Do I Still Believe In Love?

...and other frequently asked questions.

The first time I read Sally Rooney’s hit novel, Normal People, I was engaged to marry. By then, the novel, famously published when the Irish writer was only 27, was already a cult classic. It was Man Booker Prize longlisted, had sold a million copies and acquired its own TV adaptation. The show was released during our first Covid-19 lockdown (much to the delight of the streaming service, I’m sure) and it trended for weeks. We were collectively obsessing over Connell’s chain; visualising ourselves with Marianne’s fringe. At the time, I worked for Vogue magazine, and no news meeting was complete without a pitch about the show. As someone who was living with their fiancé, I found Connell and Marianne’s relationship endearingly frustrating both in Rooney’s work and the on-screen depiction: why can’t these two get together? From my position within a conventional monogamous relationship, loving someone resulted in a long-term relationship—and one that would likely end in marriage. After all, wasn't that the point? 

Readers of Sally Rooney’s work may have noticed there aren’t any representations of traditional relationships in her books. In Normal People, Connell and Marianne circle around each other for years until the novel’s final page, which still leaves open the question of whether they actually end up together. In Conversations with Friends—Rooney’s 2017 debut novel and the one that skyrocketed her to fame at the age of 25— Frances, a university student, has a relationship with Nick, a married man. Central to the story is Frances’s relationship with her ex, Bobbi, who is now her best friend. In 2021, Rooney published Beautiful World, Where Are You, which solidified unconventional love as a trope in her work: in another apex of four intersecting characters—Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon—we observe the frisson of two couples who grapple with their relationship.

Rooney, who is an author who inspires my own work (and hence this essay) has admitted in several public interviews that love is the central focus of her oeuvre. “I’m interested in love,” she said while speaking at the Louisiana Literature Festival in Denmark in 2018. “I don’t mean love in a very conventional, romantic sense—like, you meet one person who you love, you love them and that’s the end of your love life. It’s concluded, you’ve loved someone—so, well done. I’m interested in questioning that kind of love that’s so essential to our culture, which is monogamous pair-bonded love, which is seen as the epitome of what love really means.” She adds: “Why is that so central to our idea of what it means to be a human being?” 

The latter is something I have been ruminating on since last November when my would-be marriage ended. I’d been in a long-term relationship for five years and engaged for three, so the abrupt ending of our love story at the hands of the same man who had proposed in the first place had me completely untethered from life as I knew it. I began to recognise the feeling as grief, but it took me a long while to pinpoint what exactly I was grieving. After many trips to my therapist, I realised that he—and our union—had become my entire identity. Over the years, the relationship had become central to how I defined myself, and in one afternoon, that had been shattered. The bond we had was something I unknowingly relied on to give context and meaning to my life; without that, what did I have? 

In the months since the breakup, I have asked myself the same question that Rooney’s books attempt to audit: what is the point of monogamous love and why is it so essential to our culture? In Normal People, Rooney challenges this idea in her portrayal of Dublin students Connell and Marianne, and their connection over the course of four years. At the beginning of the novel, when the characters are in high school, Marianne lives “in the white mansion with the driveway” and Connell’s mother cleans her house. In school, they pretend not to know one another—Connell is athletic and popular and Marianne “wears ugly thick-soled flat shoes and doesn’t put makeup on her face.” Their relationship is kept secret. Years later, the dynamic shifts: Marianne is popular at university, Connell is not. Their romantic lives continue to intersect over the course of the book, and while it is clear they have great affection for one another, they never manage to formalise their relationship.  

Despite the character’s turbulent connection—and despite my frustration with them for it—Rooney has said time and time again that Normal People is a love story. “We probably always know that they love each other very much,” she told audiences at the Louisiana Literature Festival. “I wasn’t trying to make a mystery of whether they loved each other or not. But what does that mean? In the social world they inhabit, in their personalities, in their different positions in a class system, in their different relationships in gender?” She asks big questions about love via Connell and Marianne’s inner and outer dialogues, as well as their shared interpersonal conversations. In doing so, she asks the audience to consider: “What does it mean to say that you love another person? What are you saying when you say that? That was the question I wanted to answer.”  

What does it mean to say that I loved my ex? I had taken our engagement incredibly seriously: while we weren’t wed, when I accepted his proposal, it was good as marriage for me: I would be with him from that day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until one of us dropped dead. According to the Marriage Act 1961 (Cth), the legal construct of marriage here in Australia is defined as being the “voluntary union for life of two people to the exclusion of all others.” While the word comes from Middle English, first observed in 1250-1300 CE, the earliest recorded evidence of marriage ceremonies dates back to 2350 BC. In other words, it’s an ancient institution, and one that was largely created as a transaction to manage property rights and bloodlines. To me, this all seemed irrelevant, but the idea of marriage as a union which acknowledged our love for each other? That certainly felt good. In theory, that meant despite life’s many challenges—from illness to intimacy issues (and yes, even doubts about our future)—we would work things out together as a single unit. At some point, in practice, that single unit became intrinsic to my identity, and I began to put his interests ahead of mine. Another kind of silent transaction had occurred, where I had accepted a ring in exchange for putting my dreams, preferences and desires to the side. That wasn’t an institution I had ever wished to belong to or support. 

This is an ideal that Frances, the central character of Conversations with Friends, resents. In the novel, she announces she’s “anti love” and in a conversation with her friend—and ex-girlfriend—Bobbi, they share the following exchange: 

Bobbi: if you look at love as something other than an interpersonal phenomenon 

Bobbi: and try to understand it as a social value system 

Bobbi: it’s both antithetical to capitalism, in that it challenges the axiom of selfishness 

Bobbi: which dictates the whole logic of inequality 

Bobbi: and yet also it’s subservient and facilitatory 

Frances: capitalism harnesses “love” for profit 

Frances: love is the discursive practice and unpaid labour is the effect 

Frances: but I mean, I get that, I’m anti love as such 

Bobbi: that’s vapid frances. you have to do more than say you’re anti things 

Within this dialogue, Rooney uses the characters to highlight the transactional nature of the way love is structured within our society. For both Frances and Bobbi, who live by Marxist principles, the concept of conventional love doesn’t quite fit with their worldview. While this manifests as Bobbi remaining single, Frances ends up dating a married man who won’t leave his wife, and they both serve to subvert the notion of monogamy. Rooney has said that she’s particularly interested in how gender plays into this transaction, utilising Frances’s thoughts on love as a way to confront it. “Women are expected to give much more of themselves in personal relationships than traditionally men have been expected to,” she shared while speaking at the Louisiana Literature Festival. “Taking those kinds of very broad power dynamics into account, I guess Frances feels like, ‘What’s the point? Maybe it’s all a lie? What is there? Maybe I don’t want to give up myself?’” 

“At first I thought my cynicism about monogamy and marriage had removed me from this social transaction entirely. But then I got to thinking: as a single woman on the dating scene, aren’t I also contributing to that space? Haven’t I become a form of capital in some way?”

The ways in which I gave myself up in the relationship with my ex include (but are not limited to): doing approximately 15 hours of unpaid labour a week (in the form of housework or managing him), selling my car because he had his own, not moving to London because he didn’t like the cold, living in Sydney’s inner west (close to his work) even though I preferred the east, keeping my writing private so it didn’t impact him, and making financial decisions based on a wedding that would never eventuate. In re-reading Rooney’s work since I exited this relationship, I have observed how frighteningly close I came to blindly entering an institution that doesn’t uphold my value system. Particularly in Conversations with Friends, which I had previously viewed as an unfair indictment on the structure of marriage, I am now attentive to the way in which the character’s principles steer their love lives. Since Frances doesn’t value the system of marriage, she doesn’t mind being intimate with a man that has a wife, and even initiates the affair:  

“I kissed him. He let me. The inside of his mouth was hot and he put his free hand on my waist, like he wanted to touch me. I wanted him so much that I felt completely stupid, and incapable of saying or doing anything at all.”  

When asked about Frances declaring she’s “anti love” at a writer’s festival, Rooney said: “If you have principles that you truly believe, they have to be able to encompass the idea of human love and intimacy, and if your principles can’t, then you’re left with, ‘Well then it doesn’t make sense to me. It doesn’t make sense to give that much of myself to another person, because it’s not part of my ideology or my belief system, it can’t accommodate that.’ And I think that’s what Frances is feeling at that point.” 

Which brings me to a frequently asked question I am confronted with on dates, with strangers, by friends: do I still believe in love? After everything that has happened to me, can the idea of loving and being loved possibly still hold space in my own belief system?

I don’t think I have adopted an anti-love mentality. I’m often asked if I am now cynical about it but my cynicism seems to be largely pointed at the institutions of monogamy and marriage. I no longer believe in ‘the one’ and a desperate search for them that concludes in marriage and (to borrow from Rooney), then you’ve loved someone—so, well done. I now think that in any relationship, the people in love are simply waking up each day and choosing to be together. I was no more secure because I had been proposed to. If we’d been wed, would the contractual obligation have made him stay? I don’t think so. In the same way, Conversations with Friends’s Frances and Nick consciously make the decision to keep seeing each other, until one day, they don’t. 

That’s not to say I’m interested in pursuing the kind of clandestine relationships that occupy Rooney’s work. But what I do find fascinating in the Irish writer’s books is the way in which the character’s covert romances remove them from the currency exchange entirely. In a close reading of Rooney’s first two novels, Canadian author Sheila Heti (who I also love) observes how Roonian relationships don’t further any of the systems that they’re part of. For example, when referencing Normal People’s Connell and Marianne, Heti notes how their relationship “doesn’t further the hierarchy of popularity in the schoolyard.” It’s something she points out to Rooney while in a conversation with her in Toronto in 2019, to which Rooney responds with:  

“I really have written a lot about relationships that take place outside of the gaze of the social world—that are kept secret from people’s families and social circles. I'm not just doing it for my own fun but I am actually interested in relationships that take place away from public scrutiny, away from social surveillance. You could say it’s because I like writing about things that have a little frisson. That’s interesting to me. And so, if something’s secret, there’s always a little question mark hanging over it—why is it secret? How long will it remain secret? And those are fun things for a novelist to play with. But there’s actually something about the privacy that this gives those characters, that allows them to conduct their relationships in a different way. That actually by exempting themselves from the surveillance of the social world, they are allowing themselves to have a romantic relationship that isn’t transactional, because it can’t be, because nobody is witnessing the transactions that are taking place. There’s no currency exchange going on because it’s away from the world of transactional give and take, it’s away from the world of cultural capital and social capital and marital capital and all of that. By taking them outside of the realm of transactions between personal capital, there can be something that transcends that kind of transactional relationship completely. I am very attracted to that.” 

At first I thought my cynicism about monogamy and marriage had removed me entirely from this social transaction Rooney describes. But then I got to thinking: as a single woman on the dating scene, aren’t I also contributing to that space? Haven’t I become a form of capital in some way? And dates, particularly when you learn from them, are also to some extent transactional. At times, even good, consensual, single sex feels incredibly transactional. And since I write a dating column, I can’t really pretend that nobody is witnessing the transactions that are taking place. But then again, being in a traditional pair-bonded relationship has a certain other currency in our society that I am no longer privy to (I don’t have financial stability, I miss out on invitations to couple-based events, and I often upset waiters when I ask for a table for one). It is a structure single people can’t participate in at all.

Then at other times, I wonder why any of it matters at all. In 2021, Rooney released her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, which portrays friends Alice and Eileen, and their romantic dalliances: Alice with a man she meets on a dating app named Felix, and Eileen with her family friend, Simon. This time, the characters are in their 30s, but the tension of unconventional love remains the same. In one scene, Alice says to Eileen:   

“I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day. After all, when people are lying on their deathbeds, don’t they always start talking about their spouses and children? And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person?” 

I don’t think fear of dying alone is a good reason to get married but I have spent time thinking about how all three of Rooney’s novels (some of my favourite books of all time—can you tell?) prove that love is about connections, and how we shape one another through them, and that maybe that is enough. Maybe that’s the point of any type of relationship. Maybe that’s the point of human civilisation. Take, for instance, the epigraph at the beginning of Normal People: 

“It is one of the secrets that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness.”  — George Eliot, Daniel Deronda  

While extremely wordy, this suggests that we can only change when we’re influenced by others. On one hand, this is a deeper way to think about the meme-able idea that you should “thank your ex”—undoubtedly, when you become single, you’ll have hoards of people telling you that a) you will soon be grateful, b) you dodged a bullet, or c) you’ve experienced the best thing that’ll ever happen to you. (Annoyingly, you’ll later realise they’re right). But despite the pain, that relationship has no doubt shaped who I am. As Rooney puts it: “Everything we know about ourselves comes from other people telling us and showing us. So, I don’t believe there’s any such thing as the individual unit that moves through the world unaffected by other things.” 

It’s not lost on me that what had originally been a point of contention for me in Rooney’s oeuvre—the idea that her central protagonists don’t get their happily ever after—is now what draws me to her work. The ending of Conversations with Friends, for example, suggests it’s simply enough to have these interactions—the point is the connection and how it molds us. When talking about the ending, Rooney once told an interviewer that she tried every possible outcome to end the story of Conversations with Friends in a way that “made sense” before she realised that doing so would never be authentic to these characters and ultimately, as a realist novel, to real life. “It was about trying to let myself live with the complexities and not fence everything off at the end and put everyone back in couples again because I felt that was too easy,” she said, realising that “it doesn’t have to make sense.”  

Certainly, I’ll probably never be able to make sense of why my fiancé left, why the wedding never went ahead, why I'm still trying to sell that dress on eBay as I type. I’ll never know why other people’s marriages continue but not mine; why some couples made it through tougher times but we didn’t. I’ll never understand why he left so suddenly when others stayed. I don’t know if I’ll ever get married and I don’t even know if I believe in monogamy any more. But as to the question of whether I still believe in love? I think I do.

TABLE TALK:
Items of interest and fodder for your next date.

EAT: Armorica, Surry Hills
SHOP: CHANEL Baume Essentiel Multi-Use Glow Stick
READ: Screenshot This by Zara Wong (Substack)
DO: A Body by Berner Pilates class