Love is meant to be difficult. The human heart is hard terrain to navigate. Nobody who has ever truly loved did so without some suffering. Any love forged without a little struggle is most likely a love unfit or unable to last for life. Love must be tested to be worth the title deed.

The one surety about love is this: it changes you. Love must change you. You cannot enter into a partnership with another human being, for the rest of your life, and share their bed and body, share their suffering and success – make another life with them, a child of your mingled blood – and not change in some way.

Love knocks the rough edges from you, it smooths you out. If you claim to be in love, but have refused to change for the person you love, then that is not love. No two people can live as one until the day they die and not alter some aspect of their personality or behaviour.

So love is hard, and love makes you different. That should be celebrated. For if love is indeed the most blessed aspect of life, then those costs are cheap. If loves makes you a better person, I welcome the admission price.

The world, when considered rationally, is frightening and lonely. Love makes life bearable. Love makes life joyous amid the dark.

Love is a candle burning in a distant window on a dark night as you walk alone; it lets you know there’s someone out there for you, and you just need to make straight for that flickering flame.

In its perfect form, love is a transcendental dance, a mystical ritual almost. It takes you out of yourself, your ego ebbs, part of you dissolves into another’s soul. It’s two earthly........

© Herald Scotland