Page 551 - A Little Life: A Novel

chemistry, let’s say, or good conversation, or financial support, or
intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty—and you get to pick
three of those things. Three—that’s it. Maybe four, if you’re very

lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It’s only in the movies
that you find someone who gives you all of those things. But this isn’t
the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three
qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you
look for those qualities in another person. That’s real life. Don’t you
see it’s a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you’ll wind up
with nothing.

AMY: [crying] So what did you pick?
SETH: I don’t know. [beat] I don’t know.

At the time, he hadn’t believed these words, because at the time,
everything really did seem possible: he was twenty-three, and everyone was
young and attractive and smart and glamorous. Everyone thought they
would be friends for decades, forever. But for most people, of course, that
hadn’t happened. As you got older, you realized that the qualities you

valued in the people you slept with or dated weren’t necessarily the ones
you wanted to live with, or be with, or plod through your days with. If you
were smart, and if you were lucky, you learned this and accepted this. You
figured out what was most important to you and you looked for it, and you
learned to be realistic. They all chose differently: Roman had chosen
beauty, sweetness, pliability; Malcolm, he thought, had chosen reliability,
and competence (Sophie was intimidatingly efficient), and aesthetic

compatibility. And he? He had chosen friendship. Conversation. Kindness.
Intelligence. When he was in his thirties, he had looked at certain people’s
relationships and asked the question that had (and continued to) fuel
countless dinner-party conversations: What’s going on there? Now, though,
as an almost-forty-eight-year-old, he saw people’s relationships as
reflections of their keenest yet most inarticulable desires, their hopes and

insecurities taking shape physically, in the form of another person. Now he
looked at couples—in restaurants, on the street, at parties—and wondered:
Why are you together? What did you identify as essential to you? What’s
missing in you that you want someone else to provide? He now viewed a
successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best
of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.