How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong

by Elizabeth Day

Life crises have a way of doing that: they strip you of your old certainties and throw you into chaos. The only way to survive is to surrender to the process. When you emerge, blinking, into the light, you have to rebuild what you thought you knew about yourself.

‘Twenty years of joy and support and friendship, that’s a success,’ he muses. ‘Twenty years of anything with another person is a success. If a band stays together twenty years, it’s a miracle. If a comedy duo stays together twenty years, they’re a triumph. Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour? Is the sun a failure because it’s going to end in a billion years? No, it’s the fucking sun.’

My mistake was in expecting that when you love someone, they will love you in the same way. I had thought that he, like I, would see love as the most important thing and that he, like I, would therefore have faith that everything else would slot into place from that solid foundation.

I will believe in love until the day I die, because even when love is hopeless, it’s more appealing than the alternative of a life lived without it.