Daniel Jones - Love Illuminated: Exploring Lifes Most Mystifying Subject (with the Help of 50,000 Strangers)

For Charles and Vera Jones, my lifelong teachers in the subject of love

Cover design by Adam Johnson

Cover illustrations by Brian Rea

LETS START WITH A QUIZ. BOOKS about love often open with a tantalizing quiz so readers can discover, without too much flipping around, how smart they are, or maybe how stupid the book is.

My quiz wont be the kind where you check your answers against a key to determine your Love IQ. Nor will you be able to upload your responses to an online Personality Pikker that matches you with a certified LifeMateTM whose compatibility is guaranteed or your money back.

This isnt a book of ironclad answers or money-back guarantees. I will not be locating Mr. Right by GPS, explaining the psychology of why men love bitches, or providing a list of field-tested strategies for entrapping romantic prey. Very little scientific research underpins anything herein because I am not an esteemed doctor or a lauded academic but a lowly newspaper editor, one whorather improbably, I admitreads other peoples love stories for a living.

At the New York Times, I edit a personal-essay column called Modern Love, in which strangers spill their guts about their relationship woes. Its a job I have worked at more or less full-time for the past nine years, a period during which some fifty thousand laments about love have filtered through my brain and, often, my heart.

The stories arrive by e-mail around the clock, pouring into my laptop, dribbling out of my printer, and spilling across the tables of my office and home. They follow me into bed at night, tag along on family vacations, and ping into my iPhone when Im walking my dogs or standing on the sidelines of my sons soccer games. They also frequently are told to me in person, at cocktail parties, and public events and in planes, trains, and automobiles.

When people find out what I do, they invariably say, You must know a lot about love. Or they might invoke the name of the newspaper sex columnist played by Sarah Jessica Parker on Sex and the City and remark, Youre like a male Carrie Bradshaw.

The first person to make that observation was a journalist who interviewed me early on in my job, when I was so out of the loop love-wise that I didnt even know who Carrie Bradshaw was. I thought the journalist had said, Terry Bradshaw, the famous Steelers quarterback (now Fox Sports analyst) Id grown up idolizing during my suburban Pittsburgh childhood. It didnt occur to me to ask what Terry Bradshaw had to do with editing confessional essays about relationships. All I could think was: Im like a male Terry Bradshaw? But he is male.

Shows how little I knew about love back then. Now, nine years later, I apparently know enough about love to fill a book.

Yet I hardly see myself as some guru who sits atop a mountain of accumulated wisdom in my robe and sandals, eager to dispense sage advice to the lovelorn. In my mind I have not been mastering love all these years so much as marinating in it. Asking me what I have learned about love is like asking a pickle what it has learned about vinegar.

Let me try to explain it another way.

Say youre on an ocean cruise, and youre enjoying your narrow experiences and sheltered life, sleeping in your climate-controlled cabin and dining on your private balcony as you gaze out across the ocean, finding it all vaguely pretty as you eat your toast and jam and prepare for your fencing lesson on the lido deck.

Thats sort of what my life felt like before I became the Modern Love editor.

Then one night you stumble over the railing and fall into the ocean. But its not just any oceanyouve fallen into the Sea of Love.

The Sea of Love may sound sexy and appealing when Robert Plant and the Honeydrippers are singing about it, but in reality its a dark and scary placedeep, cold, impenetrable, and populated by billions of freakish creatures lurking in the depths with their gnashing teeth and electrified appendages. Luckily youll be stuck in this sea only a short time until your rescueor so you think. But no one seems to notice your absence, not even your wife, and one day leads to another, and before you know it youve spent nearly a decade in the forbidding murk.

Does all this time in the Sea of Love turn you into a marine biologist whos able to explain why the Caribbean ostracod, a seafloor-dwelling crustacean, uses bioluminescence to attract a mate? Or how the clown fish, a creature of limited mobility, can change its sex from male to female to copulate with a fellow clown fish he brushes up against in his coral cavern?

No, it doesnt. But when youve spent more than a hundred months soaking up the intimate lives of fifty thousand strangers, you cant help but emerge with an education of some kind. Rushing through your head has been a near-constant stream of all the bizarre and mundane things people do in the name of love, from a serial cheaters desperate rationalizations to the baffled regrets of those who seem destinedthrough insecurity or arrogance or bothto destroy every relationship they ever have.

Of course, amid all the head-scratching tales of frustration and betrayal are equally inexplicable stories of bravery and generosityhopeful leaps from such perilous heights that you almost have to look away, and courage so vast it makes you feel ashamed of your own timidity. Relationships challenge everyone, but why does desire drive some to benevolence and others to corrosive megalomania?

Lets explore it together. Have you forgotten about our promised quiz? I almost did. Anyway, here it is. Some of these questions might seem a little odd, but then, so is love. Good luck!

1. Do you think its better to put a lot of effort into finding love, or leave it to fate?

2. If a word like destiny makes you gag, should you still try to believe in it?

3. Say you have some physical shortcoming, psychological issue, or medical problem youre embarrassed about that makes you insecure about starting new relationships. When is the best time to inform a new love interest about your perceived inadequacy? Should you come clean early in the relationship and risk scaring the person off? Or is it better to wait until he or she already has fallen for you?

4. Imagine youre one of an increasing number of couples who met online and never have been together in real life, yet you still feel this is the most important relationship you currently havethe one to which you devote the most time and emotional energy. Do you think a relationship conducted purely online, via words, images, emoticons, and texting shorthand, can be as fulfilling as or possibly even more fulfilling than one conducted in person?

5. Say you are a divorced mother who goes on an online dating service and meets a divorced father from a different city. After an initial e-mail flirtation, you grow close through a series of long, intimate phone calls. He has an odd kind of British accent (he claims hes originally from London), among other appealing characteristics.

Finally, you arrange to meet; he will come to your city at the end of an international business trip. Alas, he calls you distraught from Nigeria, where he was mugged and beaten and is recuperating in a hospital. He has no passport and no money. Might you wire him a thousand dollars as a loan so he can pay his bills and continue his trip and meet you?

Even though this plea sounds alarmingly similar to a lot of spam e-mails you have received over the years, you somehow trust him. After all, this was a phone call, not an e-mail, and it was from your beloved, not a stranger, even though you have never met him. So you send the money, after which he requests more, so you send more, and so on, until you finally accept that maybe you have indeed fallen victim to a con. You stop responding and ignore his pleas until he gives up, but the experience has left you feeling drained and devastated.