My name is Joshua Seigal. I am professional poet, based in London, UK. I am currently very happily married. My wife and I have been together for eleven years, and married for eight. I have had Relationship Anxiety (AKA ROCD) in every romantic relationship I have ever been in.

When I was eighteen, I had a beautiful girlfriend. For about six months, I was pinching myself – I couldn’t believe my luck. But then one day, very suddenly, the doubt entered my mind like a piece of grit: did I love her? Did I really love her? The question plagued me night and day. I told her about it, after much internal anguish, but back then I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain how I was feeling. She thought (and perhaps I thought) that my intrusive thoughts and obsessions meant I didn’t love her. I thought I was going insane. We broke up.

A few years later, I had another relationship, again with a beautiful girlfriend. Two months in, the intrusive thoughts and obsessions struck back. At this point, I was planning for a career in academia, and knew I needed no distractions. I broke up with my girlfriend. (And I ultimately abandoned the academic path, which is a separate story, involving crippling anxiety and what one might call Existential OCD.)

After this, I was in the wilderness for close to a decade. During this time, I had zero romantic contact, with anyone. My mind and body ached for some closeness, but the anxiety was too great. Until I met my now wife. When the Relationship Anxiety slithered in, after about three months, I didn’t run. One of the reasons for this was my discovery of Sheryl’s work, which opened up to me a whole community of people going through exactly what I was experiencing. It also gave me a lexicon to describe it. Over the years, I have oscillated between preferring Relationship Anxiety and ROCD as a label; the former seems gentler, the latter more brutal and clinical. But it doesn’t really matter — the point is that I was not alone. I stuck with my relationship, and was lucky enough to discover that my partner was fully on board with my journey. I sought therapy, which I am still in. The therapeutic alliance helped cement my marital one. I am the luckiest husband in the world.

I became a professional poet in about 2013, and had my first book published in 2016. I am best known as a children’s writer, performer and teacher, and the vast majority of my work is aimed at children. Over the years I have become known as a humorous writer and a comedian, and have won awards for my ‘funny’ books and performances. I love humour, and view it as healing. I adore working with children. But I also write for adults, where my experiences with Relationship Anxiety have been pivotal. As a result, I have thought deeply and philosophically about love, both as a concept in general, and as it applies to me specifically. With this in mind, I’d like to share what has become one of my best known poems in this vein. It is a piece that means a lot to me, and hopefully people will find it interesting:

And So I Write

the word LOVE in my diary, to remind myself
of the underpinning of all the things I do.
I craft the letters with a ruler,

taking great pains to ensure that everything
is smooth, straight, in order. I decorate the word
with a border and I colour it all in, in a way

I haven’t done since primary school.
I really want this word to stand out – LOVE.
The unassailable axiom; the uncaused cause;

that than which nothing greater can be conceived.
Until I realise that the letters aren’t quite even.
Some of the lines are thicker than others

and if you squint a bit you can see
a slight smudge on the page. The letter O
seems sort of squished, and although the word

is still, recognisably, LOVE, it looks somewhat
misformed, somehow. And so I carry now
this buckled LOVE everywhere I go –

in my diary, tucked tight in my rucksack –
and this imperfection is part of everything I do,
a bold, flawed LOVE on the pages of my days.

Joshua Seigal

One final note: please do pay a visit to my website, where you fill find lots of FREE poems, for both adults and children: www.joshuaseigal.co.uk.

Sending big LOVE to all!