A partner has told you, over breakfast, that they love you. They have said it simply, and without theatre, with their full attention on you rather than on their phone — and you have said it back, and you have meant it; and the morning has continued, as such mornings do, with the small pragmatic choreography of toast and tea and the locating of car keys. And yet, somewhere on the walk to work — in a quiet corner of your mind that you would never confess to in company — you find yourself wondering. Wondering whether they meant it. Wondering whether anybody, properly, ever does. Wondering whether you yourself meant it. Wondering whether love is, in the end, simply a word people use to cover over a great deal of needing.

Is something wrong with you, for harbouring such wonderings? I think — and I want to say this with the gentleness the subject requires — that you are in the company of more people than you would suspect, all of whom carry, somewhere behind the breastbone, a similar hidden doubt about love which they would not dream of articulating out loud. They do not voice it, because to voice it would seem ungrateful, or cynical, or in some way disloyal to the actual perfectly decent partner who is at home making coffee; and so they walk around with it alone, and assume that everyone else has been issued some certainty about being loved which they themselves have always, mysteriously, lacked.

Why might love feel, to so many of us, just a little untrustworthy? The answer, when one is honest with oneself, is almost always older than the present relationship — it lives somewhere in childhood, and not because childhood was necessarily catastrophic (most of us were not raised by monsters) but because the love that reaches a child is, by the simple structural fact of being delivered by tired and preoccupied adults, always imperfect in its delivery. It is interrupted by parental grief, by financial worry, by marital fatigue, by the small daily fact that the adults responsible for our early provisioning had inner lives of their own which we could not see and could not have understood at the time. The child, watching, learns very early that love is real but somewhat unreliable; that the people who say they love you also, on certain Wednesdays, vanish into their own preoccupations, or shout, or favour the other sibling for an afternoon, or simply fail — for reasons opaque to the child — to give you what you need at the moment of needing it.

What, then, did your particular childhood quietly teach you about love, beneath the explicit things you were told? Some of us absorbed the lesson that love was conditional — that we would be loved if we achieved, if we were good, if we did not make a fuss; and if those were the household rules of your first decade, you may now suspect — without ever quite admitting the suspicion to yourself — that the love offered to you in adulthood is similarly conditional, and you may, without realising you are doing so, be waiting for the price to be quietly revealed. Some of us learnt instead that love was fragile — someone left, perhaps, or fell ill, or was lost — and we now hold the people who love us at a faint distance, as a small protective measure, on the unconscious principle that what is not fully possessed cannot, when the inevitable loss arrives, be fully grieved. And some of us, more painfully still, learnt that love was actively dangerous — that someone who said they loved us also frightened us, or shamed us, or used the language of love as cover for something darker — and decades later we may still be flinching at affection itself, even when the affection is plainly safe; for the affection has not informed the nervous system of the change in circumstance, and the nervous system has not been asked.

Which of these, do you suppose, is yours? It may be a blend; it may be none of the obvious ones; but there is, almost certainly, some old script running quietly underneath your current relationship, contributing — without your conscious consent — to the hidden doubt. What does the doubt say, when you let yourself listen to it? You may notice, when you listen carefully, that it rarely says the simple thing — "this person does not love me". It says things more sophisticated than that; it says, "they love a version of me they have not yet entirely met"; it says, "they will love me until the day they discover they do not"; it says, "their love is not, in the final analysis, quite the same kind of thing as my love"; it says, "something will go wrong, and I will not be ready when it does, so I shall remain a little bit ready, all of the time".

Are you, perhaps, exhausted by being a little bit ready all of the time? It is a particular kind of fatigue — the fatigue of holding a small private reserve back, of never entirely entering the room, of being available but not quite present in case one has to leave the room at short notice. And what would it cost, do you think, to put the reserve down? It would cost the comfort of pre-emptive grief — for there is a strange, almost narcotic consolation in expecting the worst; it feels like wisdom, it feels like a sort of protection, and the expectation, in some bleak way, blunts the blow when it eventually arrives. "If we already know it will end, we cannot be too thoroughly shocked when it does". But the consolation is, when one weighs it against the alternative, a poor exchange for what is being lost — which is, of course, the actual experience of actually being loved, in real time, by an actual present human being, in an actual unrepeatable morning.

Could you, even for the span of a single ordinary Tuesday, allow yourself the experiment of believing that you are loved? Not in the abstract; not as a philosophical proposition; but as a concrete and unsentimental fact about your breakfast. That the person across the table actually does love you. That their love is imperfect and complete in the way that human love must be. That you do not need to verify it, or test it, or qualify it, or pre-emptively grieve it. You may, of course, find this rather difficult; the doubt will rise; that is fair, and entirely to be expected, for the doubt has had several decades of dedicated practice and will not retire on a single morning's notice. But you might begin, gently, to notice the doubt as a guest in the room rather than as the speaker of all truth — and you might begin, in the privacy of your own thinking, to say, "hello, doubt, I know you; you are an old part of me; you are not necessarily right today".

What, then, is the work of love in adult life? It is, I have come to believe, twofold — to be patient with one's own doubts, and not to mistake them for unanswerable facts about the other person; and to choose, again and again, to trust this one human being who is sitting across the table, even on the mornings when the trusting feels structurally impossible. That is, in the end, what marriages are made of — not a single great act of faith, but the daily small reaffirmation that, in spite of everything one was once taught, love can be given and received without disaster; and the doubt, on its quieter mornings, may even consent to remain seated, while the rest of you carries on with the toast and the tea and the morning that is, in spite of all your reservations, taking place anyway.