Before he and I kissed for the first time, the boy said ‘you are a very nice girl.’ He said it slowly, a ialking-in-his-sleep mumble but his eyes in touch with mine. The kissing and sex part of our encounter was clumsy and unremarkable, but the whole evening is drenched in romantic feeling for me. I never saw him again. I want another night like that. That look in a person’s eyes just before they kiss you, I want to see that again. A kind of thickening of the atmosphere, as though you’ve entered personal mutual weather conditions. I remember one time, out with friends in Brighton, a friend of a friend turning slowly on their heel, wondering whether to kiss me. I didn’t notice in time. 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 was seeing a therapist a couple of years back, she asked me to write a list of what I would like in a potential partner and to bring it to our next session. I was round my friend Ella’s house for dinner, and she offered to help me with it. Even coming up with a list of things that were important for me felt hard. Some of it was the defeated part of me that assumed I would never get what I wanted – being madly desired was something I felt was important, but I also knew it had to be less important than it had been in the past – but some of it was simply not knowing. Ella wrote things down as I thought out loud. I remember saying ‘someone who goes outdoors’ and ‘someone who is enthusiastic about something’ – my bar set very low. But a lot of the other things I said were borrowed ideas from positive representations of romance, or just too generic. It made me think of a list Roddy once wrote when I asked him why he liked me and how it didn’t have a specificity that made me feel seen, it was all ‘blonde, curvy, likes music, Geordie’ etc.

Instead, I have wanted to be changed. To become or resemble an ideal of someone’s romantic partner, always looking within myself to identify what it was that got in the way of love, the tiny adjustments I could make to fulfil another’s vision. My eyes were so trained on my own imperfect state that I failed to consider the imperfection of the romantic partners I sought. If I think back to the man I had the affair with, the desire for him to like me like me – to see me as valuable to him beyond sexual pleasure – was so strong I didn’t even ask myself if I liked him. Once the spell was broken, I realised I didn’t. He would text me now and then over the years since we were involved, telling me he missed me, talking like friends. There was no friendship there for me. He was boring, arrogant, talked down to me. And who would blame him when I so clearly placed myself in service to him, failed to stand up for things that I desperately wanted, became oddly characterless in the face of his personality.

[...] Sex, I miss, but I’m aware some of the things I might want from a romantic partner are infantile. Someone to be able to be a brat to without consequences, someone to baby me with soft words and the tucking in of a blanket when I feel vulnerable and unwilling to be accountable for myself. I wail that if I don’t get a romantic partner, I’ll never spot that lump that needs to be checked out and then die. Then other things I want are more than equalled by my closest friendships – emotional intimacy, making plans for the weekend, for short trips, for things we want to celebrate, and the foundational support of curiosity, feedback and encouragement that helps the people we love go after things they want.

I need to cross a threshold – from the place I am in now, where I can still feel confused, ashamed, embarrassed, angry even, that romantic love is not part of my life, to a place where I care less about what other people might think about me and don’t punish myself when I do care, judge myself less for always wanting more. I have to own that romantic love is a present desire, not consigned to some fantasy me.

It wasn’t until recently that I paid attention to a line in Blue ’s first song that goes, ‘I love you when I forget about me.’ In the last few years, I’ve come to realise that in the romantic loving I’ve done, I’ve often obliterated my sense of self: I’ve not located my needs, let alone asked for them to be met. I’ve just doggedly pursued a kind of abstract reciprocation – have I been noticed or have I not? – and because I’ve not paid enough attention to what I want, the vast contrast between what I want and what I’ve received hasn’t been as visible to me. Romantic love transformed me but not in the way I’d dreamed it would. It made me forget myself, not to my self’s flourishing advantage – connected, inspired, courageous – but to my detriment. My resilience, self-image and facility for care scrawny with neglect.

[...] That’s the risk of abundance. It can be easy to find it lacking. A birthday party where you’re sore someone didn’t come rather than delighting in all who did. A canyon of want that is impossible to fill.