There will be shiny pavement kisses and painfully slow taxi rides. There will be orgasms and diarrhoea, promotions and debt, tricky relatives and attractive strangers and claustrophobic, mundane days; and we have to find a way to keep connecting with those we love – and trying to understand ourselves – through all of it.

Susan pointed out a useful contradiction in love: if you lose a sense of yourself as an individual it can damage a relationship, but if you can’t accept that your needs and wants are not the only story, then it will be difficult to understand your partner’s perspective.

What do you wish you’d known about finding love?

Arguing itself is not the problem, it’s the attitude to arguing that can be the real issue.

And that things would work out or they wouldn’t, and even then, that would be fine too. This black and white model of ‘it’s got to be like this and then it will be perfect’ just doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter who you meet or when you meet them; there’s pain and joy on each side of the ledger. So don’t stick rigidly to one story about what your lif

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

two types of suffering: the pain we feel from experiencing loss and the pain we can inflict upon ourselves if we get stuck in a self-pitying

smart – to work, work, work at it.

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