21st January 2000

Someone sent me an email today that made me cry, well, not really, more like cry on the inside. Typically, I'm so old at heart it feels like I've forgotten how to cry... tell me that's normal. I'm going to tack it on here after I've said my piece, it's not meant to be a depressing or anything it's just me reacting to things the way I do.

I'm old enough to know better than to believe in true love; but then by the same reasoning I'm old enough to know better than to believe in God, and Medicine, and things that I do in fact believe passionately in.

Most of you will read this article and empathise with the little things in it that make you think I did that! But the question remains, was it True Love. Answer : who the hell knows what True Love is anyway. Give it up. It's getting us nowhere.

Wrong answer.

I think there's an additional component to true love , else all of us will have truly loved a myriad different people. I still remember silly little things about certain people when I first met them; I still remember certain moments that would otherwise be trivial, and I've felt incredibly comfortable around at least two people this lifetime so far; I won't go so far as to say true love strikes once every fortnight. (and never twice in the same place unless you're very tall haha) I've felt like I couldn't stop talking to a person, like there was always something unsaid left that I should have said before, but at that wonderful moment while you're talking you don't have to think and all these thoughts come pouring forth from your head and you laugh, and laugh and it feels wonderful - even when I was feeling like crud just five minutes beforehand. I've felt incredibly lucky to meet and know someone and keep her friendship through the years, and incredibly guilty and self-reproachful when circumstance and stupidity forced me to abandon that friendship. I've felt incredibly lucky to know someone else who gets me laughing at the worst moments, and vice versa or so it seems; it's such a wonder to be able to pick up that phone and know you'll be laughing in a bit and the self-absorption will melt away.

But just once in this lifetime, I've known what it is to try to give someone up, because she needed me to, and perhaps that's what love really is, perhaps that's the point the author below just completely missed, or didn't think to write. It's also about sacrifices that can feel like they're ripping you apart, that can seem stupid and illogical and counter-intuitive and detrimental at the time, but are what you know are Right, if not for yourself, then for the person you love.

I've known what it feels like to be the villian in a poorly written story - yes don't for an instant imagine I didn't plan it that way if you're reading this whoever you are - it was intentional. Perhaps not that last line which just slipped out. Perhaps I really was being selfish and manipulative all along - if you needed to believe I was, then I was.

And just once in this lifetime, so far, I think perhaps, just perhaps I really did love someone.

*******

What is True Love?
(Lois Smith Brady)

I first began to learn about love in dancing school, at the age of 12. My waltzing and fox-trot lessons took place in a daffodil-yellow ballroom in my hometown in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, a place full of cobberstone roads, Gothic houses, emerald-green soccer fields and wood-paneled station wagons. When I arrived at dancing class on the first day, I remember feeling like a princess floating on a cloud. I thought I was going to fall madly in love with one of the boys in class and spend the next years of my life kissing and waltzing. Before long, though, I felt more like someone standing under a dark thundercloud. During class, I sat among the girls, on one side of the room, 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, I remember thinking. I could beat everyone I knew at tennis, climb trees faster than a cat and blow perfect smoke rings. Why didn't they dash towards me? My overconfidence lasted about as long as a smoke ring in the rain and I have never really regained it. Class after class, I watched the boys 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 each other in a way that seemed completely mysterious to me. I was someone who always had scraped knees and, watching them week after week, I came to believe that love belonged only to those who glided, those who never tripped, fell, 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. Around that time, I discovered the powder room, or ladies' room, for recovering in almost every kind of situation-avoiding old boyfriends at parties, constructing sentences that might make me sound wittier at dinners, looking in the mirror and taking account of my life as people laughed loudly at a cocktail party right outside the door or sitting out bad turbulence on airplanes. In dancing school, it took years for me to stop crying. It wasn't until I met Matt, a blond boy who was at least as unpopular as I was. He was quiet and always 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 very cute, and soon I learned that he told great stories. We became good buddies and loyal partners, 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, had shoulder-length hair and a face like Bobby Kennedy's. I was crazy about him but he stood me up on our sixth date- an afternoon of sky diving. I ended up jumping out of the airplane alone, feeling the beginnings of a broken heart. Although the first part of the jump went well, I was blown sideways at the end and landed in a parking lot, right between a Volkswagen Bug and a van. That seemed to be the way I always landed when it came to love. Broken hearts, I found, are alot like broken bones. At first, there's no pain, only shock and a hint of disability, like a house that stands briefly after an earthquake. But then, just when you think you might be okay, you fall apart entirely. In my mid-twenties, I moved to New York City, where love was as hard to find as a legal parking spot. Everyone in New York is obsessed with love. It is a city full of bagels, limousines, skyscrapers and people with broken hearts. I had plenty of heartbreaks myself while I lived there. My first Valentine's Day set the tone for the next five years. I went out on a date to a crowded surf bar on the Upper West Side, and halfway through the dinner my date excused himself and never returned. He vanished. On the way home, I got caught in the middle of a Frisbee game some kids were playing with jagged coffee-tin tops. It made perfect sense to me that I might be decapitated that night. At the time, I lived in a walk-up apartment with a beautiful roommate. Flowers piled up at our door like snowdrifts, and the answering machine blinked in a panicky way, overloaded with messages from her admirers. Limos were always purring outside our building, with dates waiting behind tinted windows, part apparition, part shadow, definitely unreachable. Whenever I spotted happy-looking couples on the sidewalk, I'd wonder where they found love and want to follow them home for the answer. After a few years in a city, I got a job writing a weekly column about weddings for a New York City magazine called 7 Days. My job was to find interesting engaged couples, interview them and write up their love stories. It was a dream assignment for me- I got to ask total strangers the questions I'd always wanted to blurt out. The job didn't seem like strict journalism; it was more like extreme nosiness. I finally got to ask people in love, "How long did your first date last and what exactly were you thinking of each other?" Or, "How did you know it was love?" Or, "What was your first kiss like?" First kisses, I've found, are not a good barometer-I've met lots of couples who said their first kiss was about as pleasant as dieting, but who fell madly in love anyway. I learned that true love has some universal qualities and telltale signs. For one thing, most couples I've interviewed said they felt incredibly lucky, even giddy, after meeting each other- they had an I-won-the-lottery! feeling. Whenever anyone asks me about love, I always say wait for that feeling, wait, wait, wait. Wait with the patience of a Buddhist fly fisherman. Over the years, I have found at least one sure answer to the question. How do you know it's love? You know when the tiny and everyday things surrounding you- the leaves on the ground, the shade of light in the sky, the flowers on the table, the background music, a bowl of strawberries, a message on your answering machine- suddenly shimmer with a kind of unreality. You know when the tiny details about another person, ones that are insignificant or mundane 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. During another interview, a bride said she fell in love with her fiance partly because he knew how to repair car engines and frozen pipes, but the fact that he never, ever killed bugs really won her heart. "One night, a moth was flying around a lightbulb and he caught it and let it out the window," she remembered. 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 interviewed have said that on their first or second date, they talked for hours and hours and hours- in some cases, days passed before they stopped talking. For some, falling in love is like walking into a soundproof confessional booth, a place where you can tell all. I have heard many people say the first conversation is far more important than the first kiss. 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 cannot tell you how many women have told me they knew they were in love because they forgot to wear makeup around their new boyfriend. Or because they felt comfortable hanging around the house with him in flannel pajamas. There is 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 moments. When the IRS is auditing you or when you're driving a convertible in a rainstorm or when your hair is turning gray. Judy Collins, the folksinger, once told me about a visit she made to her longtime boyfriend, Louis Nelson, in the hospital. They had been living together for 16 years, ever since their first date, but he now had a ruptured appendix and was near death. Still, they managed to crack each other up. Nelson described one of Collins' hospital visits this way: "She held on to me. She brought me crystals and a cross and smiles. She said, all pensive and serious, 'We should get married.' I said, in a Demerol fog, 'That won't keep me from dying.'" 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've been on this beat for so long a strange thing happened: I am considered an expert on love. Around Valentine's Day every year, television stations from all over the country ask me to speak, to shed some light on the subject. But to tell the truth, after all this time, 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 perfectly thin, naturally blonde, super-successful, funny, knowledgeable about politics, socially connected or even particularly charming to find it. I've interviewed many people who were down on their luck in every way- an artist unable to sell paintings and living in an illegal loft with leaky plumbing; a ballerina with chronic back problems; a physicist who had been on 112 (he counted) disastrous blind dates; a clarinet player who was a single dad and could barely meet the rent payments. But love, when they found it, brought humor, candlelight, fun, adventure, poetry, home-cooked meals and long conversations into their lives. When people ask me where to find love, I cannot give them any addresses. Instead, I tell a story about one of my first job interviews when I arrived in New York. I interviewed at a famous literary magazine, with a legendary editor. I had no experience or skills, and he didn't for one second consider hiring me. But he did give 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. It may take five years. It may take ten. But if your work stands out, we will call you." That's what I tell peole looking for love. Don't read articles about how to trap, ensnare, seduce or hypnotize a mate. Don't worry about your lipstick or your height, because in the end, it's not going to matter. Just live your life well, take care of yourself, and don't mope, complain or shop too much. Love will find you. Eventually, it even found me. I finally fell in love at 28. I met my husband in a stationary store in East Hampton, New York, near the Atlantic Ocean. I was buying a typewriter ribbon (it was a long time ago), and he was looking at Filofaxes. I remember that his eyes perfectly matched his faded blue jeans. He remembers that my sneakers were full of sand- he still talks about those sneakers and how they evoked for him the beach, his childhood, bonfires by the ocean, driving on the sand in an old Jeep- all the things he lived for. For us, it didn't take more than a tiny detail, a pair of sand-filled sneakers, the slightest brushstroke, to start love going. How did I know it was love? Our first real date lasted nine hours. We couldn't stop talking. When I was with him on airplanes, I was so distracted I forgot to be afraid of turbulence. No matter where we were, I never had to run to the ladies' room to calm myself down or think of something to say. I'd never been able to dance in my life, but I could dance with him, perfectly in step, gliding as lovers do. I learned that it's love when you finally stop tripping over your toes. I also knew it was love because we had the strangest things in common. We both believed finding a penny with the head up brings good luck. We were both afraid to actually pick up lucky pennies. Now, untouchable pennies lie all over our house and we don't have to explain why. We both liked to drive long distances while listening to sad country songs. We were both hippies once. He lived in a tepee in Nova Scotia; I lived in a Volkswagen the color of egg yolk in Colorado. The best love stores I've heard are ones in which two people have the strangest combination of things in common. Recently, I attended a wedding between a private eye (the bride) and a kayaking guide (the groom) who both know the Latin names for nearly every star in the sky, love camping out, go to Catholic mass on Sundays, eat at Mcdonald's, smoke when no one's looking and listen to Christmas carols year round. You have to believe they were meant to be together. I've also learned differences can be as romantic, and sometimes as necessary, as similarities. One couple I interviewed, Lois (a minister) and Hal (a computer scientist), had lots in common- both loved cotton clothes, esoteric movies, mismatched dinnerware, science fiction, the Grand Canyon and books on tape. But they were also very different. She talks nonstop, even with strangers, while he is quiet and private. She's a beautiful singer, he's tone deaf. "That's the one thing I miss, the two of us singing together," Lois said. "But it's okay. You can't have it all. Actually, you wouldn't want it all in one relationship. If you got it, you'd live like a mouse in a hole and never come out or make friends or see the world." A year after we met, I married my husband in a small, dainty Victorian church that sits like a conch shell in the dunes of Southampton, New York. Our wedding was a total disaster. I wore my mother's dress, which didn't fit me well- all night long it felt like someone was stepping on the hem. The sleeves were so tight it felt like I was having my blood pressure taken. I wore a headpiece that was as fragile as a bird's nest and began sliding down my head as soon as I started down the aisle. The minster, a man I didn't know very well, spoke at length about menopause, madness and marriage. Then, things only got worse. We held the reception in an old hotel full of Tiffany lamps, curvy velvet couches and cigar smoke that hung permanently in the air, like smog in LA. As I entered the hotel, my dress instantly stuck to the floor, which had been polished with a substance as sticky and thick as butterscotch sauce. All night, if I wanted to move at all, I had to lift my train up and carry it in my arms like a bundle of firewood. By the end, I was so depressed I almost ate the entire wedding cake. I learned you can have the worst luck at your weddng, you can even have bad luck your entire life. You can never get asked to dance as a teenager; you can experience hundreds of painfully awkward blind dates; you can look and feel like a bag lady at your wedding. And still, love can find you and stay with you. I have come to cherish writing the "Vows" column. Each story I hear explains some aspect of love and has helped me to figure out what love is, how it feels, how it changes you and where it comes from. Over the years, I haven't become a more hard-bitten, hard-skinned reporter. Just the opposite: Inevitably, every Saturday, I cry at some point during the ceremony. Tears splash all over my notebook. And once in a while, on the beat, I'll hear a love story that really gives me the goose bumps, one that makes me feel as though I've seen the rare, real thing. I have proof that love, optimism, guts, grace, perfect partners and very good luck do in fact exist. Love, in my opinion, is not a fantasy experience, 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 just stick it out on the platform, you won't miss it.