The Anatomy of a Love Story
How love stories are the DNA of our hearts and the miraculous humbling scripts of our lives
My parents met in a remote country town in Central Queensland in 1966. Mum was fourteen and worked behind the counter of her parents’ cafe.
My father, nineteen at the time, was traveling through town as part of a survey crew. He lived a thousand kilometres to the south and the chances of him driving through Goovigen were very small.
Mum served my dad a milkshake and knew immediately he was the guy she would marry. They kept in touch via letters. Dad was later conscripted to serve in the Vietnam War, through which Mum continued to write and send care packages.
They married five years after they first met and recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.
Love is my DNA
Some people grow up with the deep stories of their cultural heritage and connection to land. Others are taught the achievements and contributions their ancestors made to history.
My nomadic family history hails from Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia. Family stories prior to 1830 have been lost to the sands of time.
High school taught me to look at history through the lenses of politics and social change. We tell the stories of people fleeing Europe due to economic collapse and unrest. But at home, I learned about the history of love.
I don’t know my deep family history, but I imagine the love story isn’t a modern invention. It’s always been the romantic, complicated, troublesome glue of life.
The first known love story in my ancestral tree was when Denis O’Callaghan, an Irish convict, met his wife Eileen either on board the convict ship or soon after arrival in Tasmania while serving their seven-year sentences for forging a signature and stealing a loaf of bread respectively.
Little is known about them, making it easier to project onto them a romantic ideal of escaping Ireland for a new beginning in Australia. Their marriage would spawn another six generations of Callaghans and growing.
Love is my genetic origin. Love stories are my anatomy.
A story more powerful than Disney
My siblings and I often talked about how my parents’ love story shaped us as kids, and later as adults. People decry Disney for shaping a generation of people looking for this happily ever after. My parents’ story was more powerful than that of Cinderella, Belle, or Ariel.
And it doesn’t just appeal to girls or women. As a gay man, I too was caught under the spell of desire to find love in this same romantically synchronous way.
That is the golden thread in all our love stories. Call it synchronicity or serendipity or whatever you like. They each have an uncanny timing that you simply cannot make up.
Let no ocean get in your way
Years ago, I joined a gym where I was assigned a personal trainer. Ever the enthusiast, but not at all thinking of setting them up, I went home to encourage my sister to check out the gym.
She took my lead, joined the gym, and soon after started dating the personal trainer she would later marry. It was not long after joining the gym that I moved cities. It was as if my role in the serendipitous play of things was simply to connect them.
My other sister met her husband on a bus in Germany during a Contiki tour. They would go on to walk European streets into the night sharing their life stories. He was from New Zealand, meaning they would forge their relationship from across the seas until they would inevitably marry.
My brother originally met his now wife at a party in the Australian town they grew up in. But their relationship didn’t kick off until they met “randomly” on the other side of the world in London.
It takes more than serendipity
One of my favourite romantic comedies is Serendipity. It followed the hopelessly romantic Sara Thomas (Kate Beckinsale) who meets Jonathon Trager (John Cusack) while they are each buying a gift for their respective lovers.
Although struck by the connection, she was reluctant to give him her number. Her unwavering belief that if Jonathon is really “the one,” then the universe will surely bring him back to her.
They decided to test fate by Sara writing her number in the front of a book and placing it in a random bookstore in New York City. Jonathon spends the intervening years checking every store for that book just so he could call her.
Naturally, and without overplaying the plot, they end up together. But it was more than serendipity that made it work.
Love is about more than a serendipitous meeting. It requires one to recognise the gift of the moment and seize it. It also sometimes means giving something up.
Love can lead us to unexpected places
Not all serendipitous meetings lead to lasting love. I was thirty when my boss invited me to a meeting with a potential “strategic partner” and wanted my input to the meeting.
Within moments, Adam and I were captivated by each other (or at least, I was with him). My boss looked on as Adam and I bounced back and forth with mesmerising ease, charm, and good humour.
I wasn’t “out” at the time or even aware of my sexuality. But over the ensuing months Adam and I developed a friendship that went onto an affair, which played to my boyish naivety.
Adam and I didn’t work out, although I still say that relationship was significant in me discovering a new dimension to myself and gave me the courage to come out as gay.
Flirting with the universe
In more recent years, dating has been ruled by apps. I met a guy once who loved the roulette of responding to blank profiles. He enjoyed the mystery of looking beyond the flaccid descriptions and sales pitches.
After years of not trusting my own judgment in selecting potential partners, I started connecting with people who fell outside of my “criteria.” It was a kind of flirting with the universe. Perhaps, in a strange way, it was me trying to recapture that spirit of serendipity. I wanted to be surprised by fate.
But this is not how synchronicity works. For this kind of divine timing to work, one must surrender all control and effort. One must be a willing pawn in the universe’s game.
How much of love is planned versus a risky unexpected happenstance? Part of me shudders at the idea of turning love into a reality show with programs like Love is Blind and Married at First Sight. Perhaps they are trying to recapture or tap into the romantic ideal that people want to find love in the most random of ways.
Maybe there’s room for a dating app with no displayed profiles and only a roulette-type algorithm that blindly sets you up with someone. Or would that simply be attempting to commodify the universe — to one-up God, so to speak?
I am not one-half of a whole
A friend asked me yesterday if I was dating and I responded without a moment of hesitation, No!
I am caught in an effortless state between despondency and self-love. I know I am not in a place to love another. I am re-establishing myself in the world after moving countries and experiencing a spiritual crisis.
As I map the anatomy of our family love stories, it seems my love DNA lacks a desire to be saved or completed by another person — an altogether problematic proposition. I am not one-half of an incomplete whole.
A magnet must be equal in its power — two opposites required — to attract the other half. Each must be able to give and receive as much as the other.
I am in my own chapter of making myself whole again.
The anatomy of love
It is easy to look at love as an ephemeral thing one can never quite capture or describe or contain. And these things may be true. But more accurately, love has a structure.
Love has legs. It allows us to move through life. To walk towards opportunities and away from those that don’t serve.
Love keeps us upright. It gives us a reason to get out of bed and make something of this life.
Love has hands that grip us tightly and make us hold on, sometimes longer than is healthy.
Love can be hot, cold, and warm. It can both wake you up and fall asleep to your own needs.
Love can stop us from seeing clearly. It sometimes has own mind. It can cloud our better judgment and make us do things that others look on at questioningly.
Love can break and mend hearts. Love can heal.
The anatomy of a love story
Stories have three acts — a beginning, middle, and end. But love stories are sometimes more akin to a Tarantino film — beginning in the messy middle, picking up threads of an unclear beginning, and weaving an unexpected ending.
Sometimes there’s a sequel, a rekindling or reincarnation. Other times it is death through which lovers’ part.
Whatever style or story, it is rarely predictable. Even if one can comfortably direct other areas of life, in love the lover must surrender to life’s directions.
If you could map the DNA of your own love story, would you want to know it?
Our love-story DNA can reveal patterns in our psyche or hold us back from finding our own ways in love.
I sometimes feel so hopeless by the process that I feel resigned to a life of singledom. Other times I revel in that freedom. Part of me wonders whether life would be easier if I wasn’t running these love-story scripts in my head.
Is love part of my genetic fate waiting to be fulfilled in its own good time? The backstory would suggest this is so. In the meantime, I live in my own suspended story of loving myself. Patiently waiting.