Two and a half years ago, I wrote a Modern Love column about how Mark and I had spent our first date trying a psychological experiment that used 36 questions to help two strangers fall in love. That experience helped us to think about love not as luck or fate, but as the practice of really bothering to know someone, and allowing that person to know you. Being intentional about love seems to suit us well.

In the past, expecting a relationship to work simply because the people involved loved each other had failed me. I spent my 20s with a man who knew exactly what he wanted and how he wanted to be. All I had wanted was for him to love me.

We were together for almost a decade, and in that time I somehow lost track of my own habits and preferences. If I wanted to split the grocery bill, he suggested I buy only things we both liked. If I wanted to spend weekends together, I could go skiing with him and his friends. And so I did. I made my life look like his.

It wasn’t until I moved out that I began to see that there hadn’t been room for me in my relationship. And not merely because my ex hadn’t offered it — it had never occurred to me to ask. I was in love, and love meant making compromises, right? But what if I had loved him too much?

Years earlier I had read Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” and thought I understood it, but I hadn’t. At 20, I gave myself over to love, and it wasn’t until the relationship ended, when I was 29, that I discovered what it meant to fully inhabit my days and the spaciousness of my own mind. It was such a joy to find that my time was mine, along with every decision from what to cook to when to go to bed.