These are all acts of love. And love, by its very definition, always entails a surrender of independence.

You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering.

Here, then, is the conundrum we face. Our surprisingly deep discontent leads us to lock our hearts onto things with profound intensity. The ancients wisely taught that the only way to avoid unhappiness is to avoid this “love as attachment,” that is, to attach ourselves so powerfully and exclusively to an object or person that we cannot imagine life

Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead’.

But if you avoid marriage simply because you don’t want to lose your freedom, that is one of the worst things you can do to your heart. C. S. Lewis put it vividly: