You have just had a really rather good evening with someone — someone warm, someone attentive, someone who asked good questions and listened to the answers properly — and on the walk home, with the night air on your face and the residue of conversation still pleasantly settling, you are aware of two simultaneous and entirely contradictory sensations in the chest. The first is hope. The second — and this is the one we shall be sitting with, because it is the more peculiar and the more telling — is the strange and faintly mineral wish that they had been a little duller, or a little less interested, or that they had said one ill-judged thing over dinner, just enough to give you a perfectly defensible reason not to see them again.

Why does the very thing you have wanted, when at last it arrives, fill you with such a quiet urge to flee? This is the central paradox of so much adult longing — and I want to give it the careful attention it deserves, rather than dismissing it as a quirk of dating life — because the same paradox, in different disguises, will keep returning until you understand what it has been trying to tell you all along.

We say we want love, and we mean it, and we have, in fact, wanted it for years; and yet when love comes near enough to be real, something in us recoils — proposes that this is not, on reflection, quite the right person, finds some flaw upon which to focus, manufactures a reservation, books a weekend away alone — and we step back, gracefully, into the much more familiar and oddly comforting territory of wanting. What, in the end, are we addicted to? It may be the wanting itself; for wanting, when one looks at it honestly, is a remarkably safe occupation. Wanting is a private project. Wanting does not require us to put any actual portion of ourselves into the world to be received, or refused, or — most threateningly of all — accepted. It is the perfect, unrequited shape of a love that never has to be tested, and we can keep it pristine, and we can keep it entirely ours.

Have you noticed how much sweeter the longing for a person can sometimes feel than the eventual having of them? When they were unobtainable, you could project anything onto them; you could decorate them with all the qualities of the partner you had been waiting for; they became, in your imagination, almost magical. Now that they are obtainable, they are revealing themselves to be made of altogether more ordinary materials — they have habits you find irritating, they text in a way you find disappointing, they are, in a word, real. And what we may secretly resent, when someone is at last willing to love us, is precisely the loss of the ideal version we had so carefully constructed of them.

But there is something else at work here too, and it is older and more inward; it is the deep, internalised question — "am I, in fact, lovable?" — for most of us, beneath the confident adult surface, have never quite been sure. We carry a quiet suspicion that if anyone got close enough, they would discover something disqualifying; and so when a person of decent quality begins to express genuine interest, the mind performs a remarkable trick: it concludes that there must be something rather wrong with them, for them to want someone like us. Have you ever done this, in honesty? Have you, in the privacy of your own thinking, devalued a perfectly good person on the grounds that they had, by liking you, demonstrated questionable taste?

This is the famous lesson Groucho Marx half-jokingly handed us — that he did not wish to belong to any club that would have him as a member; and the joke is a joke precisely because it describes a real and recognisable psychological mechanism, namely that the club we most desperately wished to join becomes, by the act of admitting us, a club we no longer respect. What might it take, then, to break the spell? It would take, I think, a particular form of honesty with oneself — for you would have to admit that the problem is not, in the end, the other person. The other person is, broadly, fine; the problem is in your relationship with being chosen, and the only way to change that relationship is to allow yourself, this once, to be chosen, and to remain in the room while the choosing is happening, rather than fleeing it before it can take effect.

This is not as easy as it sounds — for the mind will produce, in considerable quantities and with great persuasive elegance, very plausible reasons why this person, in particular, is the wrong one. It will compile evidence. It will make a case. The case will be detailed and rhetorically impressive. And it will, on closer examination, look remarkably similar to the case it made about the last person, and the one before that, and the one before that. What is the common thread, if you let yourself look honestly? In my own observation, the common thread is rarely the partners themselves; the common thread is the part of you that flinches at proximity itself — and the flinching is not a sign that the partner is wrong, but rather a sign that the proximity is the thing being avoided.

How might we work with this, gently? We work with it by treating the flinch as information about ourselves, rather than as information about the other person. The next time, then, that you find yourself manufacturing a deal-breaker on the walk home from a perfectly decent evening, you might pause and say, in the privacy of your own thinking — "this looks familiar; I have made deal-breakers like this before; is this person genuinely unsuitable, or am I being asked, for the first time in a while, to be actually present to someone, and is the discomfort of that presence dressing itself up as a complaint about them?"

What might dating with intention, in this light, actually mean? It means, I think, going on the date with the explicit prior awareness that the part of you that wants to push love away is going to show up at some point in the evening, and refusing to be its accomplice. It means saying — at least to yourself — "I notice the urge to retreat; I am going to stay another half hour and see what that urge is really about". It means not ending things on the basis of the first flinch. It means giving the unfamiliar feeling of being close to someone the spaciousness it needs to become a feeling that is no longer unfamiliar — and that, alone, can take far more time than we are inclined to allow it.

There is a beautiful idea I once encountered — that the difference between people who end up in long sustaining love and those who end up forever circling it is not, in the final accounting, that one group found magical partners while the other did not. It is, more humbly, that one group learnt, by some combination of luck and patient labour, to remain in the room when the urge to leave was at its loudest. They stayed. They let the urge subside. And they discovered, on the other side of the urge, the actual person — who turned out, in the end, to be enough. Could you stay in the room one date longer than feels comfortable? Could you give yourself, on the walk home, a quiet pause, and ask whether the misgivings have anything at all to do with them, or whether they are simply the protest of the part of you that does not yet know how, properly, to be loved? The paradox does not resolve overnight; longing and pushing-away are old companions, and they have been together a long time. But you might begin to notice the pattern; and you might begin, instead of merely obeying it, to be curious about it; and the curiosity, gently, will loosen its grip; and one evening, perhaps not very far from now, you will look up and find that you are still in the room, that the person is still there, that neither of you has fled, and that this is, in fact, what you had been longing for all along.