How do I know if I’m in love?

Do you go mostly by feeling?

Apr 13, 2021

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Dear friend —

How do you know if you love a person, a place, a thing?

Do you create lists, spreadsheets, venn diagrams for a rational assessment of the pros and cons? Or do you go mostly by feeling, an intuitive sense that can’t entirely be explained?

I guess the word love — with its grand, emotional appeal — presupposes the latter. It sounds cold and strange to say: You have ten pros but only two cons, and thus I’m in love with you. Such a calculation sounds, in fact, not like love.

Yet don’t we all also have our internal pro-con lists? I love you because you are responsible, affectionate, even-keeled, and attractive to boot — which makes it easy for me to overlook the fact that you’re also unadventurous —

Maybe pro-con lists are really just made-up rationalizations for our unrationalizable feelings. We love a person who happens to be focused on a career — so we tell ourselves a strong work ethic is a strong pro. Then we fall out of love — and we tell ourselves any form of workaholism is a big red flag.

This is what I’ve been thinking about while floating from place to place. Places, like people, give their first impressions — and often, you get a strong gut feeling soon after arrival.

It was a warm and beautiful fall day, for example, the first time I visited Boston some years ago. Weirdly, the weather was also perfect the subsequent handful of times I returned to the Boston area, so even now I have an unrealistically idyllic sense of what it must be like to live there — the land of crisp air and colorful leaves!

Intellectually, I know Boston winters are long…..

Last December I arrived in Sierra Vista, Ariz., at night. Looking for my Airbnb in a dark, streetlight-less residential neighborhood, I immediately felt an ominous sensation — a sudden fear that I would find this town oppressively small. The fear dissipated pretty quickly, but the feeling of unbelonging stayed on, and my aversion to small towns grew, even though everyone I met in Sierra Vista was friendly and nothing bad happened.

Would my feelings about small towns be different had I arrived at Sierra Vista on a bright sunny morning?

Whenever I mention in a love note that I didn’t like this place or that, I get emails from people who love that place saying: “You visited at the wrong time! We’re in the middle of a pandemic! It’s way better in normal times!”

I’m sure this is true. That said, there have been other places — Long Beach, Austin — that I loved immediately, even mid-pandemic. They overwhelmed me with the sense that I must explore this place, get to know it, become part of it.

Why is that? Is it something intrinsic in a place, or is it simply chance?

Imagine this: You get to your destination on a perfect-weather day. You run across an attractive stranger who smiles alluringly at you and fills you with a sense of desire and possibility. You’re well-rested and your head is clear so you have some productive hours of writing or sightseeing or whatever you’ve wanted to do. In the evening you go for a walk and the setting sun lights the sky a brilliant purple-pink.

This place could be anywhere. But wouldn’t you decide you liked this place?

Of course, some places have more perfect-weather days or pretty sunsets than others, and some places better allow for the running into of attractive strangers — but there’s no doubt that a fair amount of chance is involved in first impressions, and the second, and the hundredth too. There’s no way, basically, to control the experiment of living.

I remember a couple that moved to Los Angeles during an unusually rainy year in the aughts. For twelve months they complained about the weather, and by proxy, everything else about the city, as their relationship unraveled — then moved back east where they’d come from, this time separately, having broken up. To them, Los Angeles is likely still the land of gloom and disenchantment.

I remember when my sister’s best friend from college moved to Los Angeles for grad school. She signed a lease on a parking spot-less apartment in the Miracle Mile area, a neighborhood notorious for its horrendous parking situation. This in itself was not the ideal decision, but on top of that, despite being a Harvard graduate, she never could quite get the hang of reading and interpreting parking signs correctly (I’ll grant that L.A. parking signs are not always intuitive). A torrent of tickets ensued, some eliciting tears. Not long after the start of the semester, she dropped out and moved — back to Texas (I’ll grant that parking is a lot easier in Texas). To her, Los Angeles is likely still the land of daily frustration and fines.

How much of what we love about a place has to do with its intrinsic qualities, and how much with happenstance? Do you really love Portland for its food and coffee scene, or were you just in a really great mood the first time you stepped into The Clearing Cafe? Are people really that friendly in St. Louis, or did you just luck out making a great friend your first week in town?

I guess there’s no need to parse between the two, since in the end, it’s you, the subjective being with your imprecise memories and inchoate desires, who chooses to stay or leave a place.

Right now I’m on a leg of my nomad life where I’m just visiting places tourist-style, because I’m already pretty sure they’re not the right places for me long-term. I’m in Little Rock, Arkansas, right now, heading to Jackson, Mississippi, later today, to eventually arrive in Brooklyn, New York, by mid-May. But then what? Should I recross the U.S. to try out Las Vegas and San Diego — or to give Long Beach a longer try — or should I go back south to Austin or Long Beach, cities I know I already like? And if I fall in love with someone somewhere along the road, would you say that’s a good reason to stop and stay — or would that be another of those bad decisions I want to stop making in my life?

Are these rhetorical questions, or am I asking for advice?

You tell me.

Love notes from Siel

How do I know if I’m in love?

Do you go mostly by feeling?

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