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Love Will Find You

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 b elonged 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 powder 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 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 novel. In college, I
fell in love with a tall English major who rode a motorcycle. He
stood me up on our sixth date. In my mid-20s I moved to NY 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 thru the 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. Limos 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 king 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 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 her fiance because "one night", a moth
was flying around a lig ht 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. I can't tell you how many women have
told me they knew they were in love because they forgot to wear
make up around their boyfriend. Or because they felt at ease hanging
around him in flannel pajamas. There's some modern truth to
Cinderella's tale - it's love when you're incredibly comfortable, when
the shoe fits perfectly.

Finally, I think you're in love if you can make each other laugh at
the very worst times. As someone once told me, 90% of being in love
is making each other's lives funnier and easier, all the way to
the deathbed.

I've interviewed many people who were down on their luck in every
way - a ballerina with chronic problems, a physicist who had been on
112 blind dates, a clarinet player who was a single dad and could
barely pay rent.

But love, when they found it, brought humor, candlelight, home-cooked
meals, fun, adventure, poetry and long conversations in their lives.

When people ask me where to find love, I tell a story about one of my
first job interviews. 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 is not going to matter. Just live your life
well, take care of yourself, and don't mope too much. Love will find
you.

Eventually it even found me. At 28, I met my husband in a stationary
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 - things 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.

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 a 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.