Love is Always Haunted
The Gothic Truth About Love and Marriage
Some years ago, about a week before my wedding, I was at work listening to a radio show on a topic that was understandably on the forefront of my mind: marriage. On this show was a man being touted as the preeminent expert on Holy Matrimony—a guy whose name I can’t remember—but a fellow who’d been studying the institution for decades and could tell with startling accuracy, within minutes of meeting a couple, whether they would still be married in five years’ time.
I sat listening with my ears pricked up as this guy was the real deal. Enough to make him the focus of an entire segment of NPR’s Talk of the Nation for a solid two hours.
I’m thinking about Dr. Marriage (as I’ll call him for the sake of this essay), from my perch here in Doha, where my husband Jack and I find ourselves recent empty nesters who have embarked on what can only be described as an adventure in reclamation. We’ve spent nearly three decades building a family, raising children, weathering the storms that visit any long marriage. And now, with our kids launched into their own lives back in Virginia, we’re here in the Middle Eastern desert, redefining ourselves as a couple again. Learning each other in a new context. Remembering the story that started all of this.
Because Dr. Marriage had a lot to say about stories.
He talked about respect being the cornerstone of a lasting relationship, the importance of morality within the confines of a union, the way couples should fight, and how a pair of lovers must always take up the challenge to evolve together. All very sensible and true on an intuitive level.
But what caught my attention most was his assertion that story is an essential element to a lifelong love affair. In other words, what seems to matter in an intrinsic way is not that a couple has gotten together but how a couple has gotten together. The story of us—of how our love takes flight—appears not only to be the spark that ignites the fire we need in order to sustain passion, but the one that foments friendship and trust, and gets us through some of the dark times that inevitably arrive.
Things like illness, child-rearing debacles, job loss, snoring, opposing tastes in television shows, and a mother-in-law moving in. Watching your children leave home and realizing you have to figure out who you are to each other when you’re not primarily parents anymore.
In my interpretation, Dr. Marriage was explaining how courtship—the process of wooing an amour by gestures large and small—plays a vital role in spinning that magic web we call true love. Courtship, like a good story, tantalizes. It promises abundance while threatening loss. At its heart, courtship makes a couple earn each other’s affection and intimacy. It is the inverse of a hook-up.
I was reminded of the symbiotic relationship between love and story again some years later when a friend—a new friend who I was just getting to know—asked me to share with her the story of how my husband and I got together. She and I are both writers and though neither of us is a romance writer per se, love in its many forms is a shared theme of our work.
We are also both happily married, and have confided in one another about how love took us completely by surprise. It’s not like our previous relationships were all that great, and neither of us came from what popular culture would call happy families. We had to piece together on our own what we thought a blissful union might look like.
And yet—by osmosis or destiny—it happened for us.
Before I began telling her my love story, I took a deep, meditative breath. It had been a long time since I’d recounted the tale of how Jack and I had fallen in love, and in all honesty, I’d put that narrative on the back burner while he and I focused on some monumental concerns like having babies and making sure we could feed them.
But damn, we do have one helluva story. And it wasn’t until I told my friend how we met and promptly went a little mad for each other that I realized how critical that subtext has been in carrying us through some extraordinarily difficult chapters.
Ordeals I’ve written about before: one of our children being born with a catastrophic illness; surviving the financial roller-coaster that hit so many families between 2008 and 2011; navigating the unraveling of a close family member determined to take everyone down with her.
Also the smaller things: moving from city to city, starting a business, deciding how much autonomy to give our children. Becoming empty nesters and choosing—choosing—to embark on this Doha adventure together rather than letting the empty nest turn us into polite strangers who happen to share an address.
So, yes, I’ll tell our story. But if you’ll forgive me, I’ll give you the condensed version. The fleshed-out, nitty-gritty account makes me blush and withdraw. It’s also too long for a Valentine’s Day essay.
It involves:
A chance visit to a foreign city. A meeting in a four-hundred year old, candlelit pub. Some dirty poetry. A Christening. Several dozen anonymous postcards. New Year’s Eve. A jazz club. Fried chicken and champagne on a cliffside. The kind of mushy language most people pretend to despise. And a belief in destiny.
After the swashbuckling part—the early wonders of discovery, the heavy breathing—we pretty much replaced our candy and flowers routine with the meat and potatoes of our relationship. Less poetic perhaps, but warm, comforting, sweet. Our nearly thirty-year love story bears little resemblance to our courtship.
It has involved:
Believing against all odds. Not blaming each other for things that have gone awry. Doing our part. Mustering every bit of energy in order to conjure romance amidst ruin. Ignoring bad moods. Having sex even when we don’t feel like it. Bragging about each other’s accomplishments. Dancing close in our kitchen when it all gets to be too much. And now—choosing each other again when the kids are gone and separate orbits would have been easier.
We could’ve never gotten through the latter list without the former. And I suspect that’s what Dr. Marriage was talking about. Over and over, his research pointed to the necessity of transcendence—a belief in the inherent goodness of the love that has taken root.
There is a reason why we call the one we’ve been looking for Mr. or Ms. Right. Right implies virtue, honor, truth. And according to Dr. Marriage, an attraction built on betrayal has a brutal road ahead. Such unions lack an anchor, and over time often devour themselves from the inside.
After all, what do you say when someone asks you how you met? “Well, my first wife was at Little Gym with our two year-old, and I, uh…I guess I just couldn’t help myself.”
Story, it turns out, can sink you as easily as it can save you.
I’ve been writing about love for three decades now—watching it flourish in some lives, watching it unravel catastrophically in others. I’ve seen marriages collapse over betrayals that appeared small from the outside but were seismic within the union. I’ve watched couples endure storms that should have destroyed them and somehow they emerged stronger, stranger, more themselves. I’ve observed how love transforms over time, how passion evolves into something steadier but no less vital, how the story you tell about your beginning determines whether you can survive your middle.
And all of that—the observations, the years of watching love succeed and fail, the understanding that romance is always shadowed by the possibility of its own destruction—has shaped the way I write about it in my fiction.
How could I write it any other way but Gothic?
Because Gothic romance understands what fairy tales pretend doesn’t exist: that love is always haunted. By past wounds, by the threat of loss, by the terror of vulnerability, by the knowledge that the person you love most could also be the one who destroys you. Gothic romance knows that passion and danger are twins, that intimacy requires surrender, that the deepest connections happen in the dark where we can’t see clearly and have to trust anyway.
The couples I write about in my novels—Martin and Twila, navigating love across stolen memories and fractured time—are not fairy-tale lovers. They are Gothic lovers. Their love is real enough to wound, powerful enough to save, dangerous enough to corrupt, and resilient enough to survive being broken and reassembled again and again.
Just like any real marriage that lasts.
And here is what Gothic romance understands about story—what Dr. Marriage was circling all those years ago: the narrative we tell about our love is not decoration. It is structure. The way we frame our beginning—the candlelit pub, the dirty poetry, the champagne on the cliffside—is not nostalgia. It is the anchor we throw down when everything else is chaos. It is what we return to when we need to remember why we are still fighting for this particular person, in this particular marriage, through this particular storm.
Story isn’t separate from love. Story is love. It’s how we make meaning from the mess, how we transform random encounters into destiny, how we convince ourselves and each other that what we’re building together matters enough to survive the darkness that will inevitably come for it.
Dr. Marriage knew this. When asked how he could tell when a marriage was definitively over, he said this, according to my memory: “In my experience, a marriage is beyond repair when you ask the couple how they met, and they cannot conjure any joy, even a smile from recounting that tale. If they can still tell that story with even the tiniest glimmer of fondness, there’s hope.”
That is a powerful truth—and one worth considering beyond marriage alone.
Here in Doha, in this winter season when the desert exhales and the city comes alive, Jack and I are writing a new chapter of our story. Not starting over—we’re in far too deep for that, and besides, we wouldn’t want to—but reclaiming something. Remembering the dirty poetry and the champagne on the cliffside while also honoring the decades of dancing in the kitchen when everything else was falling apart.
As we endeavor to create new stories this coming year—with spouses, friends, colleagues, even strangers—we would do well to remember that love, and the promise of what is right,
strikes at the core of our humanity. The narratives we are spinning now, through our actions and choices, will shape our future well-being more than we know.
Happy Valentine’s Day from the desert.
