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.