This post is a review of Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone. By Amy Key. 240 pp. Liveright. $28.

Some years ago, Amy Key’s therapist asked her what she was looking for in a romantic partner. When Key expressed a desire for and a fear of such a relationship, the therapist asked her to consider what it would “look like, feel like, to walk towards this fear.” Perhaps, she added, “you fear that your life is OK without romantic love.”

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In Arrangements in Blue, a deeply, at times achingly personal, mediation, inspired by Joni Mitchell’s album entitled Blue, Key, a forty-something British essayist and poet, walks toward her fear. Illuminating, instructive, and unsettling, her book examines sexual attraction, unrequited love, strategies to numb rejection, and the possibilities of intimacy and fulfillment in a life lived in the absence of romantic love — even as she recognizes that “if you ask yourself hard questions, you must be prepared not to find an answer.”

Years ago, when Key lived with strangers, she felt “a bizarre shame,” not unlike the feeling of being a virgin in your twenties. She resisted any roommate who had a partner, who might nestle with him or her, “in my own home, with none of it for me.”

When she moved into her own apartment, Key felt sad at first. But when her friends joined her for pizza and champagne, and helped paint the walls, she decided she could have a home not just for her and her cats, “but for everyone I loved and would come to love.” A place where she didn’t have to prepare meals for professional colleagues or friends of her partner, as part of the “tit-for-tat of mutual social upkeep.”

And yet, Key confesses, she still thinks about breakfasts and dinners “between two people who are in love, with an ache that seems perilously close to my skin.” She might be willing to trade responsibility for herself for the “pact some couples have,” to opt out from addressing a problem “because it’s not my area.” Key longs for “an attentive witness” to and an interpreter of her inner thoughts, who will stimulate feelings “sheer with desire, all circuitry and membrane,” but senses she has waited too long, “winterized” herself, and “given her pretty years to no one.”

Key tells herself her strong desire to have a baby was prompted by fear that no one would remember her when she died. And that she would be a controlling, excessively protective parent, gripped by anxiety that when her child got sick she would make a mistake. She also recognizes these concerns are excuses. That said, Key seems reconciled to a menopausal resolution to her ambivalence.

As she moves into her forties, Key’s still struggling to understand that romantic love does not necessarily include a powerful sexual attraction, that all partners are imperfect, stretched to fit a template, and to enjoy sex for sex’s sake. While recognizing it’s pointless to pretend that the absence of romantic love “is not a source of discomfort or grief.”

Key reminds herself she has “more important people in her life named Rebecca” than she has had romantic partners. In addition to emotional intimacy, she can count on her closest friends “for the foundational support of curiosity, feedback and encouragement.” Enlisting them and family members in celebrations of events that are meaningful to her (even if they are not engagements, weddings, or baby showers), she’s learning, is not evidence of self-absorption. She’s learning how to enjoy vacations in which she can indulge her own wants, needs, and pleasure.

Although she still yearns for romantic love, Key wants to topple it from its central personal and cultural role, “while valuing and being fulfilled by what is present in its absence” — a liquid “you” that is large and contains multitudes, and a “you” that is “small and exact like a square of pure pigment.”

If asked by a therapist for a list of what she wants from her life now, rather than the attributes of a romantic partner, Key is pretty sure she can provide one.