At sixteen, with the kind of conviction available only to those who have never tested it, you imagined love rather clearly; you imagined that the other person would understand you without your having to explain, that they would arrive at precisely the right moment in your life, that they would say the right things at the right intervals, and that, by the simple alchemy of their existing nearby, they would somehow repair the older and unnamed loneliness you had been carrying since approximately the age of seven. You were not — I want to say this kindly — a fool for imagining this; almost everyone of sixteen imagines it; the imagining is part of how one is constituted at sixteen.

But you are older now, and you have, by this point, met several people who failed to do any of this, and you have, in turn, failed several people who hoped you would do it for them; and somewhere behind the smaller and more sensible expectations of mature adulthood, the sixteen-year-old in you is still there — still waiting, still slightly aggrieved, still rather convinced that the real version of love was supposed to have been so much neater than the one she has actually been handed.

Are you still, quietly, grieving the love you were once promised? Most of us are, and most of us do not talk about it — to admit that one is still, in some interior chamber of the self, holding out for a love that would amount to a kind of completion, would feel embarrassingly naive at fifty, and so we tuck the disappointment beneath a layer of sophistication; we say things like "relationships are work", or "love is a choice rather than a feeling", and we mean them; but underneath, the sixteen-year-old continues to want what she was first promised, and continues to feel a faint, almost unmentioned protest that what she has been given is not, somehow, the thing.

What were you promised, when you examine it honestly? The promise was rarely articulated — it came through films, through novels, through the wistful way one's mother spoke of one's father, through the lyrics of songs that played on the kitchen radio while you did your homework. It seeped in. It became the water you swam in without knowing you were swimming. And the water suggested, with extraordinary persistence, that somewhere in the world there existed a person who would recognise you on sight, who would, by some unspecified metaphysical alchemy, dissolve the loneliness you had been carrying since childhood, and whose arrival — when it came — would be the end of the long uphill task of being a self in a world.

Has anyone, in the long run, quite been that person? Almost certainly not — because that person does not, in fact, exist; that person is a composite, lovingly assembled in your imagination from every fictional lover you have ever absorbed, and the loneliness they were supposed to dissolve is, in part, the existential loneliness of being a single conscious creature inside a single skull, which no other person can dissolve entirely, however much they may love you.

This is a hard truth, and it is harder than it sounds at first hearing, because the loneliness was real — and it still is real — and it would be, for almost anyone, a sweet relief to believe that the right partner would, at last, end it. What, then, if no partner can end it entirely? What if a partner can only soften it, accompany it, sit alongside it through whatever ordinary years remain — but not, in the strict and total sense, eradicate it? This is, I think, the central work of mature love: not the abandonment of the old ideal, but the slow patient education of the ideal into something kinder; not the dropping of one's hope for closeness, but the gentle surrender of one's hope for fusion; for there is no fusion, and there never was. There are only two separate people, doing their best, near each other, for as long a stretch of time as they can manage.

How does this feel, when you let it land? There is, for many of us, a kind of grief in the landing — the sixteen-year-old protests, accuses you of having become small or jaded or insufficiently brave, suspects you of having abandoned the great quest; and she is, in a way, partly right — you have indeed become smaller in your expectations, and you have been jaded by enough disappointments to know what is possible. The question, then, is whether smallness in this particular context is the same as poverty.

I rather think it is not. I rather think — and I would not press this if I did not believe it — that smaller expectations make room for more actual love, not less. The over-ideal expectation crushes the real partner; it compares them, constantly and unfavourably, to a person who does not exist; it does not permit them to be tired, or distracted, or imperfect, or to be having their own bad Tuesday for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with you. It demands that they perform a love that is not, structurally, available to any human being who has ever lived. And when one finally stops demanding that, something rather extraordinary can happen — one can begin to see the person who is actually in front of one, with their actual face and their actual habits and their actual small daily kindnesses, which had perhaps been invisible because they were not theatrical enough to register against the ideal.

Have you, perhaps, missed the love that has been there? Have you been so busy mourning the love you were once promised that you have not yet noticed the love you have, in fact, been given? This is not — and please hear me carefully on this point — a recommendation to settle for less than you deserve; there are relationships that are genuinely thin, or unkind, or wrong, and there are relationships one should rightly leave. The question is rather whether you have been measuring a real and decent love against an unreal and impossible one, and finding the real one wanting on the basis of a comparison that was never fair to begin with.

What might it be like to lower the bar — not the bar of basic respect, or care, or decency, which one ought never to lower for anyone, but the bar of mystical recognition? To accept that the other person will not always know what you mean without your saying it; that they will, sometimes, get you wrong; that the getting-wrong is not betrayal but ordinary human limitation; that you will, in turn, get them wrong as well; and that the long marriage between two well-intentioned adults is, in essence, a long correspondence of mutual misunderstandings, repaired, again and again, with patience. Is that less romantic than the dream? Yes. It is also a great deal more available. It is also, on its long unspectacular timescale, a great deal more nourishing than any dream could be — for the dream is fed by expectation, and the reality is fed by attention; the dream is a single perfect moment, and the reality is a thousand quite ordinary moments which, much later and only in retrospect, you understand to have been the entire thing. Could you begin to attend to those ordinary moments now? The cup of tea brought to you unbidden; the hand placed lightly on the small of your back in the supermarket aisle; the fact that they remembered, again, that you cannot stand a particular kind of coffee. The love you wanted is, perhaps, not coming; it was never coming, because it was never a possible thing. But love — smaller and more honest and entirely real — is already here, has been here for some time now, and has been waiting for you to look up from the dream and notice it.