"They grew to be so old and happy that they kept on playing together as dogs," once wrote Gabriel Garcia Marquez. My first true love used that quote to inscribe a book to me. The love is long gone, but I still have the book. I open it, every now and again, just to remember how hard it is to say anything about love, how much harder it is to make it last. I've spent a bit of time lately thinking about why it's so hard to say anything about love and have come to the conclusion that perhaps this is not such a bad thing. If love were easy, if its rules were inscribable, if its description as linguistically accessible as the words we have for shelter or clothing or other basic needs than where would the magic lie?

There is a great story in Rob Schultheis' excellent The Hidden West about a cowboy who been crisscrossing the country chasing his long gone wife. When the cowboy pulled out a picture and showed it round, the woman was something of a fright - ill-formed, bad intentioned, the kind of woman no one could imagine chasing. But that's exactly where love lies: just outside our imagination, in the realm of what comes next. The cowboy in Schultheis' story admits to have put in a decade tracking his woman, and a willingness to put in another if that's what it takes. I have never met anyone who has circumnavigated the globe in search of a ham and cheese sandwich. Wars have not been fought over architecture. It is only the most paltry of lives that are decimated for wont of an Armani suit. But love takes all comers. It is both our ultimate goal, ride and challenge. And that's why - perhaps - there's no easy way to put it into words.

There are the letters that came close.

the love letter collection