According to a study done by Psychology Today, less than ten percent of people in the world marry with love, while the other ninety percent marry because of external circumstances. External circumstances include they don’t want to be alone, have been forced by an arranged marriage, or are not completely in love. After looking at this statistic it seems that people do not try to find the one person they could be happy with. A theory could be that when someone thinks too much about having to love someone, they could end up forcing themselves to love the person they meet. “The Rememberer” by Aimee Bender suggests that love should not be overcomplicated with thought. When Annie talks about the first time that they made love: “… I left the lights on, kept my eyes wide open and concentrated really hard on letting go; then I noticed this eyes were open too… we sat down on the floor and had an hour long conversation about poetry” (1). Annie expresses that a task such as sex becomes difficult for them since they have a hard time letting go of the pensive side they have. For some people this does not require much thought; yet other people find it easy to love and this sometimes makes them prone to loving many people. In despair to try to keep her lover, Annie makes love to Ben and hopes to stop his reverse evolution.
Bender does not indicate what Annie does for a living or if she has any interests, but shows that Ben: missed lunch with clients, his special order book on civilization arrived and needs to be picked up at the bookstore, and has Annie tell callers that he has a strange sickness (1). This shows the reader that Ben attempts to be more social and less cerebral to increase his relationship with people. When writing about Ben’s changes Bender has a purpose as to why she chose these animals. After analyzing the animals and what they mean, they all represent a part of Ben. The sea turtle and ape mean that Ben has to calm down and think less; the baboon means that Ben has to express his mood more either with Annie or with society. The salamander represents Ben before he starts changing. His change worried Annie so much that, “[She] went to the old biology teacher at the community college and asked him for an approximate timeline of [their] evolution…” (1). Annie wishes to know the timeline of Ben’s evolution, but without proper examination the biology teacher’s timeline was off by a lot. Although if Annie really loved or cared about Ben, she would not have cared how much it costs to see how much time Ben has or how they could stop his evolution.
As to why Annie remains with Ben through his change but then dumps him as soon as she feels she reaches her limit remains unknown. Annie does not explain why she leaves him but she explains her limits: “This is the limit of my limits: here it is. … I cannot bear to look down into the water and not be able to find him at all, to search the tiny waves with a microscope lens and locate my lover, the one-celled wonder…” (2). These limits can be seen as unacceptable to someone who had found their love and wishes to remain with them for the rest of their life. Annie can be making this claim to make her feel better after she feels she has dealt enough with Ben. While Annie claims to only be able to see Ben through a