I think about what love looked like for me this year.

This year love is gross. It’s the slug trails of Vega and Joni’s snot on Dan’s black t-shirt, cleaning sick out of car seatbelt buckles and scraping cold fish pie off the floor. One day Dan comes home to find me holding a potty of wee next to a urine colour chart on my phone to assess if it could symbol dehydration. We lock eyes and laugh, and I remember the grossness can be funny too.

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Love is physical. The ache in my dad’s arms as he digs a grave for our family’s dog after she dies, the warmth of Dan’s legs wrapped around mine under the duvet, or Joni’s soft, little hand forever reaching for mine on the walk to nursery.

Love is asking difficult questions. Why do I miss Dan all day and then snap at him when he gets home? Why am I less patient with Joni when she reminds me of myself? Why does feeling guilty about the lack of time I’ve invested in a friendship make me less, not more, likely to reply to a message?

Love is also noticing love. Two friends gossiping in a changing room. The smell of my school friend Caroline’s detergent on the clothes she passes on from her daughters to mine, that reminds me of being in her teenage bedroom, getting ready for a disco.

Love is the ache of missing things, too: birthdays, nights out, stories of the morning after. It’s the way my friend Lucy says, ‘You know you can always slot right back in.’ Things don’t always have to be true to be meaningful.

Love is saying, ‘I’m so tired’ so many times a day that you ban each other from saying it, and then sending each other links to The Beatles song ‘I’m so tired’ instead.

Love is announcing to your family, possibly quite petulantly, ‘I just need some alone time!!’ Then going to the cinema solo on a Friday night and wishing you could talk to your husband about the film as the credits roll. It’s wanting the opposite of things at the same time, all the time, and then feeling deeply loved when another person understands that without pointing out the contradictions.

Love is knowing how lucky you are every day, but still allowing space for truth – even resentment – inside that gratitude. It’s remembering that, even when it makes you look terrible, honesty is the glue.

Love is saying, ‘I’ve heard this one before,’ as your partner tells the same story for what feels like the hundredth time. And then, when they stop telling it, feeling what you think is guilt, but is actually regret, because you know that hearing the people you tell love the same stories again and again is a pretty good way to spend your days.

Love is longing for time to stop taking moments from you as you’re living them. You watch the video of you and your partner dancing like young lovers and realise it was yesterday and seven years ago. You look at your little girl asleep in a grownup bed for the first time and think, where did my baby go? You try to take a mental video of the sweetest moments, then write them all down, as if that process might make them last a little longer. As if it might allow you to cheat life, so that you can still feel the soft warmth of a one year old’s cheek on yours long after they’ve grown into an adult who has stopped calling your house ‘home’.

Love is missing someone when they’re around. For all the new connection we explore as parents, some days it feels like Dan and I are walking in the same direction on opposite sides of a river. We shout instructions back and forth across the banks, united by shared purpose, somehow always keeping in step and rhythm. But I miss walking on the same side of the river. Or at least, being able to have a conversation about each other’s day when we get home from work. Instead we shout ‘what?’ from the bathroom and ‘I can’t hear you’ from the bedroom, as we wrestle a child each into their pyjamas. One day I’ll miss these days too.

Love is a way of seeing. Even on days when I feel worn out, as all of us do, there’s a point when I am able to see the sum of a day’s good and bad parts clearly. Or hear it, like a song with some individual notes that sound off key but somehow transcendent when they’re played alongside all the sweeter ones.

This feels like my challenge in love this year: to hear the full song. I think about this when I look at my Christmas tree. Before we got it I scrolled instagram to see my perfect tree: huge, bushy, covered in velvet bows and sparkly lights. Our tree isn’t like that. It’s small and sparse, with no decorations on the bottom branches (Vega has either pulled them off, broken or chewed them). Instead of velvet bows there’s a collection of partly broken things the girls made at nursery with cellotape and blurry photos of their faces in. It’s wonky and chaotic! And it makes me happy every time I look at it. Now I try to see my life in the same way: maybe not as evenly distributed and sparkly as I’d expected, but sometimes more joyful because of the lack of those things, not despite them.

from A conversation on love with Cheryl Strayed (part one) by Natasha Lunn