March 27: Why I Believe In Love by Louise Allen

I feel it in my fingers
I feel it in my toes
The love that's all around me
And so the feeling grows
It's written in the wind
It's everywhere I go...
(Reg Presley: Love is All Around)

Why do I believe in love? I believe in love because love is all around and seeing is believing. You don't have to go far to find it, just down the street to your local park. Two elderly people walking to their favourite seat, still hand in hand after fifty years together; a pair of teenagers, eyes locked, suddenly silent, realising for the first time that there is something outside themselves they will never understand and will never want to let go; a tired mother smiling as she leans on her husband's shoulder while they watch their children playing on the swings.

And feeling is believing too. How do you know you're in love? It can creep up on you so subtly that you don't realise for a long time why there is that ache inside and that glow around everything. Or it can knock your feet right out from under you and you stare, wide eyed, from the emotional equivalent of finding yourself flat on the pavement - and there it is.

And time doesn't seem to dim it. It changes it, matures it, deepens it. Perhaps that deepening is another of the reasons I believe in it. Or perhaps it is as simple and as complex as that hit I feel deep inside when I see the man I love unexpectedly. Today is our thirty seventh wedding anniversary, and even after all that time it still happens, that realisation that he is the other half the circle that is us. Why do I love him? Why does he love me?

You can blame it all on our genes, on pheromones or on witchcraft. Or you can list all the reasons - virtues, experiences, actions, looks, beliefs, values - and build yourself an ideal lover. Yet, that doesn't seem to work: we don't fall in love with everyone we meet who is lovable. I have tried to matchmake often enough, we probably all have to some extent. Wouldn't Bill be great for Jen? Sue needs someone just like Geoff. Anna and Phil have so much in common... But it only once worked for me with the least likely couple. I introduced them at a party and they spent the evening sitting together on the sofa - in total silence for the most part. And that was that - marriage, children and a dog.

In an odd sort of way that refusal of love to be predictable, manageable, easy to define and pin down is another reason for believing in it. Who could imagine something that awkward? The mystery, the surprise of it, is part of the magic. Is that why it fascinates us so much, why we are drawn to write and read about it so passionately?

Yet for all the mystery, it is there, it's real, it's true - and it is different for all of us. As a writer of romantic fiction it is that diversity that absorbs me. People seem to fall in love in so many ways, for so many reasons. And they come to that love from every background, from every emotional state.
For us writers, matchmaking for our characters should be easy, and yet sometimes they will rebel, tell us we have picked the wrong partner for them and show us who it should be. But however challenging it is to write the perfect love for my hero and heroine, whether they are seeking it or whether they are wary of it, I find they are all overwhelmed and transformed by love when it finds them.

And that, for me, is what love in real life does to you, and for you. For ever.

About Louise Allen:

Louise writes in her head until the story can't be contained any longer and has to get out and onto paper, an unpredictable process as the hero and heroine are quite likely to take over and ruin all her pathetic attempts to keep to any sort of plan. She consoles herself with the thought that it is, after all, their story.

She lives in England in a village in Bedfordshire with her
long-suffering husband who is not only a wonderful cook, but also the
perfect inspiration for every romantic hero imaginable. All their spare
time is spent at their Norfolk cottage on the coast where, although
they have no pets, they are permitted to share the garden with a very
bossy pheasant called Percy.