I meet a Venezuelan woman who is a space engineer and has a six-year-old daughter. She’s looking for her forever person, so I don’t want to date her, but I want to meet her because she’s also a queer single parent, and I want to practice my Spanish.

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We meet on a boat that is a bar. She struggles to find it and videocalls me from a canal somewhere, I don’t know where. I can’t give directions and neither can the bartender, but she arrives eventually.

–I’m looking for my forever person, she says in Spanish, sipping an espresso martini.

It sounds romantic in Spanish. I also connect to it more than I would in English, probably because I have a history of being romantic with Spanish speakers, and they are better at it than Brits. For a moment I’m seduced by the concept.

–That’s unscientific of you, I say Britishly, sipping a negroni and eyeing her espresso martini. I tell her I have a fascination for dating shows, and (raise the stakes) marriage shows, and the ones where people fall in love without even seeing the person they are speaking to and say things such as:

This has to work. This is my last chance. We’ve only just met, it’s crazy, we talk for hours every day. I feel like we already know each other, I feel like we’ve known each other our whole lives. We like all the same things. We know what the other one is thinking. You are the greatest person in probably the entire world. I like empathetic people and you like empathetic people. How many kids do you want? Five, six….Can your body handle that? I love my family. No way!—I love my family! I’m learning what being in love really is. I have no anxiety. I can’t imagine my life without you. You like potatoes and I like potatoes, it’s amazing. I’m all in.

Love is what makes our life worth living; afterward we are weak but we know we are powerful in the good times, that we don’t have to be violent or passive, that we don’t need anything and can, for a short time, fall in love

Love is what makes our life worth living; afterward we are weak but we know we are powerful in the good times, that we don’t have to be violent or passive, that we don’t need anything and can, for a short time, fall in love. If anything, I prefer that to an empty midlife where everything goes by the edges.

The Venezuelan woman says that she doesn’t particularly like potatoes, but that if I do it’s not a problem. She doesn’t mind if her partner has different hobbies either. For instance, she doesn’t watch dating shows. She says she just wants someone who will love her unconditionally.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand; we only need to understand each other.

She says she thinks her six-year-old doesn’t love her.

I ask what she means.

–I have a friend that complains about how “clingy” her child is. (She says “clingy” in English.) Her child is always saying: I love you, I love you, and holding on to her. But my daughter….I wish she was like that—she never says she loves me. She doesn’t touch me. Sometimes I ask: Do you love me? and she rolls her eyes and says: Yes, Mami, I love you. But I don’t believe it.

 If we choose one lover, we hope that he or she will fulfill us, just like when we mother a child.

Her hand is shaking as she holds her glass. Her eyes are watering a little. I admire how easy she finds it to get emotional. I don’t say that some people will never believe the person who says they love them.

–My child always wipes my kisses off, I say. 

Like a soft toy, we can make some words just for ourselves. 

–Sometimes I tell her I’m not her real mother, just to see her reaction, to see if she gets upset, because then I’ll know she loves me. So I say: I’m not your real mami! But she doesn’t believe me anymore because I’ve done it so many times.

The first time she looked really shocked and upset and I thought—you do love me! Don’t worry, she doesn’t believe me anymore because I say it so much. I almost said—but stopped myself—I almost said: I’m sick, I’m sick, it’s something terminal…I just…I know that’s going too far, so I didn’t say it, but I just want to see how she’d react if she knew her mami is dying.

Don’t worry I won’t do that. Not for a couple of years.

I love you; do you love me?

–Even if you weren’t her “real” mami, it wouldn’t make any difference, I say, in Spanish.

–I just want someone to love me unconditionally, she says again, in English.

Then she gets up to go to the toilet.

I wonder if people who haven’t been unconditionally loved by a parent need their children and their partners to love them unconditionally.

Love’s for those who want it, though we’ve been told it’s for all.

Those who want it, love is.

On the shows I watch they always talk about wanting to be unconditionally loved by their new spouses, as if this is what marriage offers. They are applying rules of parental love to partner love.

But it’s different. Partner love is conditional and it needs to be. I expect that people getting married think they are making the choice to unconditionally love their spouses, but conditions are very important in marriages and the idea that they should be unconditional is a dangerous one that comes from the patriarchy and rules about men owning women.

It is as much about survival as it is about the satisfactions you gain from it.

Conditional parental love is no good, at least not when children are children. But we can make a choice to love our children unconditionally. Anyone can make that choice; it doesn’t have anything to do with genetics or biology. Our children do not have to love us back unconditionally. Children don’t have to keep to any conditions, but parents must.

She returns. I change the subject. I ask her to tell me more about quantum physics.

Our children do not have to love us back unconditionally. Children don’t have to keep to any conditions, but parents must.

–You say on your dating profile your “unusual skill” is catching things that fall from cupboards. Do you know the quantum plate shelves? It’s like a modern geek version of the cat of Schrödinger. Basically, the laws in quantum physics are different from the ones we know.

For example, you can be in two places at the same time, or in two states at the same time. The quantum plate shelves is a cupboard in which the plates have fallen from their pile and are randomly leaning against the glass door. So far these plates are not broken, but you know that as soon as you’re going to open the door they will fall and break—even with your skills. So they are in two states, not broken and broken at the same time.

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