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.

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.

But stepping back and getting a little loose around it, and thinking, this is how it’s supposed to be, can make you happier. You’re living inside the romance of longing instead of inside the pain of it. It’s also useful to recognize that intensity doesn’t have to mean sadness, and longing doesn’t have to mean desperation. Longing can actually be a generative stance that’s lovely to feel.

Sometimes, for example, a man remarries a younger version of his first wife. The problem is not the first wife, but the husband’s difficulties in understanding, accepting his feelings. If he could have seen himself, tolerated his ambivalence – as well as his wife’s ambivalent feelings towards him – things might have been different.

The capacity to love – the opposite of narcissism – is the capacity to see other people, their lives and feelings, as real; the capacity to love is the ability to separate this more objective picture of the beloved from the picture that is produced by our fears and desires.

Understanding is the medicine in psychoanalysis.

Anna Freud once said, ‘A mother’s job is to be there to be left.’

[I learnt] above all, our bodies exist to perform the conditions of our spirits: our choices, our desires, our loves.