Natasha Lunn

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.

They had less time, so they appreciated it more; I had too much of it to fill, so appreciated it less. I knew time was a precious thing to be used more productively: I was alive, I could do anything, write, volunteer, start yoga, go to a gallery, a pottery class, somewhere I
might make new friends. I resented time for underlining my loneliness, and I resented myself for wasting it.

But perhaps I would not tell her, even if I could, because to do so would be to steal the strange, complicated, sometimes tiring gifts of the unknown. The thrill of all the places she has yet to go, all the faces she has yet to know.

Maybe, then, this is how you try to bear the burden of the mystery with grace: by finding humility where you once saw self-pity, and opportunity where you once saw absence. By saying, ‘Even if I don’t get what I want, I have a good life,’ then paying closer attention to the small details that make that
life beautiful. And by never forgetting that not knowing what will happen next also means that anything could.

But stepping back and getting a little loose around it, and thinking, this is how it’s supposed to be, can make you happier. You’re living inside the romance of longing instead of inside the pain of it. It’s also useful to recognize that intensity doesn’t have to mean sadness, and longing doesn’t have to mean desperation. Longing can actually be a generative stance that’s lovely to feel.

Partly because there’s a way in which he always feels new to me. Just when I think, I know this guy really well, he changes: a new part of him emerges that I hadn’t known before. Figuring out who he is now is deeply interesting to me.

The truth is you don’t ever really choose a person, because they change, and your lives do too. So when you’re choosing a partner what you’re really choosing is how a person weathers change. You’re choosing how you weather change with and alongside them.

Like you, your partner is always work in progress. As someone who loves them, your job is to keep knowing them, to keep being curious.

When a day ends, there’s no one that I want to tell things to the way I want to tell them to him.

The interesting thing about marriage is you commit to the idea of getting to know those corners, and of really looking at them when they develop into a different thing.