Just Fall in Love

What Literature Taught Me About Romantic Love in the Age of Dating Apps and Disbelief

This essay is dedicated to my beloved fiancé—my other half.

At some point in your life, you’ve probably embarked on the “search for your other half.”

At the age of twelve, the precocious Liza Libes read somewhere that the concept of the “search for your other half” has its origins in Plato’s Symposium. If I was not already a romantic by late middle school, I certainly became one by the time I finished Plato’s second-most famous dialogue, and would remain a romantic for the rest of my life.

The Symposium is Plato’s exploration of the nature of Eros, or erotic love. Though I am not sure that I understood much of the dense philosophical text at the time, one particular section stuck with me. This was the myth of the “search for your other half.”

The story itself—told somewhat satirically by Plato’s fictional version of the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes—attempts to explain why human beings feel more complete when they fall in love. According to Aristophanes, human beings were once all-powerful, spherical creatures who rolled around the earth like balls of clay, each with double the number of typical human body parts. As is the case with any all-powerful creature, hubris eventually got the better of them, and these human globs dared to scale Mount Olympus to challenge Zeus, the king of the gods. If you’re familiar with Greek mythology, you’ll know that angering Zeus is never a good idea, and in this particular case, Zeus decided to split these primal human beings in half, creating two bodies out of one. Ever since then, claims Aristophanes, human beings have run around the Earth searching for their other halves.

This story, of course, is not meant to be taken literally and would have even come across as comical to the Ancient Greeks. Nevertheless, it offers every romantic an idyllic explanation for why we human beings feel so inevitably drawn to the search for our other half. For twelve-year-old Liza, Aristophanes’ tale was both real and beautiful.

The Symposium soon became my gateway to more serious literature—shortly after wrestling with Plato, I picked up Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Pride and Prejudice. These novels, each of which centered around the quest for love—albeit in vastly different ways—solidified the romantic spirit in me and birthed my interest in human relationships. The first time, in fact, that I remember crying while reading a book—the moment when I realized just how powerful literature could be—was when, at age thirteen, I read Cathy’s famous outburst about Heathcliff:

My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.

There it was! The same sentiment that Aristophanes had alluded to in The Symposium. In loving Heathcliff, Cathy thought of him not only as a complement to herself but as her own being. She and Heathcliff were one.

I was uniquely touched by Cathy’s assertion to Nelly because, at the time, I had figured out what it was like to have feelings for someone else for the first time, and I could not help relating to Cathy’s famous “He’s always, always in my mind.” Was what I felt for a boy in my 8th grade class so universal among all human beings that the sentiment had been thus beautifully immortalized in literature? How did someone living in a different country, time period, and world understand so keenly what I, too, had experienced?

Sitting on my brown leather couch at seven in the morning with Wuthering Heights across my lap, nibbling purple seedless grapes, I wept not only for Cathy but with her.

Months later, I discovered that Emily Brontë’s sister seemed to understand it all just as well in her characterization of Rochester’s love for Jane Eyre:

After a youth and manhood, passed half in unutterable misery and half in dreary solitude, I have for the first time found what I can truly love—I have found you. You are my sympathy—my better self—my good angel—I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wraps my existence about you, and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.

In describing his love for Jane, Rochester’s language exemplifies that same oneness: like Aristophanes, Rochester understands love as a fusion of two souls. Jane was his better self—his other half!

Was that, then, what it meant to love? To find someone who, like Cathy found Heathcliff or Jane found Rochester, seemed to be made for you?

***

By the time I turned 18, I had read virtually every great romantic storyline under the sun. Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre contain, of course, two of literature’s most famous passionate love stories, but I had also soon learned about different sorts of literary love stories: Kitty and Levin’s less ardent yet more stable love, Gatsby’s overidealization of Daisy, Dorothea’s growing affection for Will Ladislaw. And while not all of these tales ended happily, what each of them had in common was the sacred depiction of the human quest for our other half.

Like Jane or Dorothea, I, too, was determined to find my other half.

Having spent my teenage years immersed in literature, I became a true romantic at the core, believing that because the sort of love depicted in literature seemed so universal, everyone else must think about it in such terms. After all, weren’t we all out on a quest to find our other halves—to become one with another human being?

But I was not prepared for the modern world.

At Columbia, I quickly caught on to the error in my thinking. In most Ivy League circles, there were two dominant ideologies when it came to love. The first strain of nonbelievers were the overly analytical STEM kids who viewed all human interactions in terms of patterns and formulas. Playing heavily into the modern “dating game,” these types liked to analyze trends on Hinge—that women, for instance, were much more likely than men to get matches or that Asian men were the least desirable demographic on the apps—and went around presenting assertions on the statistical likelihood of meeting the person you were going to marry after X amount of dates. This group believed in love and monogamy but were too bogged down in metrics to actually find personal success, focusing more on increasing their objective desirability on “the dating market” than actually sitting down to consider their values and the sheer irrationality of falling in love. Operating in the world of dating apps—where love, insofar as it existed, was predicated on snap decisions—my analytical classmates would cite the 37% rule when it came to deciding whether or not to go on a second date and rated men based on looks, income, height, and performance in bed. If a man did not meet a certain standard, he was immediately discarded. The way that their male counterparts thought about women was no better—a woman was cast in terms of her cup size and fertility, and God forbid you meet a woman with a brain!

In New York City, this line of thinking keeps the vast majority of young people single. When you reduce a human being to a set of numbers and criteria, the human being will, of course, lose all desirability. Looking at my single friends in New York today—which is to say, most of my friends—I can tell you with ironclad certainty that these sorts of people are single because they are too preoccupied with rules, metrics, and standards to allow themselves to properly fall in love. According to the analytical types, one must date a certain number of people before deciding to settle down or move in with a partner for a set amount of months in order to assess their fit for marriage. And what these modern criteria meant was that the majority of the people who followed them would not fall in love at all.

But was it necessary to put another human being through interview-level scrutiny before choosing to fall in love? Was it possible to fall in love at all if you reduced a human being to a number and a set of criteria? What about hearing someone’s voice and feeling that they were inexplicably made for you? What about eloping with the girl you met across the hall freshman year of college because you were certain that she was the zenith of the human experience?

As much as these analytical types got on my nerves—the young men and women taught to think in terms of formulas and statistics—they became somewhat more tolerable to me when I remembered that they sought more or less the same end goal as I did: to get married and to bear children. And though I did not believe that I would be compatible with anyone who viewed dating as a statistical game rather than an exalted experience between two human beings, I could at least respect their desire to get married in the first place.

It was the second group of people I encountered at Columbia that really brought me down—the “romantic love does not exist” crowd who spent their evenings lounging in the famous Wien Reference Room in Butler Library with a copy of Nausea or The Second Sex or some such other useless French philosophy book, sneaking an illegal cigarette between pages as they proclaimed monogamy to be dead. For these folks, love was an illusion—human beings did not need to selfishly possess one another, for such a mode of thought was invented by the draconian hegemons of the Christian faith who could not have predicted the joys of free sex in the modern world. According to these people, love was invented by Christian natalists to keep people in chains, and any human being who found himself desirous of possessing another person should be immediately reported to the Columbia University office of Gender Based Misconduct for violating basic human civil rights. To this sad cohort of intellectuals, love did not exist at all.

And while the analytical types were certainly more tolerable than the Sartre-wannabes, neither group believed in the sort of romanticized version of love that I had once found in countless works of literature: the idea that someone out there was uniquely made for you by some unknowable entity, and that when you found the person whom you believed to be your other half, you were bound to become one with them—to possess them heart and soul. It was just like the closing scene from my favorite film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, when Paul declares, "People do belong to each other.”

I grew up watching the famous Hepburn flick with my mom. I have it nearly memorized by this point because I’ve watched it around fifty times. When I showed it to a guy I briefly dated the summer after my freshman year—a Stanford kid from the same strain of analytically minded misanthropes that I met so frequently at Columbia—he winced at Paul’s famous monologue, calling it “creepy.”

I was puzzled. I had always believed that it was beautiful to possess another human being—in the very way that Rochester proclaimed that he and Jane would be fused into one. Was I really so wrong in my romantic worldview? And was my worldview fundamentally incompatible with the realities of dating in the twenty-first century?

My next boyfriend was not much different and, as I soon found out, he belonged to the “monogamy is dead” genus of modern lovers who used the word “exalted” to describe sex in the same way that I applied it to romantic love. This particular relationship was equally as short-lived as my previous one, and ended with a painful conversation about the nature of love. We were nineteen at the time, and my ex-boyfriend could not fathom settling down without first having experienced sex with many more people. To commit to me so early in his life seemed like renouncing a well of opportunities—in this case sexual. It was too early for him to know whether I was right for him or not because he had not yet had “dating experience.” So he suggested an open relationship, which drew my immediate ire. What did he mean that he couldn't tell if I was right for him or not? Did he really need to sleep with other women to figure out whether he liked me? What did that have to do with any of it?

“You’re too romantic because you read all of this Victorian literature,” he snapped. “But that’s not how the world works at all. You need to have ample dating experience before you can figure out if something is going to work for you or not.”

I was distraught. Was this really how most people thought about the world? Dating experience? In all of the literature I had ever read, people almost immediately knew whether they were meant to be. Cathy had Linton to compare Heathcliff to, sure, but she did not need to go through a trial-and-error lab experiment before realizing that she was in love with Heathcliff. For Cathy, it just happened—and there were no rules for the optimal number of people she needed to meet before Heathcliff became always, always in her mind.

After my experience with my dismissive ex, I grew increasingly despondent about the state of love in our society. Almost every other marriage today ended in divorce because people had lost the ability to unequivocally devote themselves to their other halves—to regard marriage not just as a legal document but as a unification of the body and the soul. In my romantic worldview, a declaration of love was eternal—an unconditional commitment to become one with another person and to stay with them until their dying breath. But these exalted standards didn’t seem to be compatible with the modern world, where love could be reduced to a formula and where the concept of marriage itself was dying. Could logic really have replaced the sort of head-over-heels love I had read about in literature? Would no one ever love me back the way I loved them because the modern world had taught them that such a love was impossible?

I dated one more man in college before we broke up on the cusp of my graduation because he was “not ready for something serious” and before I renounced all hope at ever finding someone who thought about love like I did. I began to believe that maybe Aristophanes’ myth was meant to be wholly farcical and that there was no truth to the idea that we are all searching for our other halves. In the modern world, marriage—if it happened at all—was meant to be convenient. Perhaps it provided a tax benefit or led to a Green Card. Either way, young people did not love each other like Cathy had once loved Heathcliff. I had deluded myself. Literature had deluded me.

There was no love.

It was about six months later that my romantic spirit got the better of me and that I met the next man I would fall in love with—the man I was convinced, from the first time I met him, that I would marry. It was one of my somewhat farfetched delusions, but I had never felt so strongly about anyone in my entire life. I felt as if he had been plucked out of my own childhood household: he had grown up on the same cartoons, had the same dumb humor, and entertained the same lofty ambitions. He made me feel inexplicably safe—as if I were a little child again tumbling on the playground at my preschool into my grandfather’s arms—and seemed to abide by the sort of devoted monogamy that was absent in so many of my classmates’ belief systems. In the early stages of our relationship, we spent hours on end talking on the phone until the sky outside my window had turned a pale blue and our eyeballs had ceased to function. Despite having a mathematical brain, he did not conceptualize human relationships in terms of formulas.

And above all, he seemed to believe in love.

There was only one problem, of course. He was several years younger than me, meaning that, according to the calculations of those analytical types, there was a very slim likelihood that such a relationship would ever work out. The optimal age gap between a man and a woman, after all, was four years, with the man four years older than the woman. There was no scenario in which a younger man—and one with virtually no dating experience—would ever want to marry a woman several years older than him because such a man would inevitably run off to a younger woman just because he could. The analytical types warned me that I would be single by the time he graduated college and realized that the whole thing had been a sophomoric fling, and the “monogamy is dead” types echoed the sentiment with the claim that no man would ever want to settle down so early without having had ample sexual experiences after college—if he decided to settle down at all. According to virtually everyone around me, I was again deluding myself because, statistically, there were very few cases in which a man could be younger than a woman in a successful relationship and, furthermore, men were sexual creatures who would only want to settle down after having gotten their playboy phases out of their systems.

But what about love? He loved me, after all! He was ready to devote himself to me wholly and unequivocally! Wasn’t that all that mattered? Who cared about several years and sexual experiences?

Nevertheless, I was continually warned about the possibility that he was solely using me for sex—not because of anything to do with his character but simply because he did not fit into the model of the sort of man I was supposed to end up with—or that the whole thing would soon fall apart once I realized that someone in his stage of life was not ready for marriage. But to me, all of these ideas seemed like modern artificial inventions—this idea of “being ready for marriage” or being in a particular “stage of life.” You either loved someone or you didn’t—and there was no formula that told you precisely when it was time to grow serious about someone. It just happened.

For several years, he and I were alone in our love for one another. No one wanted to believe that he loved me like I loved him—that he, too, believed in the old Aristophanes myth that human beings were on a perpetual quest for their other halves—and that he had found his without needing any sort of linear optimization models or empirical verifications. There was something higher out there that told him how to act.

And that was love.

When my fiancé proposed to me several weeks ago, I imagine that everyone in my life was taken aback or downright shocked. Because we have brainwashed an entire generation on this silly idea that there is a set amount of people one must date before allowing oneself to fall in love or that one must abide by a strict set of rules in terms of who to date and when, no one could have predicted that I would end up with the love of my life—the man I was certain I was going to marry from our very first date down in Miami. But I was not surprised. I had seen it coming all along—and I knew it would come. Because once upon a time, on an early date of ours, I had relayed the Aristophanes myth in The Symposium to him over ice cream—and he thought it was beautiful.

Last week, discussing the details of our wedding, my fiancé asked me if I intended to change my last name. I’m rather fond of my alliterative name—Liza Libes—and wasn’t intending on changing anything at all.

He looked at me somewhat sadly.

“But I wanted to make you mine.”

Romantic love exists. It exists just like it does in literature—and just like it does in The Symposium. It has always existed, and it always will exist. After all, those depictions of love in literature had to come from somewhere. Aristophanes might have invented a somewhat comical story, but in every comical assertion lies a kernel of truth.

People do fall in love. People do belong to each other. There is no formula or set of rules that guarantees the optimal match. There are only human beings, and we are all on a search to feel at one with someone else and to finally be understood.

I am the first out of my friends to get engaged. At 27, I am not particularly young, nor am I particularly lucky. The fact that I am the only engaged young woman in my circles speaks volumes to the lies we have told young people about love—that it does not exist or that it can be boiled down to a formula. That one must have “dating experiences” before settling down, or that one ought not to settle down before a certain age or before attaining a certain level of financial stability. These are all fabrications of a modern psyche that is too afraid to fall in love.

I’ve known since the first moment that I met my fiancé that I was not wrong to take this particular leap of faith. He and I share worldview, interests, and values, but above all, we speak the same ineffable language of the soul that two people who are made for each other are bound to understand. I romanticized our relationship from the very first day, but it was only in romanticizing our bond in this way that I found the courage to shut out the naysayers around me and to always believe that we would ultimately end up together. I don’t know what to say now to all of the analytical types who wanted to prove me wrong other than to pick up The Symposium, and perhaps to read a great work of literature. There are verities in those words that no statistical analysis will ever teach you. And there is so much love embedded in the beautiful sentences of the great writers of our world.

Maybe the analytical types will learn a thing or two—maybe they’ll even ditch the 37% rule and dare to fall in love.

As for me, I’ve finally found my other half.

I love you forever, baby.

💍 5.24.25

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