Some things I have noticed about being in love

It is very distracting. You try to focus your mind on the things you know you have to do, but sometimes it just won’t. Sometimes it just floats about, and you can’t pin it down. You spend a large amount of time staring unhelpfully into the distance and sighing.

Time speeds up and slows down. At all the wrong moments. The time you spend apart feels like years and then when you want time to drag, it’s gone in an instant. Perhaps someone is fiddling with the clocks.

Being in love makes you selfish and boring. Other people try to talk to you about their lives and their problems but you find it hard to be interested. Instead you’re just looking for an opportunity to turn the conversation around, to drop in a name. It’s oh so casual though, surely no one will notice if I just mention him one more time…

But is also makes you selfless. Suddenly you find you want to do all sorts of things you don’t even enjoy doing, just to make someone else happy. And not because you feel you should, you just want to.

It can be scary and makes you feel vulnerable. What if it goes wrong? What if the other person discovers something about you that makes them realise they didn’t like you that much after all? What if they meet someone else they like more? Part of you wants to insist they never go out, just in case, but that feels like it would be wrong. You mustn’t do that.

You feel a little bit excited and nervous and anxious and calm and happy all at once, all the time.

You think about the future a lot more than you ever did before. You imagine yourself doing things together. You want to make plans.

Being in love makes you see yourself through someone else’s eyes. You listen to them tell you all the things about you that they love and you start to believe it might be true.

Everything takes on a new significance. Everything you see and hear makes you think of that other person – books, poems, songs – they feel like they have been written just for you. No one else. Because obviously no one else in the world  has ever been in love like this before…