Is it possible that life without romantic love isn’t so bad? Is it possible we can take as much pleasure in other loves, find new ways of incorporating romantic feeling into our lives, assign importance to crossing over thresholds that romantic love has abandoned? All those things could be true. But if they are, is it OK to still want romantic love

I wanted love so badly I persuaded myself things were present in our relationship that were not. Every word of rejection, denial and disinterest was reshaped by me into something more ambiguous, more promising. I told myself that the fact we were having sex, that he was staying with me, made what he said about his feelings towards me unreliable. He

Often what was tearing at our hearts was what he described as ‘the givers of crumbs’, romantic objects that made us feel grateful for the other’s scraps of attention.

You never imagine you’ve used up all your life’s eyes-before-a-kiss moments. Very occasionally I feel a theatrical stab in my heart, I don’t want to live if they’re all gone.

When I called Katia to say thank you, she told me she’d been thinking about how when you’re single you don’t usually get the huge, special presents that people in relationships sometimes give each other, that they labour over and save up for. She wanted me to have that experience and grant herself the pleasure of giving. A grand, loving gesture was

The older I’ve become the more appalled I am by my own pliability.

My ‘you’ could be liquid, flowing from one thing to another. It could contain many people and things, be so vast as to be God-sized, an oceanic you. Or it could be small and exact like a square of pure pigment, with a startling itselfness, which once it goes beyond me can transform all it touches.

One of the cruelties of femme presentation in the world is how you can never catch your own beauty in the moment. Like the way I can now see, really see, without it being something I might have said in the hope the saying could make it so, how all young women are beautiful, how the youth in young women is so impossibly lovely. When you’re in your

Absence of romantic love in my life had created its own awkward space in me. Like a corner of a room you cannot find a comfortable use for, a deficient space grasping for its own utility. And I sense other people can see this and that it makes them uncomfortable. They seek to solve it (‘get on the dating apps!’) or to refute romance as goal (‘I