Solitude, by contrast, is a state of peaceful aloneness … it is an opportunity for self-reflection and a chance to connect to ourselves without distraction or disturbance.’

You like or love someone when you like or love yourself when you’re with them – and that takes a long time to know. You have to let them in.

far down the line. It hasn’t always been this way: in early-nineteenth-century Germany having a good friend was seen as more important than having a lover, and much closer to the roots of happiness.

Maybe not having something you want wakes you up to another kind of romance. And when life forces you to live in the intensity of the

also a chance to develop the inner resources and love that will serve you well in the years ahead.

She also reminded me that, as much as love involves consciousness, part of it requires us to close our eyes and jump without a plan. And the fact that we took that leap, without knowing that everything would work out? Perhaps that act of faith, of hope, might carry us through tougher times, when we look back and marvel at it, and think, how little

‘love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.’ She’s right – we achieve love by overcoming our narcissism.

Alain convinced me that searching for love from a place of fear was not a good beginning to any love story. It meant motivations were often selfish – to avoid loneliness; to outsource happiness – and would lead in the wrong direction. As the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck wrote, ‘If being loved is your goal, you will fail to achieve it.’

Every relationship – not just