To separate from love is to live a risk-free life. What’s the point of that sort of life? As I wheeled my electric bike through the park on the way to my writing shed, my hands had turned blue from the cold. I had given up wearing gloves because I was always grappling in the dark for keys. I stopped by the fountain, only to find it had been switched off. A sign from the council read, This fountain has been winterized.

I reckoned that is what had happened to me too.

Simone de Beauvoir knew that a life without love was a waste of time. Her enduring love for Sartre seems to have been contingent on her living in hotels and not making a home with him, which in the 1950s was more radical than I believe even she realized. She remained committed to Sartre being the essential love of her life for fifty-one years, despite their other attachments. She knew she never wanted children or to serve his breakfast or run his errands or pretend she was not intellectually engaged with the world to make herself more loveable to him. She was appalled by middle age, in ways I did not completely understand. All the same, as she had written to the writer Nelson Algren, in the flush of their new love, ‘I want everything from life, I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and have loneliness, to work much and write good books and to travel and enjoy myself…’

And what about the men who, like Algren, wanted home, children and love? In my Boston hotel, I had glimpsed a man sitting with his female companion at a café table overlooking the harbour. He was in love with her, attentive and gentle and kind. She had taken off her sandals and jacket and sunglasses and the gold bracelet on her wrist. While he pressed his lips against the glowing skin of her bare arms, she looked into the distance, and then walked away from his lips and from the sunshine. After a while, he gathered up her sandals, bracelet, sunglasses and bag, his camera, sun cream and phone, and made his way to the table in the shade. Something or someone in his life had made him brave enough to do all the carrying and all the kissing. If he wanted her more than she wanted him, how would she begin that conversation in a way that did not destroy his courage?

Marguerite Duras did not have the ‘fatal patience’ that de Beauvoir rightly thought women who were mothers had learned to their detriment. After Duras wrote Lol Stein, she made a curious remark – she said that she gave herself permission to speak ‘in a sense totally alien to women’. I know what she means. It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them.