For relationship author Mandy Len Catron, who has made a living researching how to find love, meeting her partner Mark was only one part of the puzzle.
The real challenge - the business of staying in love - lay in the prosaic details, like who takes out the bins and scrubs the bath.
In an article published in the New York Times - - Len Catron outlined how she and her partner mediate their relationship through a renewable relationship contract. It sparked heated debate for positing love as a negotiated skill.
"People either loved it or thought it was the most ridiculous and unromantic thing they ever heard,” Len Catron said.
It may sound calculating or unromantic, but every relationship is contractual.
Labelled “Mark and Mandy’s Relationship Contract,” the four-page, single-spaced document spells out everything from sex to chores to finances and the couple’s expectations for the future.
The contract is signed and dated by the couple and only lasts 12 months, after which time the couple has the option to revise and renew it, as they have done twice before.
In her latest update they went through each category and made only two minor swaps: her Tuesday dog walk will be exchanged for his Saturday one, she also agreed to clean the kitchen counters and let him take over the bathtub.
It reminds us that love isn’t something that happens to us — it’s something we’re making together.
"Writing a relationship contract may sound calculating or unromantic, but every relationship is contractual; we’re just making the terms more explicit. It reminds us that love isn’t something that happens to us — it’s something we’re making together. After all, this approach brought us together in the first place," she writes.
In a world where women struggle to articulate their needs and a explaining the term mental load generates millions of hits, Len Catron's approach could be the panacea for troubled marriages everywhere.
She said the contract was an attempt by the couple to consciously create a relationship reflecting their own values, rather than absorbing default cultural norms.
For me it was just wanting to be heard in my relationship.
“I think for him it was that fear of getting stuck in something that was unchangeable and it comes loaded with a lot of unspoken expectation. For me it was just wanting to be heard in my relationship and to feel like the things I needed or wanted from a relationship were as valuable to my partner as they were to me,” she said.
Len Catron’s investigation into the science of love was sparked by her parent’s divorce when she was 26, and her own challenges in a turbulent relationship that left her feeling subsumed in the partnership and struggling to articulate her needs.
“In previous relationships what I would do was pick fights. I would be upset about something and be really passive aggressive. The only way I could say what I wanted or needed was if I was angry,” she said.
The split of her ‘generous and loving’ parents she had modeled in her own quest for love, made her question her assumptions about relationships and marriage.
“If they can’t make it work then who can and how? What does it take to find love and get married and stay married?”
“How do I experience the narrative of happiness that has been sold to me by all the love stories? What I call the love, baby, carriage narrative. One like my parents but doesn’t end in divorce?” she said.
Len Catron wanted love research – preferably with large sample sizes.
Her diligent research paid off – personally and professionally - with a 2015 viral smash hit New York Times modern love essay narrating her own experiment using 36 scientifically researched questions she used on her first date with her now partner Mark.
The questions, based on looks at how intimacy between strangers can be accelerated through a series of escalating personal questions – from who you would like to have dinner with to your relationship with your mother.
The New York Times essay led to book deal and a , positioning the practical minded English teacher as a kind of cultural love guru, a status Len Catron is not entirely comfortable with.
What does it mean to love another person and how can I do that well?
Len Catron says while pheromones and magic were important in building a partnership, so was intimacy building.
In addition, the real and fictional love stories set the cultural scripts we subconsciously internalise.
“I think stories tell us what’s possible. The way to be happy is not to mimic the dominant narrative but sort of expand the stories you have access to and choose the ones that fit you, your identity and your life and what you want to create with another person.”
If that story involves creating a contract detailing who takes out the bins, then so be it.
“What I came out feeling was what does it mean to love another person and how can I do that well? I find it a much more interesting question and something I’m eager to keep answering.”
Mandy Len Catron, who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, is the author of
