One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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Some loves belong to the life we once wanted. Others find us in the life we eventually choose for ourselves. Neither has to be less true.

There is something undeniably interesting about the premise of One True Loves: you lose the person you believe is the love of your life, somehow survive that grief, fall in love again, and then discover that the person you mourned is still alive.

It sounds like the kind of story that should emotionally destroy you.

For me, it didn't.

I enjoyed the dramatic premise, but I never felt intensely about this book. Nothing really surprised me, and I don't mean that I knew which man Emma would choose. I simply knew that eventually she would have to choose one life or the other. There was no revelation or plot turn that genuinely caught me off guard.

And knowing what Taylor Jenkins Reid can do as a writer, this felt like one of her more regular stories. The idea had complexity. I just don't think the execution reached all of it.

Still, Emma grew on me.

Emma, Before She Knew Emma

At the beginning, I didn't think very much of Emma.

She seemed to let other people dictate what her life should look like. First her parents and her sister, then Jesse.

When she and Jesse leave home, I don't necessarily see two soulmates recognizing something extraordinary in each other. I see two young people who wanted the same thing at exactly the same time.

They wanted out.

They wanted freedom, travel, adventure, and the ability to make careless decisions without thinking about settling down. They found someone willing to escape alongside them, and they fell deeply in love while doing it.

That love was real.

But I don't think Emma was ever quite the adventurer Jesse was.

She fell in love with him, but I also think she fell in love with the idea of escaping home with someone she believed was the love of her life.

And then Jesse was gone.

Ironically, it was only after losing him that Emma began making decisions that truly belonged to her.

Going Home Is Not the Same as Going Backward

This became one of my favorite parts of Emma's story.

She returns to the hometown she once wanted to escape. She reconnects with her family. She falls in love with the family bookstore she never thought she wanted.

And none of that felt like failure to me.

Emma was not returning home because she couldn't survive without Jesse. She had already survived something unimaginable. She returned because she chose to, and once there, she discovered that the things she had spent years overlooking could actually make her happy.

Sometimes we spend so much time looking for something different that we fail to appreciate what has always been in front of us.

Her relationship with her sister stayed with me for that reason too. I found her sister surprisingly wise and supportive. She was there for Emma without needing to make Emma's decisions for her.

And somewhere inside this new life, there was Sam.

Sam Was Never Just the Safe Choice

It would be very easy to reduce the two men to opposites.

Jesse is adventure.

Sam is safety.

I don't see them that way.

Sam is pure kindness to me. He is patient, loving, and reassuring. But Emma doesn't love him simply because he offers her a safe place after tragedy.

She had already created that place for herself.

She chose home. She found a life she liked there. Sam happened to be part of it.

And I believe she genuinely loved him because, in some way, she always had.

Calling Sam boring because Jesse is adventurous also feels unfair. They are simply two very different men. The more important question is not which one has the more exciting personality. It is which one actually matches the person Emma has become.

For me, that's Sam.

But Jesse Was a True Love Too

I don't believe there is only one true love.

And I don't think Emma choosing Sam means we have to rewrite her history with Jesse and decide that what they had wasn't real.

Jesse was there when Emma lived.

He was there when she left everything familiar behind and went into the unknown. They traveled, explored, grew up together, and loved each other.

He was one of her true loves.

He just wasn't the love that belonged to the rest of her life.

And perhaps that is the most interesting thing One True Loves has to say about love: something can be completely real and still end.

Life Stopped for Jesse. It Didn't Stop for Everyone Else.

I felt a lot of compassion for Jesse when he returned.

He endured something unimaginable, and then he came home expecting to return to the life he had left behind.

Except that life no longer existed.

For Jesse, everything had stopped. For everyone else, time had continued moving.

Emma had grieved him. She had changed. She had rebuilt herself. She had fallen in love again.

And Jesse came home still loving a woman who wasn't there anymore.

I understood him, but he also frustrated me.

From very early after his return, even something as ordinary as expecting to have breakfast together felt a little cocky to me. There was an assumption that their intimacy could simply restart. At times, the way he pressured Emma felt selfish.

But it is difficult to judge him without also feeling sorry for him.

Of course he wanted his wife back.

Of course he wanted the life that had kept existing in his mind while he was trying to survive.

His suffering explains his expectations. It just doesn't mean Emma owes him the person she used to be.

And that may be where the tragedy of Jesse really lies.

He didn't only have to accept that Emma loved someone else.

He had to grieve a life that everyone else had already grieved years before.

A Dramatic Story That Didn't Give Me Dramatic Feelings

This is where One True Loves ultimately fell short for me.

There is so much here.

Death. Survival. Grief. A second chance at love. A husband returning from the dead. Family. Identity. Two genuine loves. The impossible question of whether we owe something to the people we used to be.

And yet, I finished the book without particularly intense feelings about it.

I was happy.

I was nostalgic.

And that was mostly it.

Taylor Jenkins Reid is capable of more complex writing than what I found here. I liked the dramatic storyline, but I didn't love the book. The premise fascinated me more than the execution did.

Still, I appreciate what Emma's story ultimately represents.

She survives.

She discovers that losing one life does not mean there isn't another one waiting to be lived. She learns that home can look completely different when we return to it as different people. And she proves that loving someone new doesn't erase the person we loved before.

Both Jesse and Sam were true loves.

One belonged to the Emma who wanted to leave.

The other belonged to the Emma who chose where she wanted to stay.

And maybe neither love needs to diminish the other.

What One True Loves Reminded Me

Life is fragile.

We can experience enormous pain and still experience enormous joy afterward. We can endure more than we think we can when we decide to keep going.

And sometimes, after searching so far away for the life we think we want, we return home and finally recognize the value of what was there all along.

Family.

Home.

Love.

The ordinary things waiting patiently in front of us.