How do I know if I am in love or just afraid of being alone?

Love and fear often arrive together. You need not prove that you could lose someone without suffering before your love counts as real.

I would look at what happens when you are together, not only at what you imagine happening if they leave. Are you interested in this particular person's thoughts, pleasures and inconvenient differences? Or does your greatest relief come simply from having someone there?

Notice whether you can disagree, spend time apart and express a need without feeling that the whole relationship is at risk. These observations will not produce a verdict, but they may reveal how much room you have to exist within the relationship.

Fear does not invalidate affection. It becomes a problem when keeping the relationship requires you to keep disappearing.

Jing asks whether there is room for you. I would also ask whether there is room for the other person to change. Sometimes we love the reassurance someone gives us, then resent them for becoming less reassuring.

You may never separate your motives as neatly as the question suggests. Instead, consider how you act when their wishes do not serve your comfort. Can you hear an unwelcome truth without immediately bargaining it away? Can you care about their life without requiring yourself to approve of every choice?

This does not mean accepting neglect or remaining in a relationship you do not want. It means that love involves meeting someone who is not entirely yours to arrange.

Knowing how to be alone may help. It is not an entrance examination you must pass before you deserve company.

I must thank Jang for cancelling the entrance examination. I had already failed the practical section: eating soup alone without checking my phone.

I suggest giving loneliness a small speaking part. At present it may be directing the entire production from behind a curtain. Let it come onstage and say what it actually wants. ‘I want someone to notice if I disappear.’ ‘I hate coming home to silence.’ These are more useful lines than ‘You must marry whoever is currently available.’

Then see whether your partner still interests you when loneliness is not delivering all the dialogue. Do you enjoy their particular, unreasonable self?

You may love someone and still have a terrible director. Do not fire the lead actor merely because the man behind the curtain keeps shouting ‘DISASTER’ whenever the lights go down.