What’s love got to do with it, really, because perhaps love is the most ridiculously confused concept we have managed to build an entire civilisation around.

We ask it to explain marriage, sex, children, loneliness, forgiveness, heartbreak, resentment, violence and sometimes even death, while rarely stopping to ask what exactly we mean when we say we love somebody.

We talk about love as though it were a singular, almost sacred thing, but perhaps it is an assortment of biological impulses, social expectations, childhood wounds, sexual chemistry, economic arrangements, loneliness, attachment and the deep human desire to have somebody choose us. Somewhere between all of these things, we arrive at another person and call the resulting chemical and emotional chaos love. Perhaps that is why we are so spectacularly confused by it.

There is, after all, something almost absurd about the way hormones and neurotransmitters can make one particular human being appear as though the universe has highlighted them for our attention. As though among billions of people, this one person has somehow been selected for us.

Well, maybe biology may simply be doing what biology has always done: encouraging attachment, reproduction and survival, while we, with our irritating tendency to make meaning out of everything, write poetry about it and call it destiny.

So what, then, is compatibility? We use the word casually, usually after something has failed. We say two people were simply incompatible, as though compatibility were a measurable substance that existed somewhere between two bodies and could be tested before the relationship began. But compatible in what sense, exactly? Sexually, financially, emotionally, intellectually or merely in the particular ways two people have learned to hurt and forgive each other?

Perhaps compatibility is not about whether two people like the same music or both want children, but whether they can remain fully human in each other’s presence without one person slowly becoming smaller so that the relationship can survive.

The death of Rosemary Koech, the KCB executive whose life ended by suicide, has placed some of these uncomfortable questions in front of us. Not because we can possibly reduce her death to one explanation, and certainly not because we should pretend to know the private architecture of another person’s despair.

Rather, because public reporting has described marital and financial difficulties in the period before her death, while the painful dispute that followed over her burial exposed just how complicated the relationships surrounding a person can become even after they are gone.

There is something haunting about that, because we spend so much of our lives believing that intimacy means being known, yet sometimes the people closest to us may know only the version of us that we have managed to survive inside the relationship.

And then you look at the mess left behind when love goes bad and you have to wonder: What’s love got to do with all this? What happens between sharing a bed and blocking each other? Between telling somebody everything and eventually wanting nothing to do with them? Between ‘I love you’ and ‘I hate you’? When does love turn into resentment, and when does resentment turn into hate?

What happens in those divorce cases where two people who once built a whole life together cannot even sit in the same room without lawyers between them? Because how does something that once felt so intimate, so certain, so consuming, become something you spend years trying to escape from?

Maybe that is the part that bothers me most about love, this intense confiding feeling we attach to it, this strange experience of finding one person you want to tell everything to, the person you call first, the person whose arms feel like home, the person you trust with the ugliest and softest parts of yourself, and then somehow watching that same person become a stranger.

We have given this one word so much power, used it to explain why people marry, why they stay, why they leave, why they forgive, why they destroy each other, why they keep going back and why sometimes they finally walk away. Maybe we just keep calling all of it love because we do not have a better word.

And honestly, what the hell is love anyway, and what does it have to do with anything?