Are you now able to see that, whilst you still want a romantic relationship, it’s not a permanent guarantee of happiness?

That part has absolutely sunk in. There is this idea that if you could just get someone to love you then you would be released from the low rattle of unhappiness. Then you find someone who loves you, and you still feel the rattle of unhappiness. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with you. Maybe learning to tolerate that low rattle of unhappiness is part of what reminds you that you’re alive.

As an adult I’ve watched friends marry and divorce. It’s as if I was waiting in a long line, then everybody left the ride and said, ‘That ride sucks.’ But that helped me to understand that the romantic relationship I was yearning for was not going to fix the low rattle of unhappiness. The truth is it’s hard not to have found a relationship and it’s brave to go into a relationship and it’s hard to find one and then to lose it. All of us, at some point, have to learn how to get our hearts broken.

Do we notice these subtle opportunities for love which are woven through our daily lives? I think more often we miss them, as I nearly did. It shouldn’t take a story of loss to make me appreciate a Tuesday morning phone call with my mum, but I’ve found there are few epiphanies in life that lead to an automatic change of habit. Even when we learn a lesson, it’s likely we forget it and have to learn it again. Even when we recognize a mistake, we make the same one a few more times before fully ditching the pattern. This is certainly the way I learnt – and am still learning – that a meaningful life is built on many different forms of love. Not from a seismic turning point, but through a collection of small reminders that nudge me closer to the truth, like a lost boat at sea suddenly steered in the right direction by the wind.

I used to think love was the feeling hanging between me and my mum on that phone call, a mix of what I felt for her and what she felt for me. But now I understand that love was the act of switching the way I responded to the moment; it existed in both the intention and the choice to consciously focus on it. When you understand love in this way – as an action, not a feeling – it’s easier to see why it’s unhelpful to view the absence of one form as a complete lack of it. The best description I’ve found of this error is from psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm, who compares the attitude ‘to that of the man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he has to just wait for the right object, and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it’. Love, by his definition, is ‘a power which produces love’. It is not the object you’re painting, but the process of learning to paint. It’s not admiring flowers from afar, it’s the act of nurturing them so they don’t die. It’s an ‘attitude’, a ‘power of the soul’ or an ‘orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole’.

But how do you commit to actively practising love for people and the world without getting distracted by longing for a form of it you don’t have? I think you plumb the depths of who you are until you find a purpose in life that excites you. You take all the efforts you’ve been pouring into longing, and instead use them to dig deeper for the love that’s already there, hiding right in front of you, so that you can grow it. This doesn’t mean pretending that you don’t want to meet a partner – or have a child or make new friends or find whatever love it is that you’re searching for; it means being brave enough to hope for what you want, but wise enough to know that life is not one love story, but many. It means trying to build love with a partner – if you want one – but also in purposeful solitude, in creating something that others connect to, in a stranger’s kind words, in friendship, in family, and in the sometimes-bright-sometimes-grey sky that’s always been there, all your life. It means understanding, too, that all these forms of love are not given or acquired; they are learnt and earned.

Unexpectedly, this particular birthday turned out to be a night full of romance. Friends and family sang and laughed and danced and wrote Happy Birthday messages on the giant cardboard cut-out of me as a toddler that my parents had blown up into a lifesize version. As I watched them, I saw the love in my mum’s big heart, in my dad’s gentle kindness, in my brother’s deep understanding. It was in my friendships too: in one friend’s sensitivity, in another’s faith. It was in the new experiences I had shared with colleagues and journalism college friends, as I forged a career that meant something to me for the first time, and in the old history I shared with university flatmates, whose hugs still felt like home. Seeing these people sitting side by side, who saw all the versions of me – and I them – reminded me that we were each responsible for tiny pieces of each other’s hearts and happiness. It wasn’t only that this night made me realize life was full of different types of love, but that the capacity to love exists inside each of us – and our task is to tap into it. Instead of waiting for love, I could choose it. I could notice and listen and pay better attention to the people already in my life. I saw then that my search for love had been distracting me from the very thing I was looking for. Instead of asking, ‘Will I ever find love?’ I needed to ask a better question: ‘How could I love better?’ The first part of finding love had been to look inside myself. The second was to practise looking out.

Taking the journey inwards had still been important, because when you don’t understand or value yourself it’s more difficult to generate love for other people. It made me see, too, that I had never really loved the men I’d dated and idealized in my twenties. I had not been invested in helping them grow, or in seeing the whole of who they were, because I was more interested in how I looked in their perception of me. It was a half-hearted version of love, rooted in ego. I resolved to give it up.

The search for any kind of love, I now believe, is a continual process of looking in and out. Looking inwards to understand yourself, to be curious about your needs and desires and gifts and flaws, to develop generosity and self-compassion. Then looking outwards to use the power those things give you to love other people, and the life you are living too. What I had learnt is that you don’t really find love at all; you create it, by understanding that you are part of something bigger. A small speck of colour vital to a picture of life.

For some people, saying, ‘I don’t spontaneously want sex as much, shall we start scheduling it?’ can be difficult. You’re acknowledging a change in your relationship (even if, as you said before, that could be a positive one). Why can that conversation feel so loaded?

The idea of initiating a plan for sex is so fraught. We’re all fragile and fearful of rejection, and it requires great vulnerability to say, ‘If we showed up for sex at three o’clock on Saturday, I’d be glad to be there. I’d put my body in the bed.’ To ask for that is to risk being turned down. And our identity is tied to our success as sexual people. Some heterosexual men, in particular, are taught to believe that the only way they can access love and be fully accepted is by putting their penis in a vagina. So if their partner says no, they’re not just saying no to sex, they’re saying no to their partner’s whole personhood. Sex itself is not a drive, but connection is, and we don’t grant men access to other channels for giving and receiving love. If a man in a heterosexual relationship can recognize that there are other ways he can give and receive love, that would take pressure off of sex. It wouldn’t be as much of an obligation for the woman, because she wouldn’t feel she was rejecting his entire humanity just by saying, ‘I’m too tired for sex.’ That has nothing to do with his humanity, she’s just exhausted.

What do you wish you’d known about sex and desire?

The neuroscience of pleasure. The simple way to think about it is if you’re in a sexy state of mind and your partner tickles you, it could feel good and lead to other things. But if that same person tickles you when you’re pissed off at them, you might want to punch them in the face. It’s the same sensation with the same partner, but your brain interprets it differently because the context is different. So in order to know what pleasure feels like in your body, it’s not just about saying, ‘Touch me here. Don’t touch me that way.’ It’s about creating a context that allows your brain to interpret a sensation – any sensation – as pleasurable.

During our conversation, I was reminded of this quote by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky.’ Like Rilke, Susan helped me to understand that distance in a relationship is not a threat; it is a door to a more rewarding connection.

If someone is self-reflecting and self-regulating, what are the next steps?

I reteach communication (because at that point it’s probably got a bit mean) and negotiation, which allows a couple to see that in most situations, apart from ultimate deal-breakers (for example whether or not you want kids), you can both get what you want in a relationship. Then it’s also the ability to take responsibility for your own feelings. To keep yourself together. To be mature and balanced. To not just think, right, you’re going to have to put up with every single flicker of emotion I have.

I’m not saying we should be able to do this a hundred per cent of the time; we’re not robots. It’s about getting into the habit of thinking, I can feel myself getting angry. It’s fine to have this feeling, and it’s important, because it’s telling me something. But what should I do with the feeling: do I snap at my partner? Do I walk away and slam the door? Do I lash out verbally? And crucially, do I lose the sense of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’? Or, instead, can that person think about how both parties are viewing the situation, and say, ‘Look, I’m feeling angry at the moment. I need to find a way to calm down and then I can listen to you, I can reflect on myself, I can start taking responsibility and we can have a conversation which includes both of us’?

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. That’s why it’s useful to think as both ‘I’ and ‘we’, to live together and apart, to trust the distance between you as individuals and learn to share your life with another person too.

All of this, I think, comes back to a word I never used to associate with love: responsibility. Maybe I’d never considered it before because I’d been too focused on being loved, rather than loving someone, and what that might require. Responsibility is at the root of many of the valuable lessons Susan shared: be as kind to your partner as you would to a stranger. Don’t rely on them to meet all your needs (or to make you happy). See arguments in context. Don’t expect them to put up with every flicker of emotion that you feel. Sift through your own feelings first.

My earlier attempts at love had been a falling – a rushing, crazy, forceful feeling that took control of me, overshadowed everything else. I was not answerable to it, or accountable to it; I was lost in its drama. So at first I did not understand what the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm meant when he said that love is ‘a “standing in”, not a “falling for” ’. But this, I think, is the process Susan describes: standing in love. Developing the emotional maturity it takes to remain steady, to hold your balance, to have control over your position. To give the person you love the gift of spaciousness. To not lean wholly on them, but to stand beside them.