Conversations on Love

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.

I remember praying one day, and speaking to God, and saying that if my success was going to come at the price of my spirituality, then I didn’t want it. I would rather have peace and self-knowledge than be constantly struggling to succeed within a structure that is set up to keep you wanting more and more.

Even through teen angst and my lonely twenties, even when friends or family felt uncertain, God has been solid and consistent in a way that absolutely nothing else in life has. I know it’s not a fashionable thing to say.

If I do meet someone, he will be a normal human being who is trying to figure out his way through the world, who is flawed and who will make mistakes, just as I will.

Part of that lesson was finding a love story with my friends in my twenties, when I realized how profound, heartfelt, generous and consistent those friendships could be. Rain or shine, two o’clock in the morning, whatever we needed, we were there to talk each other through it. Those friends encouraged me to interrogate who I was as a person: what I believed, why I believed it.

She finds it everywhere: in work, in faith, in family, in friendships and in her continued investment in self-understanding and philosophy.

No one person can see the whole of who you are

Sofia Khan is Not Obliged, and its sequel The Other Half of Happiness,

Alain convinced me that searching for love from a place of fear was not a good beginning to any love story. It meant motivations were often selfish – to avoid loneliness; to outsource happiness – and would lead in the wrong directio

Perhaps, if we could, we would see that there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ stories after all – just the lives in front of us, full of possibilities.