While I was having these conversations, love was leaking in and out of my life too. The interviews expanded my idea of what love could be, and what it could look like, but it wasn’t until I started trying to conceive after a miscarriage that I began to see how much more I had to learn. Because although I thought I’d outgrown my propensity towards longing, there were many similarities between my longing for a baby in my thirties and my longing for a boyfriend the decade before. Both made me more focused on the love I didn’t have rather than the love I did. Both sometimes tipped me towards self-pity. Both made me compare myself to others and feel like there was an area of happiness in life I was excluded from. I used to look longingly at couples holding hands on Sundays, but now I fixated on women pushing buggies round the local park. The thing I was longing for had changed, but the restless, searching feelings were the same. I understood then there would always be something to long for in love if I continued to see it in this narrow way – a boyfriend, a marriage, a baby, a second baby, a grandchild, another decade on this Earth with my mother, father or husband. So I began to ask more questions. I began to write this book.

In a commencement speech at Douglass College in 1977, Adrienne Rich said that responsibility to yourself ‘means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.” ’ When I looked up the original Jane Eyre line I found the one that precedes Rich’s quote: ‘I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me to do so.’ Reading both lines together, I realized I’d done the opposite to Jane. I’d lost sight of my inward treasure (and therefore my ability to walk away) and, as a result, had traded in my self-respect. And for what? Not for love, but for a gut feeling that told me the men I dated were extraordinary humans, always cleverer and more interesting than I was. (It was no coincidence that I often dated journalists, advertising creatives and writers – all careers I wanted but had not at that point been brave enough to pursue.) It wasn’t until I interviewed clinical psychologist Dr Frank Tallis years later that I understood how misleading that gut feeling could be. Because, as Tallis told me, we often ‘aggrandize our own confusion or lack of insight’ when we have no evidence of real intimacy. We reach for words like ‘chemistry’ or ‘gut feeling’ because we have nothing tangible to base a feeling on – no examples of kindness or care or connection, just a magnetic draw. Tallis said this lack of evidence ‘becomes fuel for romantic mysticism. You think, I can’t explain it, so therefore it must be fate, it must be profound. But that’s just one false inference feeding another, and each inference takes you further away from reality.’ As I listened to his explanation I winced with recognition, remembering all the times I felt mystically drawn to someone without any real knowledge of who they were. But I did not understand this at the time, and so I continued to erase pieces of myself to sustain relationships that had no roots in the real world.

A year later we went for the drink which would be our last alone. On the pavement outside a Soho bar afterwards, I saw that somewhere in the night air between us was a decision that wasn’t really about the person standing in front of me at all. It was between immaturity and growing up, between fantasy and reality. Did I want to keep avoiding intimacy and lean back into the safety of a nostalgic crush that didn’t require me to do anything differently? No. I wanted to form real relationships that existed in the real world. To do so would require courage and self-understanding, maybe a little loneliness, and a lot of responsibility. Part of that responsibility meant not calling Ben for attention whenever I felt alone. It meant understanding the role I was playing in idealizing men instead of really seeing them, and finding the inward treasure I had lost in the process. It meant, as bell hooks wrote in All About Love, wanting to know ‘the meaning of love beyond the realm of fantasy – beyond what we imagine can happen’. I still believed the act of showing yourself fully to a new person was a risk, but somewhere inside me a fresh knowledge was unfolding: that the risk of not doing so – of never being seen, of never expressing needs, of never giving and accepting real love – was far greater. After years of feeling passive in love, I understood then that we do have a choice, even if it’s difficult to see. Mine was this: to stay in the fantasies inside my head, or to climb out and live.

[...] It’s difficult to know the difference between forcing yourself to do something that’s not good for you, and being scared of doing something that is good for you. If the fear is excitement, then feel it and do it anyway. But if it’s about the massive amount of willpower that’s required to do something out of societal pressure, then that’s different.

On the drive home I thought about how the unknowns of my life I was thrashing against were possibilities too. I looked back on all I did not know as a toddler, as a child, as a teenager; all the wonderful stretches of life ahead. I wondered if the ugliest shade of unhappiness comes, not directly from what you lack, but from wanting a different life to the one you’re living. Perhaps that feeling is not a state of longing after all, but a way of seeing. A choice disguised in a lack of one.

I needed to ask, what would a better way of seeing look like? And how do you move forward when uncertainty tempts you towards cynicism? The answers, I think, are in something the author Sheila Heti told me in an interview when I asked her about the question of whether or not to have children. The important thing, she explained, was not to make the ‘right’ or ‘best’ decision, but ‘to closely bind yourself to whatever you’re living’. She said, ‘You make your life meaningful by applying meaning to it – it’s not just inevitably meaningful as a result of the choices you’ve made.’ We were discussing this in the context of choice, but I think it applies to circumstance too. The romantic relationship or family I wanted would not make my life meaningful; only I could.

What does it mean to you to be a good friend?

The first thing, I think, is to ask yourself that question. To me it’s about demonstrating love, investing time, having an awareness of people – their history, their desires, what they need. And seeing and accepting the different facets of who they are. It’s also about finding romance in your relationship. I do woo my friends. I tell them how amazing they are because I want them to feel good about themselves. When we end a phone call, I don’t say, ‘Love you, bye,’ I say, ‘I love you.’ When we’re apart, I tell them how much I miss them, and when we’re together, how beautiful they look. I’m big on birthdays too, because I had a work friend who, after I’d had a horrible break-up, took on the role of my boyfriend on my birthday. She knew that no one else was going to plan anything, so she organized a day of nice things. We still do that for each other’s birthdays: plan an itinerary of things and spend the day looking after the other person. Little rituals show someone that their friendship is important to you.

Speaking to Candice made me think Alain de Botton was right: it is a tragic misalignment, how we’ve relegated friendship to a lesser form of love. Because whether you are in a relationship or not, friends have access to parts of you that no one else does. How, then, do you pull friendship back to its rightful position in the hierarchy of love? I think with tiny rituals and reminders. For Candice, that’s planning a birthday itinerary every year. For war reporter Janine di Giovanni, it’s breakfast with a friend on Skype on Sunday mornings, from different countries. For me and Marisa, it’s regular dates in Pizza Express, where we know the menu so well we don’t have to waste any time looking at it. It’s wearing the gold bracelet she once bought with the words ‘May we always dance around the refrigerator light’ engraved on the inside. She gave it to me when we lived just streets away and our lives were intertwined. Now that we don’t live nearby, it’s a reminder to find other ways to close the gap. A small symbol that means, Let’s keep on prioritizing each other.

Bill and I spend a ton of time together, but we accept each other’s limitations every day. Being in a good relationship requires that. There’s always going to be stress on your day-to-day life, which makes it easy to push a partner away. To me, it’s like you build a private religion with another person, and honesty and vulnerability have to be a part of it. You have to revisit what you each need and are afraid of. And tolerating someone else’s vulnerability is a challenge if you’re a tough person. I’m pretty tough, but I still have to encourage my husband to look at how he feels and unpack it, and then be patient with what he finds. He is seven years older than me and loves to complain about his back. I have terrible neck issues too, so I understand, but I don’t complain. The problem is, if you say to yourself, ‘I don’t want to hear about your pain because I don’t complain about mine,’ then that’s the death of love. You have to be tolerant and give the other person what they need. If you don’t do that, it’s easy for both of you to drift into your own worlds and to stop sharing yourselves. There is a callus that’s always threatening to build up, and you have to break it down as a team somehow, again and again.

What advice would you give someone who hasn’t met a partner when they hoped to, and is feeling exhausted by trying to find love?

When you’re in the throes of obsession, there’s a possibility that opens up every second you give up. And it’s not giving up on ever finding a partner, or having a baby, or whatever it is that you want. It’s giving up on trying to control what happens. When you’re trying to manage your obsession around something you want really badly, it’s soothing to try to let go of your sense that it is all up to you to make it happen. It’s easy – as a person who works hard and is smart – to work, work, work at it. But stepping back and getting a little loose around it, and thinking, this is how it’s supposed to be, can make you happier. You’re living inside the romance of longing instead of inside the pain of it. It’s also useful to recognize that intensity doesn’t have to mean sadness, and longing doesn’t have to mean desperation. Longing can actually be a generative stance that’s lovely to feel.