It is three-something in the morning, which is apparently the hour my brain has chosen for solving questions it has spent several perfectly respectable daylight hours avoiding.
The room is quiet. The window is open and the curtains are hanging loosely around it, moving only occasionally when the night decides to send in a bit of air. Beside them is the clothes rail, carrying such an unreasonable quantity of shirts that I have begun to suspect they are breeding when I am not looking. Above me, the ceiling fan is completely motionless and therefore contributing absolutely nothing to the situation.
And then there is the little framed heart on the wall.
Of course there is.
There I am, awake in the middle of the night trying to understand closeness, freedom, trust, silence and what it actually means to build something with another human being, while a yellow heart hangs opposite me looking as if it understood the entire matter hours ago.
I stared at it for a while.
Eventually something clicked.
Maybe love has suffered from a terrible public-relations problem.
We keep describing it as two people becoming one.
It sounds marvellous until you consider the practical consequences. Which one keeps the passport? Whose opinions survive? Who chooses what temperature the bedroom should be? And if two people genuinely become one, who is going to tell the other when they are talking complete nonsense?
No. I don’t think I want one.
I want two.
Two people who remain recognisably themselves and nevertheless create something between them that neither could create alone.
Two minds. Two histories. Two temperaments. Two separate ways of understanding the world. Two people capable of wandering off into their own thoughts, work and interests, and still knowing where they belong with one another.
That feels much closer to love as I understand it.
I have never wanted somebody I care about to become smaller in order to fit beside me. I don’t want another person’s world reduced until it fits neatly inside mine. I don’t want them arranging their ambitions around my comfort or editing themselves until every difficult, stubborn, surprising or eccentric bit has been removed.
Quite the opposite.
If I care about somebody, I want them to become more themselves.
More curious. More confident. More irritatingly independent. More ambitious. More alive.
I want them to go somewhere and see something I haven’t seen. I want them to notice what I would have missed. I want them to come back with an idea I would never have had. I want them to disagree with me occasionally so spectacularly that I am forced to make tea before replying.
That last part may be the British contribution to conflict resolution.
The Ukrainians, I suspect, would already have rebuilt the argument, reinforced it with concrete and installed a generator before the kettle had boiled.
Between those two traditions, we should be able to manage most things.
And perhaps that is why, lying here tonight, my mind returned to that project we started.
I won’t name it here. Let it enjoy some mystery.
Besides, like most children born accidentally from two people talking too enthusiastically, it already knows perfectly well who is responsible.
I remember the morning it began.
We were driving past a building you knew very well, and you started telling me about it.
At first I thought you were explaining a building.
Then I realised you were reading it.
That was different.
A wall wasn’t simply a wall. A façade wasn’t decoration. A street wasn’t merely a route from one place to another. There were decisions inside them. History. Politics. People. Power. Memory. Things that most of us would walk past while wondering where to get coffee.
You saw something else.
And I remember listening and thinking, almost immediately: more people should hear this person.
That was the beginning.
No committee.
No feasibility study.
No consultant arriving with a seventy-page report explaining that storytelling required “stakeholder-driven multimedia synergies”.
Thank God.
Just one person listening to another person and recognising something.
A voice.
A way of seeing.
A way of understanding places that made those places suddenly become human.
And I thought it deserved a larger horison.
That is still how I think about the project now.
It was never born from the idea that somebody needed fixing or rescuing or reinventing.
I didn’t think, “Here is someone I can turn into something.”
I thought exactly the opposite.
“Here is someone who already is something. More people should see it.”
And, for the historical record, this means the architect is responsible for the birth.
I merely assisted with delivery.
You were innocently describing buildings and somehow caused a publication to exist.
There are worse consequences of architecture.
Possibly several in London alone.
What excited me was imagining how it could work.
You could be out there somewhere, walking through a city, meeting people, watching, listening, noticing the things that only you notice and writing them in your own voice. Somewhere else, I could build the structure around those stories so that they travelled further.
Different work.
Different strengths.
One thing built together.
There is something deeply intimate about that kind of collaboration.
Not because two people become dependent on one another, but because they begin understanding what the other can do.
You begin anticipating each other’s instincts. You know which sentence the other person will defend. You know which photograph they will choose. You know where an argument about a headline is going approximately forty seconds before the argument begins. Eventually even disagreement becomes part of the architecture.
And that, I think, is something worth protecting.
I realised tonight that what I want in love is actually not very different from what I love about building something creatively with another person. I want individuality inside continuity. I want freedom inside belonging. I want somebody to have an enormous world of their own and still have a place in that world where we meet deliberately.
Not accidentally. Not when convenient. Deliberately.
I don’t think commitment is the opposite of freedom. I think bad commitment can be. But good commitment is something else entirely. An architect might understand this better than most. A good building does not imprison the people inside it. It gives them somewhere to live.
There are doors. Windows. Private rooms. Shared rooms. Places to withdraw. Places to meet, eat and sleep on one-another’s arms, with love.
And beneath all of it, foundations strong enough that nobody wakes each morning wondering whether the whole bloody structure will collapse before lunch.
That is beautiful to me.
A home doesn’t ask you to stop being yourself. It gives yourself somewhere to return to. Maybe relationships can do that too.
You can have your own work, your own friendships, your own travels, your own thoughts, your own silences, and still know that there is somebody with whom you are building continuity.
Somebody who doesn’t regard every moment of independence as abandonment. Somebody who doesn’t need constant proof. Somebody who simply knows: we are here.
There is enormous calm in that. And I think calm is underrated in love.
We are trained to admire fireworks. Great declarations. Dramatic beginnings. Airports. Rainstorms. Somebody apparently always has to run somewhere.
But perhaps the real luxury is being able to stay. To know another person over time. To discover them slowly. To have private jokes that would make absolutely no sense to anyone else. To know what makes them furious and what makes them laugh. To have an argument and discover that the relationship remains there afterwards. To go through difficult weeks without immediately declaring the whole civilisation over.
There is something profoundly reassuring about continuity. About saying, not ceremonially but through ordinary behaviour: I am still here.
That is something I value enormously. Maybe more than I realised. Because when I think about connection, I am not imagining two people politely keeping enough distance that neither could possibly hurt the other.
That sounds safe, perhaps, it also sounds rather lonely, I want closeness, I want trust. I want the slightly ridiculous familiarity that develops when two people have stopped performing.
I want somebody who can look at me and immediately know whether I need a conversation, tea, or five minutes in which nobody says anything whatsoever.
And I want to learn that language in return.
There is vulnerability in that, of course.
You cannot be genuinely close to somebody while keeping every defensive wall intact.
At some point, somebody has to open a door. Preferably not all the doors simultaneously. Even architects have regulations.
But enough. Enough to say: this is me. This is where I am confident. This is where I get frightened. This is where I sometimes become difficult. This is where I need reassurance. This is where I need quiet.
And I think the beautiful thing is when another person can hear those things without immediately trying to redesign you.
Maybe that is emotional safety. Not endless agreement. Not avoidance. Not pretending nothing hurts. Safety is knowing that truth doesn’t automatically threaten the existence of the connection.
You can say, “I need time.” You can say, “I don’t understand what I’m feeling yet.” You can say, “This frightened me.” You can even say, “I think you got this completely wrong.”
And somehow the room remains standing. That matters to me because my instinct, when something important feels uncertain, is to understand it.
Preferably immediately.
I want to put it on a table, turn on every available lamp and inspect it until somebody identifies precisely which bloody cog stopped moving.
This works extremely well with machinery.
Human beings seem strangely resistant to it. No technical drawings. No numbered components. No red arrow saying: FAULT LOCATED HERE.
Appalling design.
So I am learning something about silence too. Sometimes silence is not absence. Sometimes another person is thinking. Sometimes feelings arrive before language. Sometimes people need a little room before they know how to say what is true. And if I care about somebody, I want there to be warmth inside that room.
Not punishment. Not coldness. Not a clever withdrawal designed to make them panic and come running back.
Just room.
But room within connection. That distinction is important to me. I am not interested in rehearsing somebody’s departure before they have even decided to go anywhere. I don’t think giving someone space should mean quietly escorting them towards the exit while congratulating yourself on being emotionally sophisticated. Sometimes space simply means: take your time, I’m still here.
That is much closer to how I feel. I believe in staying when something matters.
Not staying at any cost. Not losing yourself. Not tolerating anything simply because time has passed. But staying long enough to understand. Staying long enough to repair. Staying long enough for another person to discover that one difficult chapter does not automatically mean the book has finished.
There is courage in that too. We live in an age that has become incredibly efficient at leaving. Mute. Block. Delete. Move on.
There are entire industries devoted to explaining how quickly we should remove complicated people from our lives. Sometimes that is necessary. But not every crack requires demolition. Sometimes a crack means: look here.
Something needs attention.
An architect would be unemployed rather quickly if every structural concern were solved with dynamite.
People can rebuild. Trust can return. Warmth can return. Even laughter can return, sometimes before anything else does. Actually, laughter may be one of the better signs.
There is something wonderful about the first stupid joke after a difficult period. Not because the difficulty has disappeared. But because suddenly both people remember: oh yes. There you are. I know you ❤️.
And perhaps rebuilding is made of tiny moments like that rather than enormous speeches. A message about work. A photograph. A question. A ridiculous observation. A story sent from another city.
“Have a look at this.”
A disagreement about an edit. A laugh. A conversation that lasts longer than either intended.
One day perhaps nobody can identify exactly when things became easy again. They simply did. I like that possibility. I like it much more than grand declarations. And I think that is partly why the project matters so much to me.
It represents something very simple underneath all the publication schedules, edits and deadlines. Two people saw something together. One brought the stories. One helped build somewhere for them to land. Then, somehow, an idea acquired a name, a shape, readers and expectations.
It became real because two people believed in it. I still believe in it. And I still believe in the person whose way of seeing the world gave the whole thing its reason to exist.
That belief is not conditional. It isn’t a reward for closeness. It isn’t something I switch off because human emotions become complicated. It was recognition. I saw something worth believing in.
I still see it.
And perhaps there is something else beneath that which I have been trying to explain to myself.
When you care about somebody, helping them move further into the world is not the same as pushing them away from you.
That difference is enormous.
I can want someone to be seen, to succeed, to travel, to write, to grow, to become more confident and more themselves, while also wanting a place beside them.
Those things don’t contradict each other.
Actually, I think that is the kind of love I want. Go further. Become more. And let us still have somewhere that is ours. There is no tragedy in that. There is joy.
There is the pleasure of watching somebody you admire become increasingly impossible to contain within the small version of themselves the world might once have expected.
And there is the pleasure of knowing that you don’t have to stand at a distance to make that possible.
You can be beside them. Not directing. Not controlling. Participating. Building. Laughing. Occasionally arguing about typography.
Making tea.
There is one small principle I carry with me about history: what came before us should be understood and respected, but the present deserves to be lived as the present. We should not ask what we are building now to compete endlessly with what has already had its chapter. That is all I need to say about that.
Because tonight I am much more interested in what is ahead.
What can still be built. What can still become easier. What two people might learn about one another once fear stops doing all the talking.
I want connection in which neither person disappears. I want commitment without possession. I want freedom that does not require emotional distance.
I want two people able to say, “I need some room”, while both still understanding that the room is part of the same house. I want difficult conversations that do not automatically become endings. I want ordinary days. I want work. I want stupid jokes. I want ideas appearing at inconvenient hours.
I want the possibility that something which became complicated can become simple again, not because anybody ignored what happened, but because they understood one another better afterwards.
And yes, I want staying. There. I said it.
I don’t think there is anything embarrassing about wanting somebody to stay. There is something beautiful about being chosen repeatedly by somebody who is completely free to be themselves.
Not trapped. Not obligated. Not reduced. Just choosing.
Today.
Tomorrow.
Again.
And perhaps occasionally on a Monday when an article is due and somebody has forgotten to send an image 🤪.
Romance comes in many forms. Some are candlelit dinners, opera houses for a show and good god, I love them. Some are shared editorial deadlines, or perhaps visiting some buildings never seen by anyone ever before, very exquisite, always up for that. We work with what life gives us.
Darling, it is now considerably later than three in the morning. The shirts remain silent. The ceiling fan continues to enjoy its extraordinary salary-to-productivity ratio. Outside, most reasonable people are asleep.
And the little heart is still on the wall. I looked at it again just now and laughed. Maybe it really was simpler than I thought.
I want you to be you. I want to be me. I want enough room for both of us to breathe and enough closeness that neither has to wonder whether the other is really there.
I want honesty to be safe. I want laughter to remain possible. I want what matters to be worth repairing.
And when two people find something worth building, I don’t think the answer is to stand at opposite ends admiring each other’s independence.
Sometimes you simply pick up the tools and continue. The architect can check whether the foundations are sound. I’ll deal with the words.
And, naturally, put the kettle on.
We should probably stick to our areas of expertise.
And perhaps that is enough philosophy for one night, because somewhere between all these thoughts I have also started packing, which feels rather more useful. I hope it will not be too long before the distance becomes a road, the road becomes a doorway, and I find myself standing there with an unnecessarily British amount of tea, a very Ukrainian quantity of stubborn hope, and probably one bag too many. I don't want to arrive carrying answers or expectations. I simply hope I can see you, smile at you, and, if you let me, hold you for a while and tell you quietly what all these pages have been trying rather badly to say that I love you, that I have missed you, and that with me you do not have to perform, explain everything at once, or be anything other than yourself. No grand scene, no violins, no emotional customs declaration at the border, just warmth, two arms, perhaps a slightly ridiculous smile, and the hope that when I finally say, "I'm here", you will understand everything I mean by it.
Good night,
No Strings Behind Us
After a long day of writing, answering messages and trying, with varying degrees of success, not to overthink everything, I went down to the beach.