By THIRSTY
Mandy Len Catron’s memoir journey began
with an essay she published in the New
York Times entitled, “To Fall In Love With Anyone, Do This.” That article went
on to become one of its most popular columns in 2015. Her memoir, how to fall in love with anyone, followed
and was released this summer. It has been called a work that melds “science and
emotion beautifully into a thoughtful and thought-provoking meditation on the
most universal topic” and “a beautifully written and well-researched cultural
criticism….”
Originally from Appalachian
Virginia, Mandy Len Catron now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, and
teaches English and creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Stay Thirsty Magazine was pleased to
visit with Mandy Len Catron at her home for this Conversation about Love.
STAY THIRSTY: You dedicated your book, how to fall in love with anyone, to your parents. Why?
MANDY LEN CATRON: My parents had a great marriage, if also an imperfect
marriage. I learned so much from them about what it means to be on the same
team, to look out for each other, to be generous. I feel so grateful to them
for these things. I still don't know all the reasons they divorced, but I
trust their decision. And I don't think of their marriage as a failure because
it ended. For most of their marriage, they loved each other well. And they have
loved me well all my life.
Mandy Len Catron |
STAY THIRSTY: Does romantic love inoculate people from heartache?
MANDY LEN CATRON: Definitely not. If anything romantic love makes us
more vulnerable—any kind of love is really a risk. I look at my dog sometimes
and think about the fact that I will outlive him. It’s so uncomfortable to
acknowledge this. And yet I chose to live with this discomfort the day I
adopted him. Romantic love is the same. There is so much at stake. So much to
lose.
STAY THIRSTY: Do people want a guarantee that love will last before
they take the leap to reveal themselves to the other person?
MANDY LEN CATRON: I think most of us would probably prefer love came
with a guarantee. Certainly I have wanted one many times. For much of my life,
I naïvely thought marriage offered a sort of guarantee. It’s not that I didn’t
know marriages could end, but still I thought there was a way to do it right, a
way to avoid the risk. But of course there are no guarantees. And for love to
really work—for the kind of intimacy most of us want—we have to reveal
ourselves anyway. We have to make the choice without the guarantee. That’s the
deal.
STAY THIRSTY: Can people really decide to fall in love or is it just
chemistry?
MANDY LEN CATRON: Love is a biological experience. The chemicals in our
bodies and brains do matter. But I it’s also a social experience—it’s shaped by
the culture we live in. We like to imagine that our ideas about what’s
attractive, the kind of person we want to be with—our desires—are fixed, that
they are hardwired into us. But lots of research suggests this isn’t the case.
Our desires respond to the culture. This is why dating apps reflect our
prejudices, and why the ideal body type shifts over time. So what we call
“chemistry” isn’t pure biology.
I don’t think you can simply will
yourself to fall in love with any random stranger. But I think we all can open
ourselves to love’s possibilities, we can widen our ideas about what love might
look like. And I think we’d benefit from doing so.
STAY THIRSTY: If you find yourself in love with someone, how do you
know it will last when things get difficult? When do you know it is time to cut
and run?
MANDY LEN CATRON: I think the reality is that you don’t know it will
last when things get difficult. The best you can do, perhaps, is find someone
who will cheer for you when things go well. There’s research that suggests
finding a partner who celebrates your successes actually matters more to
relationship satisfaction than finding someone who can support you through
difficult times—a study I think about often and try to apply to all my close
relationships.
When it’s time to cut and run is a
good question. And not an easy one to answer. The best answer I’ve come up with
is to ask yourself if you can be consistently kind to your partner—and if they
are kind to you. If the answer to either one of these questions is no, you
might spend some time thinking about what the relationship really offers each
of you.
STAY THIRSTY: How do you live with the doubt that inevitably creeps
into a relationship, both your own and that of your partner?
MANDY LEN CATRON: I wish I knew the answer to your question. I’ve
struggled with this a lot. So many of the people I know have. Maybe what we
need is more stories about doubt, more conversations that normalize it and
reckon with it as a predictable part of love. Our narratives of love tell us
that you’re supposed to feel one way about one person forever—that this is the
ideal (and achievable) version of love. But the truth is that our feelings
about our relationships and our partners aren’t fixed, as much as we might want
them to be. I’d love to make more space for that kind of change.
STAY THIRSTY: Is the process of falling in love the same as staying
in love?
MANDY LEN CATRON: Some researchers have suggested that what we call
falling in love is an intense neurochemical experience similar to doing cocaine
or winning at the blackjack table. In other words love highjacks the reward
system in our brains. My own personal experiences with falling in love have
been that it’s intensely pleasurable and also kind of terrifying. We have a
cultural fascination with falling in love. We write songs and make movies about
it. But we don’t have much conversation at all about staying in love. The ideal
form of romantic love in America right now is long term, monogamous,
marriage-minded commitment. And yet we don’t have many stories about what it
means to stay committed, about how it might work and what it might cost us and
whether this kind of relationship really makes sense for everyone.
STAY THIRSTY: What gave you the confidence to reveal yourself and
your relationship to the whole world and to write about your love so honestly?
How has going public changed your life and your relationship?
MANDY LEN CATRON: I think I best understand ideological questions by
bringing them to bear on personal experiences. If I want to understand the role
of love and love stories in our lives, I need to begin with their role in my
life. In doing this, I’m not assuming that everyone’s life is like mine, but
I’m taking this abstract question and applying it in the most honest and
accessible way I can—through the filter of my own life. And it turns out that
dissecting my own anxieties helps mitigate their power.
I don’t
want to position myself as an expert on love, but instead as someone who is
curious, who is willing to think really deeply about it, and who is pretty good
at research. At times this requires making myself vulnerable, but I try to be
really thoughtful about how I do this; it’s always in service of a larger
question.
(Mandy Len Catron photo credit: Jennilee Marigomen)
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