Conversations on Love

by Natasha Lunn

love leaks in and out of all of our lives, every day, freely, cruelly and beautifully.

Acknowledging your brokenness, pain and insufficiency is a rather romantic thing to do.

Part of that lesson was finding a love story with my friends in my twenties, when I realized how profound, heartfelt, generous and consistent those friendships could be.

You like or love someone when you like or love yourself when you’re with them – and that takes a long time to know. You have to let them in.

Because to be in love is to recognize meaning in small, mundane moments.

But the best definition of happiness is the ability to approach your life as this gorgeous, unfolding work of art that’s always changing, and never quite what you expect it to be, and then seeing that it’s more beautiful than anything that’s supposedly perfect and pristine. So learning to love someone for all their faults and layers of weirdness is a way of learning to be alive, fulfilled and satisfied with the life that you have.

It means trying to build love with a partner – if you want one – but also in purposeful solitude, in creating something that others connect to, in a stranger’s kind words, in friendship, in family, and in the sometimes-bright-sometimes-grey sky that’s always been there, all your life. It means understanding, too, that all these forms of love are not given or acquired; they are learnt and earned.

I needed to ask a better question: ‘How could I love better?’ The first part of finding love had been to look inside myself. The second was to practise looking out.