The beginning or the end of a love story is perhaps the two phases where our adrenalin is the most fully charged – where we are sensitive to being either most alive or most in decline, and inspiration for art is at its most prolific. What happens to that phase where nothing really happens? When life is a predictable cycle of routine and chores, of repeated conversations and plans, of recycled jokes and unanswered questions. It seems the first flush of romance aimed to arrive at stability, but once we are here, it doesn’t register in our pores with the same affection. Recently, I heard a social media ‘life coach’ opine that the ‘butterflies in stomach’ phase was mainly a struggle with the fear of not knowing whether our love was reciprocated. And we mistake it for passion or excitement, and deride the comfortable chapters – the less frightening phase – as one lacking in true romance.

Today, 17 years into a long-term love, I wonder about the supposedly comfortable details that is somehow less threatening than the fabulous first years. Perhaps it is when we know our other half is in the house without needing to see, hear or smell this fact. Or automatically and somewhat telepathically getting up from sleep when he just landed from an overnight flight somewhere in the world, just in time to see a text confirming his arrival. Or hearing his key turn in the front door’s lock, and feeling a gurgling warmth akin to something like relief, knowing that safety is now here. Somehow, I find these sentiments infinitely more disconcerting than the ephemeral buzz of initial confessions of love. It is now no longer a transient feeling but a way of being. The accumulated time spent together has synthesised our heartbeats into one shared rhythm and if life was to remove one of us from each other, it would not be the end of an us, but also the end of a part of me. And for me, this is both the most enriching and petrifying element of long-term love – it’s capacity to both complete and undo us.