Natasha Lunn

When I asked psychiatrist Dr Megan Poe why people lose their sense of self in relationships, she said it’s sometimes because they’re trying to ‘echo-locate the other and not reveal the self’ and merge with them.

Our story existed in ambiguity, and in all the things we would never say.

How many of us have these stories of adolescent infatuation, in which longing is more important than knowing, and fantasy trumps reality? This kind of young love is often
constructed with beautiful intensity, which is understandable in your teenage years, when you are rich in time and ruled by hormones. Maybe such fixation is even a form of creativity – how a youthful imagination can take the scant details of an ordinary connection and build another world inside it.

Moving through the motions of intimacy with this dread pulling at the back of my mind was an anxious state to exist in, always suspecting that a person did not want to be with me but being too afraid to ask. It meant I got so good at pretending I didn’t need anything that I forgot how to be myself.

What do you wish you’d known about finding love?

It’s like mixing paint: sometimes when you mix two people together they make a horrible colour. Some people do bring out the absolute worst colours in you and, if that’s the case, it’s the relationship that’s flawed, not you. You’re not meant to lose sleep or cry over love. You shouldn’t have to fight for it. If it feels like a fight, don’t waste your time.

If you don’t like being alone, you don’t like it, and that’s all right. Forcing yourself to do something when every cell in your body is screaming ‘no’ just leads to panic. 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.

This was how I spent the twilight of my twenties: always believing I was just on the edge of meeting someone, seeing opportunities everywhere, then feeling a little pathetic when they never quite materialized in reality. The searching was a constant distraction, as if talking to a friend at a party and looking over their shoulder at who might be coming through the door next. Except, instead of a conversation, I was missing my life.

They had less time, so they appreciated it more; I had too much of it to fill, so appreciated it less. I knew time was a precious thing to be used more productively: I was alive, I could do anything, write, volunteer, start yoga, go to a gallery, a pottery class, somewhere I
might make new friends. I resented time for underlining my loneliness, and I resented myself for wasting it.

But perhaps I would not tell her, even if I could, because to do so would be to steal the strange, complicated, sometimes tiring gifts of the unknown. The thrill of all the places she has yet to go, all the faces she has yet to know.

Maybe, then, this is how you try to bear the burden of the mystery with grace: by finding humility where you once saw self-pity, and opportunity where you once saw absence. By saying, ‘Even if I don’t get what I want, I have a good life,’ then paying closer attention to the small details that make that
life beautiful. And by never forgetting that not knowing what will happen next also means that anything could.