14 February

For Valentines Day, back to my (unpopular) suggestion that the essence of all love is jealousy. (I took this from Proust, blame him.) If you're not jealous, you're not in love. We treat jealousy as some character flaw, when in fact it's the only part of what we call love, that is actually love. Jealousy is the recognition that your beloved is another person. With their own thoughts and feelings, that can never be yours. We talk about jealousy like we talk about somebody stealing our car. But jealousy is recognising this unbreachable gap between you and another person, a gap that actually attracted you to them in the first place. Nobody falls in love with themselves, it's the differences between you and the other person that originally make them attractive to you. Their mystery. Real jealousy isn't worrying somebody is stealing your car, it's that shock of recognition that your partner is still a mystery to you, no matter how long you've been together. It's what makes a relationship feel as new as the first day, every day. If we drop the co-dependency thing that makes jealousy about installing a car alarm, to protect your property.