Conversations on Love

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.

This makes me think that one of the most important things in love is memory. We have to remember to keep up the little acts that say ‘I’m here’: to post the birthday card, to look into someone’s eyes, to call, to kiss, to hug, to ask questions and to say ‘I love you’ – and not in a throwaway way. Then to remember the big things: to tell the truth, to accept impermanence, to retain separateness, to see beyond ourselves, to understand that, although other people’s flaws are annoying, so are ours; and to keep catching ourselves.

I am a fairly grounded, well-rounded person; I don’t need a hero. If I do meet someone, he will be a normal human being who is trying to figure out his way through the world, who is flawed and who will make mistakes, just as I will.

Because it is crazy, if you think about it, to decide to commit to another person even though you have no clue who each of you will be in ten, twenty, thirty years’ time. You make a pact to build a life with someone without knowing what that life will look like. Without knowing who will get sick or who will lose their job, whose sex drive will change or whose in-laws might need regular care. This is what we do when we begin a relationship: we commit to something unknowable.

This is what I am trying to find out too. Is love stronger than the fear of uncertainty? Than the fear of change? Than the fear of death? Answering these questions is a never-ending task, and this is one of the greatest lessons I have learnt: love is a lifelong project, a story that we can’t skip to the end of. How lucky are we, to know we will never finish it? Because there is never a final page, only a series of beginnings. This is one of them.

I remember praying one day, and speaking to God, and saying that if my success was going to come at the price of my spirituality, then I didn’t want it. I would rather have peace and self-knowledge than be constantly struggling to succeed within a structure that is set up to keep you wanting more and more.

Even through teen angst and my lonely twenties, even when friends or family felt uncertain, God has been solid and consistent in a way that absolutely nothing else in life has. I know it’s not a fashionable thing to say.

If I do meet someone, he will be a normal human being who is trying to figure out his way through the world, who is flawed and who will make mistakes, just as I will.

Part of that lesson was finding a love story with my friends in my twenties, when I realized how profound, heartfelt, generous and consistent those friendships could be. Rain or shine, two o’clock in the morning, whatever we needed, we were there to talk each other through it. Those friends encouraged me to interrogate who I was as a person: what I believed, why I believed it.

She finds it everywhere: in work, in faith, in family, in friendships and in her continued investment in self-understanding and philosophy.