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.

If I was in a relationship, I longed for it to last, and if I wasn’t, I longed to find one.

We don’t learn about love at school, we don’t research it, or take a test in it, or review it once a year. We’re encouraged to learn about economics and grammar and geography, but not to know about love. It seems strange to me, how we expect so

much from love, and yet devote so little time to understanding it. Like wanting to dive into the sea but having no interest in learning how to swim.

Why could I walk away from a job I was unhappy with, but not from a bad relationship?

Why did I have agency in every other aspect of my life, and not in love? Why did I assume marriage would be the end of something, and not the beginning?

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

More consistent than any affection was a careless – perhaps unintentional – cruelty that I silently accepted and used as further proof that I was unlovable.

Insecurity is the most unattractive quality in a woman,’ after I’d summoned up the courage to ask why he took so long to reply to my messages.

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. It also meant I mistook instability for attraction, because the scraps of affection men tossed me were more thrilling for their inconsistency: