End of Chapter 12: Heartbreak [Extract from the book, Being Wrong, by Kathryn Schulz]
...we should be able to be wrong from time to time, and be at peace with other people's occasional wrongness, and still love and be loved. That's so basic as to be banal, and yet it runs counter to our prevailing model of romantic love. There is no room for divergence, disagreement or error in the starry-eyed, soul-mate version of love articulated by Aristophanes et al. To accommodate these eventualities - and we had better accommodate them - we need a more capacious model of love. In this model, love is not predicated on sharing each other's world as we might share a soul. It is predicated, instead, on sharing it as might share a story...SHOOT: This next part is REALLY good!
This analogy is not accidental. What is true of a story is true of love: for either one to work, you better be good at talking and good at listening. Likewise, if stories only succeed when we consent to suspend disbelief, relationships require of us something similar: the ability to let go of our own worldview long enough to be intrigued and moved by someone else's. This is storybook love in a whole different sense of the phrase. It is not about living idyllically in our similarities, but about living peacefully and pleasurably in our differences. It is not bestowed from beyond the normal human realm, but struggled for and gained, slowly and with effort. And it is not about unchanging love. It is about letting love change us.
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