Conversations on Love

‘Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.’

When I asked psychiatrist Dr Megan Poe why people lose their sense of self in relationships, she said it’s sometimes because they’re trying to ‘echo-locate the other and not reveal the self’ and merge with them.

love is not a narrow thing. That love is what makes us care, connects us to each other and the world. That love is a quest, a promise, a home. It’s the force we create to reach each other, with cups of tea and tenderness, with humour and ‘I’m sorry’s; and it’s a world we create with another person, one truth at a time.

The challenges have shifted in friendships as well: more of my friends are miscarrying, and I have to find ways to sensitively show up for them, while allowing space for any complex feelings they might have now that I’m a mother. Love will always flow through our lives in this inconsistent, unknowable way, and we cannot press pause on the joyful bits, nor fast-forward the suffering. All we can do is keep noticing when there is an imbalance, keep adjusting our efforts to make sure the people we love know that they are important to us.

In my twenties, friendship was effortless and romantic relationships required work. In my early thirties, marriage felt easy but I had to put more effort into friendship.

Love is a frequency we can either choose to tune into or ignore.’ We can decide to move through the world in a loving way.

So my love for Joni folded out into my life in the same way as it had for her father: slowly and steadily, deepening with time and knowledge, until it was as much a part of me as my organs.

There can be no way of knowing if the relationship will survive, if the adoption will go through, if a parent will live a long life, or if the next person we give our heart to will treat it with care.

It’s very romantic to me that what you’re signing up for are all of those hard things: the work of long-term love, the inevitable loss, the decision not to leave when things get tough, the beauty of suffering together. The romance is actually in the hard part, not in the kiss.

We might avoid talking about death because we can’t bear to think about losing the people we love, when actually, not talking about it is one of the reasons we can take them for granted every day. Perhaps by facing the truth – that, if we’re lucky, we get to exist alongside them in this world for decades, not centuries – we will remember to look into their faces more than our phone screens.