How A Book Club Made Me Leave My Boyfriend

Given the chance, which type of fire would you choose -- a hearth fire, a bonfire, a wildfire, or a sparkler?

This is the question I ended a relationship over.

I think anyone who has been in more than one relationship can agree: they’re all very different. You are a slightly different person in each of them. New partners bring various facets of your personality to the forefront, and each relationship understands some element of you that the others didn’t. It’s part of why we feel nostalgic for past relationships, even when they were objectively not the right fit: there will always be something that person understood about you that your current partner doesn’t. Whether it’s a certain type of humor, a genre of movies you like, or odd habits that complimented each other well, your past partners have a hand in shaping who you become, which makes us review them with rose-colored glasses when they’re over.

I read The Light We Lost as part of a book club, and to be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to it. I’m not much of one for romance; the mawkish idea of fated love, or star-crossed lovers, is more likely to make me roll my eyes than swoon. Some might call me jaded, or cynical; I prefer practical. I’m the kind of person to watch a movie where someone sprints through an airport to declare their love, and think: “If someone did this to me in real life, I’d call security.”

The book is billed as “a novel about the inner-workings of the human heart, a heartbreaking ode to the lengths we go to pursue our dreams and the sacrifices we make for love, with a surprising, emotional ending.” (Jill Santopolo’s website). Thankfully, though, it’s less cloying than it sounds. The book ends up being a pretty complex exploration of what love actually means, and how different relationships impact our futures. It touches on whether one type of love is better or worse than another, and how love changes as you age. I enjoyed the book tremendously (and recommend it often), and the ending is something that has stuck with me.

But there’s a point somewhere in the middle that changed the course of my future. I remember taking a photograph of the page I was reading; I found the extended metaphor, of love as different types of fire, so compelling that I wanted to remember the exact wording of it.

The Light We Lost makes an analogy about types of love: a solid, stable relationship is like a hearth fire; a one-night stand burns bright but briefly, like a sparkler; whirlwind relationships are all-consuming like wildfires. It’s a poetic idea, but that wasn’t why it caught my attention; it was the follow-up conversation the two characters have that kept me turning pages. After this analogy, they discuss the merits of the types of love, and then make the extremely valid point that not everyone would choose the same type of love from that list. Given the choice, we would all choose very different types of fire. It all depends on your personality -- and your partner’s -- and your goals for your future.

Naturally, I started trying to classify the relationship I was in. The closest category, several years in, was a hearth fire -- ours was certainly solid and stable. But -- and here was the key point -- was a hearth fire the type I would choose, given the chance? Was “solid and stable” the way I wanted to describe my love?

It was a train of thought that wouldn’t leave me, and a week later, my book club cut right to the chase: which type of love would you choose?

I told them I’d choose a wildfire, and that’s the moment I knew.

I don’t mean to imply that this decision rested solely on my opinion of a book club selection. But this conversation forced me to evaluate what I had, and what I wanted. The disconnect between them is what led me to speak up for myself, decide on the future I actually wanted, and leave the relationship I was in.

So the question is: given the chance, which type of fire would you choose?

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