How do you know?

A few thoughts on love for Valentine's Day.

Like a lot of people in love, I’ve gone a long way in mythologizing the story of how I met Ben, pulling out the details that are shiniest and placing them side-by-side to create a gorgeous, carefully-edited little tale that we’ve shared with our friends and family. But I have a hard time writing about it for a larger audience, because I am self-aware to a fault, and the last thing I would ever want to come across as is a smug, coupled woman blithering on with platitudes of “when it’s right, you just know.” I hated that kind of writing when I was single, and I fear backsliding into hypocrisy if I give into the urge to put it down into words. I’m even having a hard time considering what my vows will sound like during our wedding, and that’s a moment in which people *want* to hear it, right?

But I’m going to attempt to do that right now, after that lengthy amount of throat clearing, because since we’ve gotten engaged, I’ve had lots of readers reach out asking how, after years of not knowing, I met him and knew. And the truth is it has very little to do with Ben and my relationship and everything to do with my relationship with myself. (See? Another clichéd platitude!! Turns out love is full of ‘em.) Consider it an early Valentine’s Day present.

The interesting thing about meeting someone right is that you are given the ability, suddenly, out of nowhere, to be able to look back on your past relationships with stunning clarity. In examining each and every attempt at love I’d made up until the autumn of 2021, I can see now, in stark relief, the desperation with which I entered most situations. Sometimes it was subtle: Leaving my phone ringer on overnight in case a text message would come through; getting into a car that a man who didn’t even know my middle name had sent for me so that I might be delivered, like a greasy box of pizza, to his apartment door.

Other times it was overt. A few weeks ago, a memory came bubbling to the surface of my brain as I was drifting off to sleep: Me, texting a man who very obviously didn’t want to see me again after just a few dates, asking whether or not we were still on for drinks that evening. After he continued to ignore my text messages, I called my friend Lo, crying. “Why do you let these jerks who you barely know occupy so much of your brain?” she asked me.

I’ve thought about that question a lot in the years that passed, and I’m still very much working out the answer to it. I don’t know where the lack of self-esteem originated that caused me to look at myself like the runt of the romantic litter, a damaged good I needed to work hard to get people to love. This feeling has infected a lot of my life, actually. I have consistently felt like I’ve needed to make the extra effort, go the extra mile, polish myself up in some kind of way in order to get people — friends, family, my therapist — to stick around.

Friends who have been allowed to peek behind that curtain have often commented how differently my interior and exterior worlds seem to be: On the outside, I present myself in a more-or-less together kind of way. On the inside, I feel like an absolute mess. I don’t think this is unique to me. I think a lot of us have this much self-doubt. I don’t have an answer as to how I cured mine, because that is still very much a work-in-progress.

Eventually, I think, I just got exhausted from trying to live my life as a perfect person. So I just gave up. I ended my emotionally tumultuous relationship and moved into my new, single girl apartment in August of 2021. There, I started to take a sledgehammer to every idea I had about what would make me someone worthy of love. I want to be clear that this wasn’t the result of some great epiphany, or some realization that I am, in fact, worthy of love. It was pure burnout. I’d emptied my tank trying to mold myself to what I believed other peoples’ expectations were. So I attempted to refill it by turning my gaze inward.

I bought a pack of Post-It Notes and scribbled little mantras on them — “You don’t need to be anyone other than yourself to deserve love,” “Everything you want is right around the corner,” “What is meant for you will never leave you” — and stuck them all around my apartment in places where I would see them every single day. It was a way of tricking my psyche into believing something I’d spent 32 years doubting. I started listening to my gut reactions, tuning in to the little voices that would speak up when something felt not right or when they knew I needed some time alone. After years of thinking it was selfish to do so, I centered myself, and, surprisingly, people gathered around to meet me.

I met Ben on Thursday, February 17, 2021 at approximately 5 PM for a walk in Prospect Park. He had swiped right on me on Bumble, and I swiped back, and sent him a message that he responded to an hour before it was set to expire. (He told me later that he was trying to play it cool — so cool that he nearly forgot about it — so we’re really only together because of Bumble’s notification system. Bless.) We sent a few texts back and forth before realizing we lived around the corner from one another. And since I was determined to delete my dating apps for a nice long break if this date didn’t work out, a walk was all I was willing to commit to.

We walked and talked for hours. If I didn’t know an album he was referencing, I told him that, instead of pretending to be more worldly than I am. I blathered on about my work and didn’t worry if I was boring him. When he invited me back to his place for some whiskey, I realized I wanted to go, and that I didn’t want to weigh whether or not this would make him respect me less. When he kissed me, I kissed him back, because I wanted to, and the whiskey tasted so good. At one point, I looked him in the eye and said to him, “I really like you, and I want to see you again.” He said he did, too, and I believed him.

I got home around 1 AM and fell into a deep sleep. The anxiety around whether or not we’d moved too fast never came. A Post-It Note stuck in the corner of the mirror in my bedroom reminded me that, “What is meant for you will never leave you.” The next day, less than 12 hours after I’d left his apartment, Ben texted and asked if I wanted to hang out on Saturday or Sunday. I considered it and told him either. He asked for both. We did both.

That’s not to say that I didn’t have anxiety flares. But in those moments, I reached inward to soothe myself instead of looking to him to do that. I reminded myself of the Sundays on my couch, and how much I enjoyed my alone time, and realized that my life would be happy and fulfilled regardless of how long he stuck around. My life was mine, and there was comfort in that, and I knew that I didn’t need to beg or bargain to keep love in my life.

I realize now that, when people talk about “just knowing” when you meet the right person, the knowing is less about recognizing a feeling, or experiencing peace, or looking at the other person and thinking, “Oh, that’s right.” The knowing is more about knowing yourself, and your limits, and your boundaries, and what your willing to deal with, and what you truly want in that moment. There’s a lot of talk about needing to love yourself first, but I don’t agree with that, because it can be incredibly hard to love yourself without someone mirroring that back to you, and those who are struggling with that are still deeply worthy of love.

I’m not naive enough to think that things will be perfect forever, or that this is necessarily the end of my story with love. One thing I love about Ben is that he is pragmatic, which is a beautiful counterweight to my idealism. (Although, to hear him tell it, he’s only pragmatic after years of suffering from idealism.) We know that things will progress and shift and change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. But we’re happy today, hopeful about tomorrow, and eager to see what’s in store.

So, back to the original question — how do you know? For me, it came down to one thing: I finally knew that I just needed to be myself and the right person would present themselves at the right time. It’s a lot of faith to put into yourself, but sometimes the best way to do it is just fake it. Take a deep breath, take a running leap, and free-fall, believing that something or someone will be there to catch you. Worst case, you’ll fall into your own arms. What a beautiful place to land.