Do you remember the comic strip series ‘Love is…’ by cartoonist Kim Casali? For a time, in the 1970s and 1980s, this ‘brand’ was everywhere (perhaps because it called to mind the First Corinthians chapter of the Bible beginning, ‘Love is patient, love is kind’). Romantic that I am, I always looked for the strip in the newspaper, and it made me smile.

Love is so much, but if there is one single definitive ‘Love is’, I think it is this: ‘Love is… discovery’. In my new book, Legacy, this theme is at the core of Luna and Ruy’s love story in various ways:

Intellectual challenging

Luna is a journalist for a scientific journal. She is educated and opinionated, and a firm believer in what science tells us is fact. Dr Rodrigo Rueda de Calderón is also educated and opinionated, but his gypsy heritage has opened the door to a whole world of alternative, herb-based healing that he believes can complement his science-based medical training in oncology.

Luna has been sent to Spain by her boss to write an exposé on Ruy’s clinic in Cadiz, which she assumes is using ‘cutting-edge, although possibly questionable, use of some rather wacky herbal treatments’. But from the outset, Ruy will challenge her preconceptions and spar with her intellectually.

I believe love can only spring from a meeting of minds, which requires each to challenge the other. This is by no means the easiest part of love (frequently it can lead to disagreement), but ultimately the challenge leads to personal growth and a mutual respect that forms a foundation for attraction and admiration.

Sexual awakening

An essential ingredient in romance, don’t you think? No matter the person’s background, for a relationship to work the chemistry must be fantastic and lasting, and the sexual connection must be brand-new, exciting and entirely unexplored territory for both. In Legacy, Luna is inexperienced when it comes to men, and the sensations that flood her when she is around Ruy are very hard to ignore. Ruy, meanwhile, is swept into his own awakening – when you really feel for someone, the attraction is transformative and so much more poignant.

Embracing the existence of something greater than oneself

Luna, Ms Practical, has a habit of seeing life in black and white. Since her mother deserted her and then died, this has been a form of self-defence and a simple way of making sense of the world. When she meets Ruy, however, her eyes are opened to so many other colours that are inherent in the true complexity of life. He has been taught by the gypsies to which his family are linked to believe in ‘the other’ – in legends and fate and yes, even magic when it comes to how a man and woman may meet and fall in love and forge a future together. For Luna, love is a journey of discovery in a strange new world which is only visible to those who develop faith.

Coming to know oneself

All good stories, I believe, contain an element of self-discovery. As Polonius said to his son in Hamlet:

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Being true to oneself is particularly important when one bears a family legacy that can so easily be defining. But first, Luna and Ruy must follow the ancient Greek wisdom inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: Know thyself.

All good relationships, I think, require a journey of self-knowledge. How can you offer yourself to another if you don’t truly know who you are? Ultimately, Legacy is a story of a woman discovering how to be not her father’s daughter or her mother’s daughter, or even a scientific journalist, but herself, her soul embodied.

Love is… discovery. And as one of my favourite authors, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, put it, ‘It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process…’