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.