How to fall in love

an anniversary essay

I was not in the mood for a party that night but when the party happens downstairs in your living room you don’t really have a choice. Kim was throwing an early Lunar New Year celebration and the guest list included her gym crush, so all of us housemates had an unspoken agreement that we would do everything in our power to make the evening go as smoothly as possible. I took it upon myself to be “the glue”, that person who, knowing one or two people from each friendship group, makes them mingle until what began as a collection of work friends, gym friends, and uni friends becomes one big cacophony of where are you froms and what do you dos and how do you know Kims. I envisioned a borderline Stepfordian party, where people drank and shared funny anecdotes and laughed and everyone was included. So when I saw him sitting alone at the kitchen table I grabbed a cup of mulled wine and went and sat next to him. 

I don’t remember exactly what my opener was but I remember telling him that my New Year’s resolution was to learn how to tell the future from the tarot books Kim had bought me for Christmas, an endeavor he found not at all insane. “We need more people who can do that”, he agreed and laughed before admitting that he had a tarot deck as well. It was, he said, interesting to see how the brain united all the random tarot symbols into coherent narratives. I disagreed - tarot was to only be used unironically for the arcane art of fortunetelling. 

My job as the glue meant that I had to circulate, so after a while, I left him in someone else’s company. Every now and then I’d look over my shoulder to a random corner of the room and there he was, always where I expected him to be, as if my body was a compass, always finding its North. 

We didn’t reunite until later that night, after the food had been eaten and the drinking games played and some of the guests had already gone, leaving the rest of us to intimate conversations with whoever was closest. We talked about our childhoods and our work, my Dante and his cowboys, our shaky love lives, mine a revolving door of people who were not for me, and his at a complete standstill in the aftermath of a relationship that had lasted throughout his early twenties. When we finally broke off from each other long enough to realise what time it was, the sun was rising and Kim was sleeping on the sofa next to us. 

I didn’t see him until the following week. I’d come home from a bizarre coffee date and was glad to see him and Kim in the living room, ready to hear me complain about men. The story was that someone I had had a brief tryst with at Oxford the previous May, was now moving to London and wanted to get back together. The coffee date had been an awkward mix of mining for information about my relationship status under the guise of catching up and a frustrating, albeit flattering declaration. He was saying all the right things: how much he’d missed me, how he regretted letting me go - all the things that any person who has been broken up with wants to hear. But it was just making me angry. My life was not some poorly scripted rom-com. I didn’t want someone to have to lose in order to understand how valuable I was. I wanted to be wanted from the first moment. 

For a long time after Matt and I started dating, whenever my friends asked for the story of how we got together, I’d include the coffee date incident for reasons I didn’t fully understand until recently. I don’t think I had - at least not consciously - any romantic feelings for him at that point in time, but meeting him, chatting to him until morning that night reminded me of the type of person I wanted to be with. I wanted someone like him. 

We had our first kiss two months later, on April 1st. We like to joke that this relationship is just one elaborate April fool’s joke. It’s still unclear who the butt of the joke would be. 

After we kissed, I remember noticing that the sky was perfectly clear that night but there was no moon. On my way back home I checked the calendar and saw it was a new moon, the perfect time for planting new seeds. I smiled to myself both because I was proud of remembering this bit of gardening knowledge I’d got from my grandmother decades earlier and because it felt so fitting. Of course, I’d fall in love on the first day of a new moon cycle, the first day of a new month, the day of fools. It’s funny because love, he and I have recently decided, hinges on being a fool. 

You have to be a little foolish to be in love. A bit naïve. Silly enough to believe that this kind of thing could happen to you. Childish enough to place yourself at the center of the universe for a few seconds, long enough to indulge in the thought that maybe you are special and maybe you do deserve this feeling, and perhaps there’s no reason to be suspicious of it, to prod and test it and see how much it can take before it breaks. Maybe you can accept that you’re part of something alive, a seed that has sprouted and is budding and will blossom only to repeat that cycle next year and the next year and the next. 

Today we celebrate a year of living together and one year and six months since our first kiss. Since I began to accept being asked what movie I wanted to watch tonight, walked to the bus stop if it was dark out, being cooked for, being listened to even though I always start a story with an exasperating amount of preliminary context, being brought flowers, and being written poems about.

Who knew that being a fool pays off?