Natasha Lunn

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

bout their experiences of love in an email newsletter called Conversations on Love. I’ve listened to people talk about their love for a person, for a city, for a poem, for a tree.

I was obsessed with the idea of love, not the truth of it.

It seems strange to me, how we expect so much from love, and yet devote so little time to understanding it.

On and on it wilts and blooms, the love in all of our lives.

On the surface what we want and need from love are different. But I have found that our individual questions are often rooted in three bigger ones: How do we find love? How do we sustain it? And how do we survive when we lose it?