone feels threatened by it that it can hurt the relationship, and it can fall apart.
Have you found becoming an aunt a different kind of love?
If I become a parent someday – I still don’t know if that will happen or not - but if I do and I adopt a child, I know some people will say, oh, how will you love this child? What will that feel like? But I lived with my ex who had a daughter and it didn’t take long for me to think, I would die for you. It took much less time than a person might think. In that case, it’s not biology, it’s just, I will die for you and I love you. And with my niece - and my nephew now too - it’s like that plus biology, because my niece looks so much like my sister. I’m three years older than her, and when she was born it was like she was my baby. I loved her so much. And when I see my niece it’s like, there’s my baby again, but it’s my sister’s baby. It’s another form of my love for my sister all over again, which is so cool.
When you fell in love with your ex’s child and the relationship ended, was it harder to grieve the loss because there isn’t a label for that ending?
When things have labels you can have a ritualised ending point. I see that with friends who have ended a long-term relationship and weren’t married. People responded differently to a 10-year relationship ending versus a divorce after three years. They say, ‘Oh my god, it’s a divorce’. But to the person who has ended a 10-year relationship, they’ll say, ‘Oh you’ll find someone new.’ Why is it the label that flags how ‘bad’ an ending is? Again, I’m the one who is responsible for that happening in large part, so I’m not trying to sing a sad song.
But it showed you how quickly and intensely parental love is possible without a biological aspect or labels other people might put on it?
Yes. And then when it’s gone, when there’s no ritual at the end, that whole part of yourself – of being in a caretaking role for a child – is gone all at once. All that love suddenly has nowhere to go, and that’s really hard. It was unfamiliar to me and I’d never felt that way before. I hadn’t even read stories about it, so I had no road map.
I liked that you chose to end on your relationship with your dad as a love story, because, if you’re lucky enough to have always had it, it’s easy to take parental love for granted.
And not all of us get that. Not all of us get it from two people, or even from one. If you did? Radical is the word I use. It’s like, you love me, and that’s felt so easy that I can almost take it for granted. Think about the other relationships in our lives, when is that ever the case? It’s insane.
You wrote that you’ve come to appreciate the more gently-plotted love. Was it important for you to end the story there?
It’s hard to write stories about things that are beautiful and calm and slow. The longest romantic relationship of my life is not in this book, because it was good and I don’t need to understand it. (I turn things into stories so I can understand them.) Not everything has to be a story, and it’s good to remember that. To let something just be.
At the end it was important for me to say that I’m not advocating for people to go out and lead lives full of story-worthy love with twists and turns. All I know is, there are lots of good things and they don’t always make for good stories, but they are good, and they are love, and I’m so grateful for them.
What do you wish you had known about love?
I wish I had known that there wasn’t one way to do it right. That it was about discovering what about love worked for me, or made my life bigger, or made it smaller. If you define love too narrowly, you can be blind to a lot of really good loves in your life. So broadening the definition? All it does is let you have more love in your life. There’s really no downside to that.
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