In Love

A lot of our members have requested some guidance on how to answer this question, because it's a question that a great many women struggle to answer with conviction.

Of course, there is no infallible litmus test. How boring life would be if there were! So this article is not intended to give you any sort of checklist that leads you to an easy answer. I'll leave such contrivances to the teenage magazines.

What I aim to do is provide you with some food-for-thought that will help you, if you are at all unsure, to make up your mind about what love means to you, and whether you are in love or not. And, even if you already know that you are in love, I'll try to provide some guidance and support if you want to make your love-life more meaningful and rewarding.

Quite possibly, love is one of the most over-used and abused words in the English language. In spite of the considerable efforts of our most accomplished poets and writers to capture the beauty of the word, its high currency is commonly devalued to the point of worthlessness. Here in England, for example, you can find yourself addressed as "Love" or "My love" by a shop assistant who has never before laid eyes upon you as you make a trivial purchase at a store.

In part, I think this devaluation is because we tend not to distinguish very well between different types of love, even though making a distinction can be very useful indeed.

I remember that someone once told me that Eskimos have 20 different words for snow, whereas we - even in England where we talk about the weather all of the time - have only one. I don't know whether that information is true, but it makes sense to me because it must surely be useful for Eskimos to be able to communicate with precision about something that affects their daily lives so significantly. After all, a sentence like "that dry fluffy type of snow that makes hardly a sound until your foot has sunk into it to a depth of about 8cm at which point you hear a slight double-crunching noise" would become a bit tedious after a while!

But I'm not going to propose that we invent new words for the different types of love: I'm hoping that we can make do with four simple qualifiers that make the important

distinctions very clear. I'll tell you what they are, and then I'll show you how useful they can be.