ONE SUNNY SPRING Sunday in 2021, when my son, Leo, was six, we ran into one of his neighbourhood friends, Izzie, in the alley behind our house. It had been at least a year of rolling lockdowns and school closures, and the kids seemed unusually delighted to behold each other in real life.
They decided they wanted to play but what? “I have a great idea,” Leo said. “Let’s fall in love! Do you want to fall in love this afternoon? Is that a great idea?” Izzie took a half-second to consider this proposition, then replied: “No.” She wanted to play tag.
Leo has always been the kind of child who looks for close connections, often (apparently) in the wrong places. It sometimes feels as though he’s been looking for a soulmate since he was a toddler. When Leo was in preschool, I’d ask him every day when I picked him up: “Who did you play with today?”
“Neve,” he’d say of a child he had befriended. “Only Neve.”
The conversation went on like this for months, until one day the script changed: “Did you play with Neve today?” I asked. “No,” he answered in his tiny three-year-old voice, “Neve needed her space today.” (Neve was two.)
Sometime in early 2022, he presumably took this line of love-related questioning to the playground because, sometime around his seventh birthday, he came home from school and immediately grabbed his iPad to ask Siri: “Can you fall in love when you’re just a kid?”
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