L-O-V-E, from the beginning

Some enchanted evening, you will see a stranger.

You will see a stranger, across a crowded room.

And somehow you know.

You know even then.

That somewhere you’ll see her again and again.

-- Oscar Hammerstein II

*

“How did you two meet?”

It is a common question, and an especially popular conversation starter around the ides of February, when interest in how people met the loves in their lives is high. The answer is likely to be more than a chronicle of events. Inevitably, it will include certain facts, but between the lines, in a nether region fragrant with attitude, lies the true character of a couple’s beginnings.

Someone had to come up with a clever term for, and insights into, these oft-repeated legends that are a social ritual for couples. Chip Brown is one of 17 contemporary writers who contributed to a new anthology, “Committed -- Men Tell Stories of Love, Commitment and Marriage.” In an essay on marrying late, Brown describes every couple’s “story of how we met and chose to marry” as a “creation myth.” In religion and anthropology, the expression is normally applied to theories that evolve to explain how the Earth and man, the trees, rivers, animals and stars came to be.

“Creation myths are common to cultures,” Brown said in a telephone interview, “and I was thinking that every marriage is a culture,” a metaphor he attributed to John Updike.

Like primitive tribes, lovers use creation myths to wrest order from chaos, to transform the origins of a relationship into a narrative that contains, at best, clues to the unknowable. It isn’t difficult to figure out why a woman might decide to talk with a personable stranger on an airplane rather than take a nap, but why was he assigned the seat next to hers? Why did he take that particular flight and not the later one he’d planned to catch? And why has their dangling conversation, and attraction, continued for decades?

The response to “how did you two meet?” is a tale meant to unlock the mystery of continuing attachment. So we tell and retell the facts -- the who, where, when and how -- in the futile hope that they will add up to a why. And yet, romantic and anthropological creation myths aren’t meant to be definitive. They share a sense of awe, a fundamental awareness that even if some things remain unfathomable, what passes for knowledge has meaning.

What one couple knew to be true, when they met many years ago, was that they each attended a dinner on campus for college students who couldn’t afford to travel home for Thanksgiving. Each time they tell their story, he recalls how terrible the food was, and how vivacious and pretty she was. What they didn’t realize initially, and have never been able to articulate since, was that circumstances brought them to a place where they could begin to discover that they were two insecure, lonely people who managed to feel at home in each other’s company. The objective details of their first encounter only skim the surface of their complex bond.

Creation stories soothe at times of trial. They can be resurrected in the light of a bleak dawn, like fond memories of departed relatives. When a stunned husband whose wife had walked out accepted a friend’s offer of a waterproof shoulder and an impartial ear, he repeated the couple’s creation myth, convinced that it demonstrated that his beloved was coming back. “We had such a great beginning,” he said wistfully.

Social science has confirmed the significance of a strong prelude. Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University has identified a gap between the experiencing self and the remembering self. His studies have found that a person’s recollection of a situation is influenced by emotional high and low points and by how it ends. So, if a woman trapped in a burning building were rescued by a brave stranger whom she later married and had a family with, memories of the disaster that set the romance in motion would be dwarfed by positive subsequent developments.

Children, who have unerring little noses for a good yarn, delight in creation myths, especially their own. (“Mommy, tell me about the night I was born again.”) Creation myths are comforting to revisit because they confirm our connections and return us to magical moments of discovery. In the beginning, all is pristine. Creation occurred in prehistory, before he saw her cranky with the flu, before she learned that driving in heavy traffic makes him snappish.

Yet a focus on the creation myth to the exclusion of ongoing reality is a view as lacking in balance as seeing the wedding day as the culmination of existence. No single event, whether a magnificent party or a cosmic first date, should be overvalued.

Brown, who married at 43, said, “I had so many beginnings. I was sick to death of beginnings and endings. After a while, you long for the middle. I look at the beginning of relationships as a series of illusions and naive expectations about to be disappointed. It isn’t only Genesis that matters. It’s Deuteronomy. What I find haunting is that the story changes in light of subsequent information.”

Over time, as understanding of enduring love grows, some details fade, characters disappear and back-stories are minimized.

The creation myth takes place at one of the last times when the couple were completely separate individuals. Early on, they both might include information about what was going on in their lives just before they met. Several years into a marriage, “we” often replaces “I,” conceptually if not conversationally. Then the pronouns in the creation myth change accordingly.

“Part of what keeps people together is that they’re interested in collaborating on a narrative with an uncertain outcome,” Brown said. “If you’re not interested in that, then you’re bored by the story and the relationship. Time, for a couple, isn’t really linear. You can go back in and rewrite 1996. Now you can see things in your first week together that you couldn’t see then.”

In a number of religions, there are creation stories that predate Genesis. Even in ecclesiastical lore, there is more than one primordial tale. Just as it’s unseemly for a speaker at a funeral to talk more about themselves than the deceased, a creation story with one person’s point of view, featuring one very major and one minor character, insults the genre. There is also something unsettling about two versions that differ substantially.

“If the marriage is going to survive,” Brown said, “the creation myth has to get stronger and more consensual. It’s a collaboration. His version and her version overlap. The percentage of overlap is, perhaps, an indication of the health or obnoxiousness of the marriage. If there was 100% overlap, they would be a really insufferable couple. If the area of overlap is too small, you wonder what’s keeping them together.”

Many creation stories support a romantic ideal made familiar by Hollywood.

When the synopsis is: “We couldn’t stand each other at first, but we gradually realized that all that hostility was just misdirected sexual tension,” some credit must go to the Doris Day-Rock Hudson canon, with apologies to Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew.” Kudos to Will for “Romeo and Juliet” as well, the mother of all star-crossed love stories.

The films written by Nora Ephron that starred Meg Ryan have inspired innumerable personal histories. There’s the “When Harry Met Sally ...” scenario: “We were friends, and then one day I said to myself, ‘I wish I could find a guy like Harry. Wait a minute! What’s wrong with Harry? I’m in love with Harry.’ ” Romantic movies (“Sleepless in Seattle,” “You’ve Got Mail”) foster myths within myths -- some creation stories are based on the myth of the thunderbolt hit or on finding “the one.”

Even without a lush soundtrack, there is poetry and promise in the notion that the right person will be recognized with the clarity of divine intuition, and you’ll just know.

In the creation story I know most intimately, we both tell one part exactly the same way: Our first date, which took place in New York, ended with a late drink at the Cafe des Artistes. To his immediate and unending annoyance, I ordered a glass of single malt whiskey that I nursed and sipped and mostly left behind. After we’d said goodnight in the lobby of my hotel, his parting words were, “You’re going to be a very important person in my life.”

He couldn’t believe he actually uttered such a prophecy, but he felt compelled to. Because he just knew.