With humor and brutal honesty, Loveland (Blackwater Press, 2024), Susan Ostrov’s memoir about romance, aging, and sex, shows us how she slowly—often painfully—shed the cultural norms of romantic love to find her own version of “happily ever after.” Ostrov makes clear that her own story, as a white, heterosexual, cisgender woman, may not pertain to everyone, but even so, her experiences will resonate—particularly when she writes about finding desire in midlife and sexual pleasure well into her seventies. We may all understand, intellectually, that happily ever after is a myth, but as Ostrov’s book shows us, shaking loose the chokehold of that myth is harder than it seems. Ostrov explores how her life has been shaped (or distorted) by the pervasive emphasis on romantic love—in movies, novels, songs—which turns every boy into a potential Prince, every kiss into a transformative moment.
As a little girl in her family’s one-bedroom walk-up in Brighton Beach, Ostrov remembers listening to her parents fight and her mother’s elaborate tales about “what might have been.” From these experiences, she says, comes her romantic genome: she is the product of her anti-romantic mother, Betty, and her sensitive father, Al, which makes her “a cynical romantic, which is something like having one brown eye and one blue.”
Stories about her parents’ unhappy marriage form one strand of Loveland; the other stands are formed by incidents in Ostrov’s own life and by her scholarly analysis of everything from Wuthering Heights to movies such as “Carol” and “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.” Putting all these elements into conversation allows Ostrov to examine not only where her ideas about romance came from, but also why it is so difficult to break free from these cultural norms. Romantic love gets presented, Ostrov writes, as “coherent, smooth-surfaced, a deep space in which to dwell and build a life.” But for so many of us, love is “a puzzle with jig-sawed edges, and all we have are scattered, often missing, pieces of ourselves. [Her] is to lay out those parts to see how they might fit together, especially for women.”
Like many other women—maybe even most women—Ostrov’s life includes incidents of sexual violence, from the middle-aged stranger who molests her when she’s barely a teenager, to casual gropings on the subway, to unwanted advances from men she’s dating. These traumatic events highlight a tension at the heart of ideas of romantic love: romance is often wrapped in threat, from Heathcliff’s pursuit of Cathy in Wuthering Heights to the dangers that Edward Cullen presents to Bella in Twilight. Violence is further woven into the fabric of how we understand relationships by the fact that a romance only becomes a “love story” when it becomes domesticated: the violence embedded in romance becomes the “happily ever after” of marriage.
The analytical points in Loveland speak to another thread that runs through the book, the story of a little girl who becomes a reader, starting with B is For Betsy to Little Women and from there to college, where she becomes an English major. As a reader, Ostrov encounters the novels that have been woven into our cultural imagination: Jane Eyre (which teaches her that perhaps she doesn’t need to be beautiful to find true love); Wuthering Heights, and its bad boy, Heathcliff; Lady Chatterley’s Lover and its titillating (and misogynist) sex. Even as Ostrov is falling in love with her studies, she continues to search for romance because—as everything around her suggests—she only has value as a partnered woman.
In her quest to find “The One,” Ostrov starts exploring the world of sex, which she finds—even with Frank, the man she will eventually marry—quite underwhelming: “furtive, rushed, uninspired.” Although she is only nineteen and still in college, Ostrov marries Frank, in part because she bows to her mother’s logic: if you can’t be a man, you should marry one. Frank plans to be a professor; he represents not only “true love,” but also a significant step up from her parents’ lives. As the wedding draws nearer, however, Ostrov realizes that she “did not want to be trapped in a commitment, [even as she] was desperate for a commitment.” Her dilemma foreshadows the conundrum of marriage itself, as portrayed in Western culture. We are assured that when we marry, “romantic passion will shade beautifully into the peaceful tedium of the everyday,” and that marital love will develop as naturally “as cultivating houseplants.” Anyone who has been married, or in a long-term partnership, is aware that partnerships do not work this way—and yet the idea(l) persists because to think otherwise is to go off-script.
Always the dutiful student, Ostrov tries to follow the script of being the good wife, except her love of reading leads her to apply to a PhD program in literature. She and Frank are both admitted, but only he gets financial aid. When she asks the dean why that is, he tells her that “university policy was to give preference to men for financial aid, because women had a higher drop-out rate, due to having babies.”Thwarted in her professional desires, married to a man who pays more attention to his career than to his wife, Ostrov finds a textbook solution to her lack of fulfillment: babies. Babies, unlike husbands, “need exactly what I wanted so much to give, a perfect balance of giving and taking.” The babies (she eventually has three) feed one aspect of Ostrov’s life and when she is later accepted into the Columbia PhD program for literature, it seems that she’s managed to achieve a balance—particularly when she decides that her dissertation will be about women, love, and sexuality in the nineteenth-century novel.
It’s at this point—three babies in, PhD and first job in hand—that things take a turn, hinted at by the first sentence in this section: “Reader, I divorced him.” Her decision to end her marriage emerges from her slow realization that perhaps she could choose her own desire, rather than erasing herself in favor of her family’s needs.
Ostrov meets the man who will become her lover when she’s in her mid-forties, the age when popular culture tells us that women begin to lose their allure. But when the man she calls Gerald begins flirting with her, Ostrov experiences herself as desirable; she falls in love with Gerald—and with the version of herself that emerges when they’re together. The affair, and the very enjoyable sex, brings about a “radical change in perception, not even acknowledged as such at first. . .an act of interpretation that was to recast and recalibrate everything, a new frame that altered the picture inside that frame.” The most important recalibration, of course, is in how she sees herself: “It was…tremendously liberating for me, in terms of finding out what I really wanted, breaking rules of domestic relations and questioning…what it means to be a wife, or a person on her own.”
While she admits that some might see her words as a rationalization, Ostrov notes that without the impetus of her feelings for Gerald, she would have remained miserable in her marriage, which would ultimately cause more damage than the affair. Extramarital affairs, Ostrov writes, “are popularly called ‘cheating,’ as if human relations were a card game. But every affair is also a compromise, an adjustment in terms of trying to balance elements of inner and outer life that don’t go well together.” When she divorces her husband, friends assume she will marry Gerald. Marrying her lover would have fit the conventional narrative of romance: a marriage would turn the affair into a “love story,” thus absolving Ostrov of the stigma of adultery. Ostrov refuses that convention: “Reader, I won’t marry this one.”
She remains in a relationship with Gerald for decades, which requires her to make peace with the fact that he has other lovers and a series of live-in girlfriends. Their relationship, in other words, pushes her to keep adjusting her definition of romance—she is both an adulteress (with her husband, while she’s married) and a mistress (one of Gerald’s many lovers). The ambiguity of this situation leaves Ostrov free to pursue other encounters, some romantic and others purely sexual. Loveland makes clear that the aging body is not a desexualized body: Ostrov shares her various intimacies with us as a way to illustrate the myriad ways in which a woman can find fulfillment.
The last third of the book chronicles the arc of a love affair that takes Ostrov by surprise, both for its deep intimacy and passionate sexuality. Although that relationship ends, Ostrov reminds us that “end” does not mean “failure.” Loveland’s conclusion, in fact, might be seen as the coda to Miranda July’s All Fours, in which the menopausal heroine radically redefines her domestic situation. Ostrov, who is old enough to be the mother of July’s heroine, wants us to consider alternatives to the conventional happily ever after. What if we “dismantle romance as experience that has to be hooked up to an institution like marriage and coupling,” she asks. What if we could find definitions of romance that are “fluid rather than closed and limited…a way of reframing the meaning and value of the romantic, especially for women.”
Loveland helps us navigate our own answers to these questions and adds to the important conversations going on about aging, particularly for women. Like All Fours, Loveland offers us the example of a woman who has veered away from the narratives that women are expected to follow in order to write her own story.
