The Love Proof by Madeleine Henry

Author:Madeleine Henry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2021-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

“How are you, Sophie?” Dr. Alice White asked the next day, a long month into their sessions. Sophie had barely spoken since they met, but she appeared to want to. Every week, she arrived on time and sat by the sofa arm closest to Dr. White’s chair. She’d bring her eyebrows together sadly, abruptly. She’d rest two fingers on her lips, then drop her hand to her throat, clearly focused on her own voice and yet not using it. Dr. White kept trying, in front of her Harvard psychiatry degree on the wall, to tease out the knot inside her.

Silence.

“What’s on your mind?” Dr. White asked.

Sophie tugged a drawstring on her black Nike hoodie. She wasn’t trying to be difficult. She wanted to figure herself out, too. The flashbacks she kept having of Jake were interrupting her daily life. These didn’t feel like normal memories. They hijacked all five of her senses. One second, she’d be on the subway to work, dense air plugging her nose, and the next, she was sitting next to Jake in the dining hall, breathing him in again. It was like a lucid dream, but with body, substance, and spectacular detail. She could count the Cheerios in his bowl. She could feel the sun through Berkeley’s windows. She was there—but so briefly, and without ever losing track of the present—it was as if she were in both moments at once.

Her parents had already sent her to a general physician to see if anything was physically wrong. They wanted to understand not only the “hallucinations”—their word—but her weight loss, pallor, and why her hand kept drifting to her stomach. Sophie kept cradling her belly as if she were alerting the world to a tapeworm. All tests came back healthy.

“Last time, you mentioned ‘soul mates’—”

“I said I was reading about them,” Sophie corrected.

She’d been reading poems during the day at Free People, looking for other accounts of what she was going through. Rumi had written, “Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.” That passage had felt like a clue. What did psychiatry have to add? Why was she being catapulted into the past, somehow straddling then and now?

“Right,” Dr. White said. “Then you asked me if I believe in soul mates.”

“Yes.”

“I said there was no evidence of them, and I wanted to say more about that. ‘The One,’ ‘true love’—I went through the literature again.” Dr. White leaned forward but spoke gently, afraid to scare Sophie’s voice away. “Studies show that people who believe in soul mates are actually more likely to break up and have difficult relationships. Because they believe there’s only one person for them, they keep asking themselves: Is this him? Is this ‘the One’? A better strategy is to ask, How can I make my relationship better? People are happier when they feel empowered to improve their relationship. When they have a growth mindset, not a destiny mindset.

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