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.