A Bachelor's Effort To Understand Love
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IT was on the island of Saipan, in a remote part of the Pacific Rim, that John Bowe, then a 42-year-old writer researching a book on modern-day slavery, fell madly in love for the first time in his adult life.
The romance, which began three years ago, could have resulted in an engagement and maybe even marriage. Instead, it was the latest in a series of fraught relationships, all of which seemed destined to end in failure.
Mr. Bowe, a perpetual bachelor, had been in love twice before -- in high school and as a graduate student -- but it had been so long and this new feeling was so profound that it shook him to the core. Rather than making him happy, he said, it confused him.
"This facet of experience most people center their lives around came as this alien, funny, unanticipated shock to me," he said last week, pounding garlic and spices with a mortar and pestle in the kitchen of his West Village studio apartment. He was certain that he was in love, he said, but felt confounded by how to deal with a relationship that "came with so many complications, and a lot of fear, and a lot of pressure."
Part of the problem, he said, was the distance involved -- Saipan is a two-day trip from New York -- and the fact that the woman shared custody of her two sons with their father and couldn't leave the island.
So tormented was Mr. Bowe by his inability to make the relationship work that he set out on a two-year quest to find out why. Not through conventional means, like psychotherapy, but by researching other people's romantic experiences.
The result is "Us: Americans Talk About Love," a new collection of first-person accounts of why love succeeds or fails, published by Faber & Faber. No aspect of lust, greed, need or devotion is ignored: The book includes tales of obsession and confusion (from a 17-year-old girl in San Antonio, Tex., who can't get over an ex-boyfriend and a drug-addled 30-year-old living with his mother in Arizona while following his ex on Facebook); finding bliss (as a 44-year-old lesbian eventually did in Minneapolis, after more than a decade of marriage to a born-again Christian); and acceptance (from a 76-year-old widower in Manhattan who says he dated more than 300 women after his wife died, without ever finding anyone to take her place).
First Published January 28, 2010 2:00 am
