How to fall in love
Notes from a quasi-journalistic, occasionally poignant, deeply subjective investigation into love, jazz, and toast crumbs in the butter
Let us consider for a moment the mythic twinge of the heart muscle that is accompanied only by one distinct act: falling in love.
It starts, perhaps, with a conversation. Not the first conversation, of course—that’s just syntax and sly flirtation, punctuation-as-peacock-feather, proof that you know how to talk to people with whom you want to have sex. Not even the second or third, though those are important in the narrative structure you are both unconsciously building, like two flirtatious structural engineers reinforcing load-bearing beams.
No, it starts with the fourth conversation. The one that veers just a little too personal, a little too weird or revealing—something about the way you used to measure time by the shadows on the grass every summer, or how you sometimes cry after sex even when it’s good. The one that makes you feel like you’ve handed them a small, warm animal and asked them to look after it. The small, warm animal? That’s your life. Your innermost self. The “you” your mother and elementary school English teacher and bestest and oldest friend know you to be.
The fourth conversation—that’s the beginning of the falling.
HOW I ANNOYED SIX PEOPLE BY ASKING THEM THE QUESTION “HOW DO YOU FALL IN LOVE?”
“How do you fall in love?”
Of course, to answer the question, one must first concede that falling in love it is not the same as being in love. “Falling” implies motion, gravity, a direction. A kind of accidental inevitability, like slipping on black ice or answering a call from an unknown number only to hear a voice that ruins your entire sense of linear time.
Hemingway had an answer—you fall in love the way you go bankrupt: “gradually, then suddenly.”
Though Hemingway was married four times—which would likely lead one to believe that he of all people should know how one falls in love, because that likely was his favourite bit—there is something quite special and much less distinctly cheesy about the ways in which other people less interested in bull fights and old men by the sea might answer the question.
To break out of the metaphor and into something that resembles reportage, I asked a collection of six strangers and friends and other people in whom I have particular vested interest in their answer.
THE ABRIDGED ANSWERS OF SIX PEOPLE ASKED THE SAME QUESTION
Clara, 31, florist, has never been on time for anything except theatre and heartbreak and believes most problems can be solved with “figs, sun, or scissors”
Clara is the kind of person who looks you directly in the eye when she speaks. She smells vaguely like rosemary and says things like “I think we underestimate the eroticism of attention.”
“I fall in love when someone sees me in a way I didn’t know I could be seen. Not just compliments, but like—recognition. As in: I see the version of you that’s still trying, even when you pretend not to care. And I like her.”
I ask her if this is terrifying.
“Of course,” she says. “That’s why we mostly avoid it.”
Jeremy, 30, pub owner and part-time philosophy PhD candidate, lives on an inherited houseboat on the Regent’s Canal
Jeremy wears multiple rings on both hands and is growing a moustache. His voice sounds like it’s used to being heard in both Aiglon dormitories and back gardens of pubs. He owns a sterling silver peeler and makes a very good Negroni.
“Falling in love is like seeing yourself reflected in someone else’s mind.”
He is twirling an orange peel like he probably would his moustache if I wasn’t around.
“It’s narcissism, sure. But also curiosity. The right person makes you want to know yourself better. And then, paradoxically, forget yourself entirely.”
He pauses. I don’t say anything.
“But I also think we fall in love with people who let us be stupid. Playful. Less performative. It’s anti-branding.”
I nod, but also want to scream.
Tasha, 45, divorce lawyer, mother of three, and very, very funny—the kind of funny that would earn a glowing two-word review on a film poster: “Razor-sharp!”
Tasha has the kind of laugh that makes strangers turn around in cafés, craning their necks in the hopes of being let in on the joke. She is warm yet unsentimental. The kind of woman who has lived enough to tell the truth without bundling it in bubble wrap, which, incidentally, is what makes her an excellent divorce lawyer.
“I fall in love when I don’t feel like I’m performing competence,” she tells me over coffee, taken black.
She thinks for a minute, tapping the Whole Foods-branded keep-cup she brought with her as she considers the rest of her answer. I can’t help but notice that her nails are long, glossy, and immaculate.
“Falling in love—love in general, really—it’s rare. Most of us are trying so hard to seem like we’re not trying. But when someone sees you in the absolute mess of it—your pain, your pettiness, your unpaid parking tickets—and they stay? That’s the beginning.”
Then she laughs. I ask her what’s funny.
“Even though you probably feel impossibly old right now, you’re still young. So— because no one will tell you this, I will: sometimes, they leave, because love is a choice and, sometimes, people are bad at making choices.”
I ask her if she believes you can fall in love more than once. She scrunches her nose.
“Ohhhh YES,” she says. “Otherwise what’s the point?”
Cam, 24, film student, buys Tabi socks in bulk from Amazon and is currently editing a short shot entirely from the perspective of an upper middle class family’s compost bin
Cam has a bleached buzzcut and large hands. Her energy is the kind of unfocussed focus of someone who either hasn’t slept in days or just had the best nap of their life. She refers to her feelings as “projects” and once tried to get a tattoo of a Keith Haring drawing but reneged at the last minute because she was “worried about copyright infringement.”
Cam is cutting a roll of expired 35mm film with surgical precision.
“It’s chemical,” Cam says. “Like… You can intellectualise it all you want. But I think love is a biological hallucination with spiritual side effects.”
I ask her to elaborate.
“To sum it up, I know I’ve fallen in love when I smell someone’s T-shirt and the thought of not being able to smell their T-shirt again makes me want to eat drywall.”
I lean back in my chair. I’m not quite sure what Cam means but, then again, somehow I totally do.
Owen, 31, artistic director, unironically wears Uggs, eats fig rolls by the sleeveful, and carries a tote bag containing three pens, two legal pads, and a copy of Subculture: The Meaning of Style by Dick Hebidge
Owen has the deliberate posture of someone who once played Orpheus in a university production and never quite stepped out of character. He has the kind of bone structure that makes baristas get his order wrong on purpose just to keep talking to him. He speaks in long paragraphs and smells faintly of eucalyptus.
“Falling in love is like entering a room you didn’t know existed in your own house. You think you know the layout—you’ve lived here a long time, you’ve opened every drawer, rearranged every piece of furniture in your head—and then someone says, ‘What about this door?’ And they open it. And suddenly there’s light you’ve never seen before. A corner of yourself that feels both new and familiar.”
Owen runs his fingers through his long-ish hair in a way that should be annoying but is actually quite charming. This is likely due to his aforementioned bone structure.
“The feeling for me isn’t quote-unquote “fireworks.” It’s a deep exhale. It’s the moment I notice my own pacing change. Like—I’m slower. More deliberate. I want to listen more. Ask questions I don’t already know the answer to. I think that’s what love is, for me. A new curiosity. A softening.”
He pauses, then smiles a little—like the thought he’s about to say isn’t quite safe, but he’s going to say it anyway.
“But, to really answer your question with some kind of specificity: how you fall in love is in the moments when, say, the other person reads a book you told them you liked in passing. That kind of shit is the fucking best feeling in the world, so, yeah, that’s how.”
Hugo, 29, artist, wears a rotation of five jumpers in varying shades of navy, always reads the author’s acknowledgments first, and once sobbed during a BBC nature documentary but won’t say which one
Hugo has the kind of face that makes middle-aged women stop him in the street to ask if he’s “been in something.” He’s all sleepy charm and sharp observations, the kind of person who listens closely. He has a talent for looking at you so intently you feel a bit ruined when he looks away.
When I ask Hugo the question, he thinks for a long time. Finally, he has an answer.
“Can I give you the unromantic version?”
Obviously, yes, please, I tell him.
“Okay great. You fall in love when you stop holding back—when you stop editing yourself in real time. It’s not always some “swoony” moment. Sometimes it’s just… they see you hungover and sweaty and you’re mumbling something about toast crumbs in the butter and they just get it.”
I raise my eyebrows. He shrugs.
“Also, I think it’s about rhythm. Well—timing. A shared pace. Not to sound like a twat, but falling in love is like… jazz. You know they’ve fallen in love with you when they fit into the pauses of your day.”
I remind him that I’ve asked how he falls in love—not how he gets other people to fall in love with him. He laughs.
“Right. Strike that from the record! Let me rephrase. I fall in love when I want them to fill all my pauses. That sounds weird, but, like, you know what I mean, yeah?”
RETROSPECT PUNCHING YOU IN THE SOLAR PLEXUS
Of course, part of the problem is that we usually only know we were falling in love after it’s happened. Retrospect wears the right amount of cologne and pours you a third glass of wine you sip by candlelight because Retrospect is seductive like that.
It could take days or weeks or months before Retrospect waves you over and punches you in the solar plexus, knocking the air out of your lungs—a specific light, a smell, the back of someone’s head that looks almost like theirs but isn’t—and suddenly you’re back in that early part. The falling part.
This is, of course, deeply inconvenient.
Because that solar plexus punch has made you acutely aware that you’ve been collecting all these fragments—the shared jokes and small kindnesses, the way they pull at their ear lobe when they’re concentrating—and at some point, somehow, all those fragments have cohered into a stained-glass something you now have to protect.
And after you’ve massaged your chest and allowed the oxygen to return to your lungs, you’ll step back and look at the colourful shards that you’ve been unconsciously melding together, marvelling at your work. You’ll then try pinpointing the exact moment when you tipped from lusting to longing, from liking to loving—but this is a fruitless exercise, because, like her brother Retrospect, Memory is tricky.
Memory is an unreliable narrator with a penchant for sentimentality. She doesn’t remember the facts; she remembers the feeling. Well, not exactly—she remembers the texture of the feeling. The almost-audible silence between you in the cab. The warmth of their jumper left on your chair like a placeholder. The way time bent a little when you first heard them laugh. The inexplicable holiness of a night where all you did was talk about your childhoods and then brush your teeth side by side.
“How do you fall in love?”
That’s how.
And even if it ends, which statistically speaking, it probably will (sorry!), you don’t lose those early details. Not really. They just fold themselves into the sediment of who you are.
Which is maybe what love really does—it changes your internal architecture. Even when it doesn’t last. Even when it breaks you. Especially then.
THE EMOTIONAL RESIDUE OF FEELING
I’d asked them all the same thing. Over coffee, over wine, on benches, in kitchens, on long walks through muddy parks. People I knew well, people I’d just met. I thought the answers might blur together—be soft, safe, Pinterest-quote universal. But they weren’t.
Instead, they were sharp. Absurd. Tender. Deeply strange. They smelled like rosemary, tasted like fig rolls, carried legal pads and wore navy jumpers. They spoke about toast crumbs and shared silence and drywall. About attention and T-shirts and jazz.
They didn’t give me the blueprint. But they did give me texture. The emotional residue of feeling. The static of something real brushing up against your life and staying, even if only for a moment.
THE SHORTEST, SIMPLEST, MOST FINAL (?) ANSWER TO THE QUESTION “HOW DO YOU FALL IN LOVE?” THAT IS ALSO A QUESTION
Though all these collected answers hold truth, there’s a question posed by the poet Gregory Orr that feels like the simplest, truest answer of all, one that should be asked at some point during the fourth conversation:
If we’re not supposed to dance, why all this music?
Antonia, this was such a good read. Makes me want to fall in love yesterday.
this is the most beautifully written article ive read on here in ages <3 the way you described each person was magical