How To Find True Love (Or Rather, How It Finds You)

Got this from the Sep­tem­ber 1999 Reader’s Digest . There are a lot of great trea­sures in old mag­a­zines I tell you. Read till the end. It’s worth it.

by Lois Smith Brady

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 towards me? Yet class after class, I watched boys dressed in blue blaz­ers and gray pants head towards 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 belonged 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 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. He stood me up on our sixth date — an after­noon of sky div­ing. I jumped out of the plane alone and landed in a park­ing lot.

In my mid-20s I moved to New York City 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 through 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, over­load­ing with mes­sages from her admir­ers. Lim­ou­sines 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 a kind 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 future 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 with her fiancee because “one night, a moth was fly­ing around a light 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.

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 can’t tell you how many women have told me they knew they were in love 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 — when the IRS is audit­ing you or when you’re dri­ving a con­vert­ible in a rain­storm or when your hair is turn­ing gray. 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.

Seven years ago I started writ­ing about love and wed­dings for the New York Times in a col­umn called “Vows.” And now that I have been on the beat for so long, a strange thing has hap­pened: I’m con­sid­ered an expert on love. The truth is, 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 thin, nat­u­rally blond, super-successful, socially con­nected, knowl­edge­able about pol­i­tics or even par­tic­u­larly charm­ing to find it.

I’ve inter­viewed many peo­ple who were down on their luck in every way — 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 pay the rent. But love, when they found it, brought humor, can­dle­light, home-cooked meals, fun, adven­ture, poetry and long con­ver­sa­tions into their lives.

When peo­ple ask me where to find love, I tell a story about one of my first job inter­views. It was with an edi­tor of a famous lit­er­ary mag­a­zine. I had no expe­ri­ence or skills and he didn’t for one sec­ond con­sider hir­ing me. but 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’s 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 sta­tionery store. I was buy­ing 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 — bon­fires by the ocean, dri­ving on the sand in an old jeep — all those things that he cherished.

How did I know that it was true love? Our first real date lasted for 9 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.

I have come to cher­ish writ­ing the “Vows” col­umn. 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 as gritty and real as the sub­way, it comes around just as reg­u­larly, and as long as you stick it out on the plat­form, you won’t miss it.