At the moment they are poised to enter the real world, what Sacks calls “a place of darkness,” Adam gives his wife “the first gift of love, a personal name.” And God, in turn, responds to them both “in love,” and makes them garments to clothe their nakedness, or as the second-century sage Rabbi Meir put it, “garments of light.’”

  In the grip of peril, they reaffirm their love. In the face of darkness, God bathes them in light.

  This is the fourth great love lesson of Adam and Eve. Love is not about avoiding conflict; it’s about overcoming it. Love is not about pushing problems away; it’s about pushing through them. “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds,” Shakespeare writes in Sonnet CXVI. “O, no; it is an ever-fixed mark.” Love, he concludes, “bears it out even to the edge of doom.”

  Who knows the edge of doom better than Adam and Eve? Nobody. Which is why their constancy deserves our constant acclaim.

  5. Care. Not everything Adam and Eve can teach us about love is positive. Thinking of all the love stories that follow theirs, one can easily identify a number of weaknesses in theirs.

  First, Adam and Eve show very little affection for each other. There are no rose petals, back rubs, doing the 4 A.M. feeding to let the other sleep in. Also, they never express their commitment to each other: The closest we get is Adam effusing, “At last! This one is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” Finally, they don’t seem to be having a lot of fun. Missing are the nicknames, the inside jokes, the playful routines that sustain even the shakiest connections. Adam and Eve love each other, but do they like each other?

  Still, there’s yet another void in their relationship that’s even more disappointing, and that’s the fifth great characteristic of love: care. Part of loving is the willingness to diminish yourself in the service of upholding the other. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” wrote Simone Weil. “Taken to its highest degree, [it] is the same thing as prayer.” Do Adam and Eve pay attention to each other?

  The idea of selflessly giving to the other has roots in the Bible, so it’s possible to imagine Adam and Eve having exposure to this idea. Christians sanctified the idea of kenosis, a hollowing out of oneself in the service of God, which Christ embodied on the cross. More recent writers use other ways to capture this idea. Simon May adopts the term “attentiveness”—“the practiced, almost meditative, open attentiveness to the other”—and says it’s the fundamental quality of interpersonal love.

  John Gottman, one of the leading psychologists of contemporary relationships, uses the term “attunement.” Gottman pioneered the practice of videotaping couples in simulated living situations and analyzing their behavior. He dubbed his facility the “Love Lab.” One powerful predictor of a couple’s success, he found, is how well the couple repairs arguments, meaning one side takes affirmative steps to address the concerns of the other.

  Gottman calls this gesture attunement, which he defines as “the desire and the ability to understand and respect your partner’s inner world.” Couples who are high in attunement spend less time in the “nasty box” during disputes, and more time in the “nice box.” Adam and Eve certainly spend time in the “nasty box”—“the woman” ate first, Adam bitterly tells God. It would be nice to see them spend time in the “nice box,” too.

  The common attribute of all these descriptions is a willingness to turn away from the self and turn toward the other. “Love is to be identified with curiosity,” writes Avivah Zornberg. It’s committing yourself to first learning about, then inhabiting, the self-made world of the other, and attempting to make it a better place to be.

  It would be gratifying to know that Adam and Eve make this commitment to each other. And maybe they do. Their story, alas, shows little evidence of it. Attunement, attentiveness, kenosis, curiosity, there are many names for this idea. I prefer the plainspoken “care.”

  Care for your lovers. What could be more straightforward than that?

  6. Co-narration. William James remarked that the great “unbridgeable chasm” in nature is that between two minds. It has long been the role of romantic love “to cross that abyss,” wrote novelist William Gass, “to create a new creature made of mingled intimacies, to fill one soul with another.”

  The most effective way to do that is to have the lovers create a new story—a shared story—of their life together. This new story is not a one story. It’s a two story. It has two protagonists, two people whose needs must be fulfilled, two individuals whose fears must be surmounted. This shared story does not replace the individual stories each lover tells. It rests on top of them. It’s the second story in each person’s imagination. The first story is love of self; the second is love of other. The second cannot survive unless the first is well built.

  The process of cocreating this shared story—what psychologists call “co-narration”—is the last great quality of romantic love, and it’s the one Adam and Eve are most responsible for introducing. Theirs is the first joint byline.

  Perhaps the most salient characteristic of joint storytelling is that it’s more challenging than solo storytelling. The word “acrobatic” comes to mind. This sense of physicality gets at the inherent difficulty of relationships: They take coordination. The most common metaphors we use about love miss this point. We speak of being struck by lightning, punched in the gut, hit by a truck. These are all passive.

  Love is active. Fromm liked to say that our primary metaphor of romance, that we “fall” in love, is misleading. Falling is easy; standing is hard. Falling is reactive; it just happens to you. Standing takes work. Yet that long-term state is what we’re after. We say we want to fall in love, but what we really want is to stand in love.

  That process of standing in love is built on a number of things, including the shared exchange of ideas, deeds, and bodily fluids. But most of all it’s built on words. The great Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget coined a phrase to describe how preschoolers play. Children he said, engage in “collective monologue,” meaning they gather together but talk only to themselves. Love is the inverse of this. It’s “collective dialogue,” meaning the two sides construct a shared version of reality. This coordination doesn’t preclude both parties from having their own version of reality; that happens, too, of course. But it’s the version they assemble together that represents their intermingled union.

  And this story is not just abstract; it’s concrete, too. Helen Fisher has found evidence of long-term attachment in the human brain. She put individuals who had been married an average of twenty-one years into brain scanners. Most had grown children. Then she looked at the regions of their brain that were most active. Those who scored highest on marriage satisfaction questionnaires showed increased engagement in three areas of their brains.

  “The first has to do with empathy,” she said. “The second has to do with controlling your emotions. The third has to do with positive illusions, specifically the ability to overlook what you don’t like about a person and focus on what you do.” It’s like that old song, she said, “Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.”

  “Can you actually teach your brain to learn that skill?” I asked.

  “Absolutely. The brain is very malleable. That’s why we call this type of thinking positive illusions. You can learn to focus on the positive aspects of the relationship and not focus on the negative.” It all comes down to storytelling, she said. “To be in a healthy relationship, you don’t have to agree on everything, but you have to agree on enough things so you have a good story to tell.”

  This to me is the most exciting thing I learned about Adam and Eve. Love is a story. But not just any story. A love story has a number of qualities that set it apart from other stories.

  First, it’s a story we construct with another person. We can’t be the sole author of our own love story; we can’t impose our will or demand the last word. We must, by definition, share credit, share ownership, share creation. Tales of pinings and yearnings and unrequited love are oft-told phenomena, but they’re not love stories. They’re stories with only one teller. A love story, by definition, has two.

  That’s why Adam and Eve aren’t a love story when Adam alone feels lonely or even when he gushes that Eve is the “one”! They don’t become a love story until she begins to feel the same way. When “the two of them” are naked and feel no shame; when “the two of them” open their eyes and discover they are naked; when “the two of them” lie face-to-face and conceive.

  Second, a love story takes time. The most common definition of love is that it’s that remarkable period of tingles, infatuation, novelty, and lust one often feels at the start of a relationship. That can be part of love, of course, but it’s not a requirement, and it’s not the whole story. Love is also the long-term stew of reinvention, reconciliation, hardiness, and appreciation.

  To me, this is the essential mistake in how we talk about our most central obsession. We define love in a way that guarantees we can’t succeed at it. We describe love as something passive and fleeting, then are surprised when it goes away. We glorify love as effervescent, then are disappointed when it evaporates.

  Love is not eternal and unchanging; it’s ever-changing and ever-evolving. Love is not a moment in time; it’s the passage of time. It was this way for Adam and Eve, and it’s the same for us.

  Finally, a love story is one we tell along the way. We experience the passion, the pain, the jocularity of love while we’re trying to craft the narrative of that love. We’re living the story while we’re telling it. Indeed, we can never escape our story, which is one reason we find love stories so escapist. We work through our own issues by comparing them to the issues of those we read about, watch, and talk about.

  That’s one reason Adam and Eve have endured for so long. Every generation compares its problems to theirs. And yet we don’t respect them for what they achieve: their willingness to keep walking, keep talking, keep coming back to each other, keep working it through.

  We are resistant to the idea that Adam and Eve are a love story, I believe, not because they don’t exhibit the attributes of love, but because we’ve misidentified what those attributes are. “Love is not an initial conquest followed by a relationship, much less ‘happily ever after,’” Robert Solomon writes, any more than a good novel climaxes in the second chapter, five hundred pages from the end. Love is “the continuing story of self-definition, in which plots, themes, characters, beginnings, middles and ends are very much up to the authorship of the indeterminate selves engaged in love.”

  We get disappointed when we don’t have a storybook romance, he adds, but the truth is that we have to create our own story, our own romance.

  This is what I took from Adam and Eve: Love is a story we tell with another person. And, as it is with them, the telling never ends.

  • • •

  ON DECEMBER 13, 1867, Mark Twain was touring Jerusalem when he visited a room in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre identified as “Adam’s Tomb.” He was overcome with emotion. “The fountain of my filial affection was stirred to its profoundest depths,” he wrote. “I leaned upon a pillar and burst into tears.” How touching it was that “here in a land of strangers, far away from home, & friends, & all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation. True, a distant one, but still a relation.”

  Twain became obsessed with the forefather he never met. He jokingly proposed a statue of Adam be built in his wife’s hometown, Elmira, New York. When the public unexpectedly embraced the idea, he commissioned Congress to pay for it. They turned him down. Next he contributed to the Statue of Liberty but urged organizers to replace the woman with a monument to Adam. They never responded to his letter. Twain even adopted as one of his pen names “A Son of Adam.”

  Twain went on to write half a dozen little-known but extraordinary pieces about the first couple, including “Extracts from Adam’s Diary” and an unfinished “Autobiography of Eve.” Taken together, one historian wrote, “they are perhaps the most personal of Mark Twain’s writing.”

  Adam, in Twain’s telling, is at first uncomfortable with Eve. She eats too much, goes out all the time, and talks a lot. “It used to be so pleasant and quiet here,” he says. Adam gets anxious when she takes up with the snake. “I advised her to keep away from the tree. She said she wouldn’t. I foresee trouble. Will emigrate.”

  Eve is equally unimpressed with Adam. “He talks very little. Perhaps it is because he is not bright, and is sensitive about it.”

  But slowly the two come around. “I see I should be lonesome and depressed without her,” Adam says. “Blessed be the sorrow that brought us near together and taught me to know the goodness of her heart and the sweetness of her spirit.” A similar transition happens to Eve. “I love him with all the strength of my passionate nature,” she says. “It is my prayer, it is my longing, that we shall pass from this life together.”

  Twain completed the last of these writings, “Eve’s Diary,” soon after the death of his beloved wife, Livy, in 1904. “I am a man without a country,” Twain wrote a friend. “Wherever Livy was, that was my country.” In a one-sentence epilogue to “Eve’s Diary,” which was originally titled “Eve’s Love-Story,” Twain adds a similar panegyric from the mouth of Adam. Standing beside Eve’s grave, the original lonesome man laments, “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.”

  Twain’s touching eulogy to his wife, placed in the mouth of his “blood relation,” captures everything I admire about Adam and Eve: Their ability to speak to us, to give us the message we most need to hear in our most vulnerable hour. That message, in its simplest form, is that there is an ideal of undying love. There is a promise of eternal happiness in the Bible just as powerful as the promise of eternal peace.

  There is promised love as well as promised land.

  Today, we need that promise more than ever. In a time of dislocation and disconnection, we need to be reminded we’re not meant to be alone. In a time of crumbling commitments and disposable pleasure, we need to rehear that the first relationship lasted forever. In a time of “work-life balance” and “Can we have it all?” we need to recollect that even the first couple struggled to find individuality in their togetherness. In a time when we all let ourselves and our lovers down, we need to recall that the first man and first woman found a way to heal their wounds and forgive their wrongs.

  We need, above all, to remember that the relationship at the foundation of our civilization was a success, not a failure.

  We need Adam and Eve as our role models.

  And they’ve earned it. In a world dominated by I, Adam and Eve were the first we. They were the first to say we are better off as an us than either of us is as a me.

  Adam and Eve are the first love story.

  That doesn’t mean they are the best love story, any more than the first game of baseball was the best game of baseball, the first novel was the best novel, or the first orange soufflé was the best orange soufflé. It doesn’t mean they are the first lovers to have their story told. There may have been hunter-gatherer sonneteers on the savannas of Africa or an Egyptian Jackie Collins in the court of King Tut.

  But Adam and Eve are the first love story in the sense of the first to exemplify the conscious decision to elevate human-human love to the plane of god-god love or god-human love. They are the first to have survived, been retold, been sampled, been reimagined. They are the first that every other love story gets compared to, favorably or not.

  Just look at how we remember them. They are Adam and Eve.

  Not Adam.

  Not Eve.

  Adam and Eve. One name is rarely mentioned without the other.

  In 1956, the poet Philip Larkin visited Chichester Cathedral in southern England, where he came upon two stone effigies in Lewes Priory. The figures were the 10th Earl of Arundel, Richard FitzAlan, and his second wife, Eleanor of Lancaster. The two were lying on their backs, carved in marble, holding hands.

  “Side by side, their faces blurred / The earl and countess lie in stone,” Larkin wrote in “An Arundel Tomb.”

  Our almost-instinct almost true:

  What will survive of us is love.

  I am struck that what Larkin saw in these figures is what Twain saw in Adam and Eve. It echoes some of what Mary Shelley, John Milton, Lord Byron, Michelangelo, Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Pope Francis, and so many others saw in the first couple as well.

  And it’s what I choose to see, too.

  I see in Adam and Eve what I believe they saw in themselves: that what will endure of their union is their togetherness.

  What will survive of them is love.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank the dozens of people who appear by name in this book, all of whom gave up their time, invited me to their homes and workplaces, and answered my often probing and personal questions with aplomb, insight, and good cheer. You are testament to the ability of Adam and Eve to continue to shape the world thousands of years after they first entered it. Thank you for your guidance, your wisdom, and, in many cases, your friendship.

  Avner Goren walked the early steps of this journey with me in Jerusalem, as he has done on nearly every journey I’ve taken since our first meeting nearly two decades ago that led to Walking the Bible. In Israel, I am profoundly grateful for Susan Silverman, Anat Hoffman, Avital Hochstein, Nama Goren, and Michal Govrin. For help with the Sistine Chapel, Geraldine Torney and the wonderful team at Italy With Us, Enrico Bruschini, Gregory Waldrop, Jeremy Zipple, and Ian Caldwell. For their companionship in the Galápagos, the Pan-Stier family: Max, Florence, Zachary, and Noah.

  At the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising Museum, Kevin Jones and Shirley Wilson. Also in Los Angeles, David Wolpe. The many women of Kohenet, and the team at Hazon. On Long Island, the entire community of the Compassionate Friends. In Seneca Falls, Coline Jenkins, Ami Ghazala, and Rev. Allison Stokes. To everyone at CNN who invited me to cover the pope, Jeff Zucker, Charlie Moore, Kerry Rubin, Rebecca Kutler, and especially Anderson Cooper. At the New York Times, Stuart Emmrich and Laura Marmor.