couples who met at a bar or a party. One person heard a laugh across the room. One person pulls the other in with the three-second look, that most powerful of all social gestures. You lock a stranger’s eyes, and then you hold them, by simply staring, for three seconds. Then there’s a smile. Some little flicker of mutual recognition is sent and received.
You never know when the heart will open. Two decades ago, there was a concert pianist living in Houston who was about to move to be with her fiancé in San Francisco. Just before she was scheduled to leave, she thought she would get her hair done. She went to a salon she’d never been to before called Etudes de Paris, walked in the door, and saw a man cutting someone else’s hair. A certainty formed within her.
She went back into the dressing room, draped her gown around her, and called her mother. “I’ve just seen the man I’m actually going to marry,” she said. She went out, got her shampoo, and was eventually sitting before the man she’d noticed, whose name, it turned out, was David—pronounced in the French way, Daveed. They chatted about this and that, and eventually David asked her story. She mentioned she was a pianist, about to move out to join her fiancé in San Francisco. “But,” the woman added, “I won’t go if you’ll marry me.”
There was a pause.
David looked down at his scissors, and, as he later recalled, “I never felt more free in my entire life.” He responded: “It’s a deal.”
They got engaged at that moment and then got to know each other and eventually wed.
“It is always astonishing how love can strike,” John O’Donohue writes in his book Beauty. “No context is love-proof, no convention or commitment impervious. Even a lifestyle which is perfectly insulated, where the personality is controlled, all the days ordered and all actions in sequence, can to its own dismay find that an unexpected spark has landed; it begins to smoulder until it is finally unquenchable. The force of Eros always brings disturbance; in the concealed terrain of the human heart Eros remains a light sleeper.”
I don’t know about you, but for me the pregnant glance never comes with the first look. It’s usually something like the millionth look. For some reason, I have to know someone well in nonromantic circumstances before any meaningful spark can happen. I met a girl in eighth grade and we hung out casually as part of the same circle for the next five years. Then one evening, just before high school graduation, a bunch of us were sitting around a campfire. She and I exchanged a new kind of glance, her hand slipped into mine, a little fire was lit. Within three months it turned into the raging firestorm of full-blown adolescent love.
Love starts as a focusing of attention. The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.
CURIOSITY
The second stage of intimacy is curiosity, the desire to know. Your energy is up. Your mind is moving toward something. You hope this person is as great as she seems to be.
Think of the facets of curiosity: They are all comparable to the stages of early intimacy and early love. There is joyous exploration, the desire to learn more about the person. There is absorption, seeing only this person and not anyone else in the room. There is stretching, the willingness to be in new situations if you get the chance to be with him. There is what some psychologists call deprivation sensitivity, the feeling of emptiness when you are not with the person.
There is what the experts call intrusive thinking: She’s on your mind all the time. When you look at a crowd in a train station, you think you see her in the throng, when it’s really someone who looks only vaguely like her. You have imaginary conversations with her as you run—bold conversations, the way the thoughts you have while exercising are always bold.
If you’re in school, you study together. You may not even talk that much. You just want the other person around. As C. S. Lewis notes, at this stage you may not even be sexually attracted to each other, you’re just overwhelmed by this curiosity: “A man in this state really hasn’t leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is