Conversations on Love

by Natasha Lunn

This kind of young love is often constructed with beautiful intensity, which is understandable in your teenage years, when you are rich in time and ruled by hormones. Maybe such fixation is even a form of creativity – how a youthful imagination can take the scant details of an ordinary connection and build another world inside it.

that responsibility to yourself ‘means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind.

Tallis told me, we often ‘aggrandize our own confusion or lack of insight’ when we have no evidence of real intimacy.

It’s a strange feeling, thinking about who you were in past relationships: a mix of sadness and humour, of mortification and frustration.

The problem is not being alone. It’s being alone when you have a story in your head about human beings, and the proper place of companionship within our story.

We tend to be afraid of the wrong things and overlook the real things we should be afraid of.

We can play a similar sort of observer and feeler division in the early stages of love.

No one really wants to be idealized – we want to be seen and accepted and forgiven, and to know that we can be ourselves in our less edifying moments. So to be on the receiving end of somebody’s idealizing feelings is alienating. It looks like we’re being seen and admired like never before, but actually, many important parts of us are being forgotten.

In my earliest efforts at love, imagination was a thief that stole truth and perspective and time. It was a distraction from reality, which made me see love where there wasn’t any.

Giving up that control is about having faith that things happened as they’re meant to, and if a plan doesn’t go accordingly that’s because there’s something else waiting for you

What happens then is you make a shiny shell that appeals to people to make yourself feel great, but that shell is a fabrication, a sort of forced identity, rather than your inner being.

But Philippa showed me that part of falling in love is letting another person have an impact on you. You’re not rigid and unchanging, she told me, you’re altered by each other, ‘like two stones rubbing together until suddenly they fit’. The important distinction? When you want to change to keep a partner interested, that’s ‘adaption’, which is bad because you’re bending your identity to please another. Whereas when you change alongside another person, that’s ‘mutual impact’, because you’re not putting on an act to please anyone. Instead, you’re growing, individually and together.

mixing paint: sometimes when you mix two people together they make a horrible colour. Some people do bring out the absolute worst colours in you and, if that’s the case, it’s the relationship that’s flawed, not you. You’re not meant to lose sleep or cry over love. You shouldn’t have to fight for it. If it feels like a fight, don’t waste your time.

I wondered if the ugliest shade of unhappiness comes, not directly from what you lack, but from wanting a different life to the one you’re living. Perhaps that feeling is not a state of longing after all, but a way of seeing.

This distinction made me see that, as well as being a burden, my longing for love made me more alive to small moments of beauty in solitude:

To me it’s about demonstrating love, investing time, having an awareness of people – their history, their desires, what they need. And seeing and accepting the different facets of who they are.

That’s something I’m working on: understanding how people see me, understanding myself, and vocalizing how I feel, rather than assuming people know.

although you have to work at a relationship, you shouldn’t have to work at convincing someone to love you. Either they do or they don’t. The loving and being-loved part should be easy.

I think the reason people view older love as safe companionship is because we are scared to look honestly at its frailty. If we were to admit how fragile it is, it would be terrifying, because we have leveraged so much of our lives into it.

You make space for a new person, but that new person is comprised of many of the things that you love about the person who’s already there.

1) Being completely present in the moment, embodied, focused and absorbed. 2) Connection, alignment, being in sync. 3) Deep sexual and erotic intimacy.

it is the emotional risk that’s important. It is the vulnerability, the authenticity. It’s daring to accept your partner fully for who they are and what they desire, and to be accepted by your partner for everything you are and desire too.

You have to continue wanting things so you continue consuming, so you continue stimulating the economy. There’s a baseline sense that being constantly full of desire is the appropriate state to be in, which is bizarre, because isn’t desire just dissatisfaction for what we currently have? Why is that the goal?

she understands how the parts of a relationship that feel most comfortable (security and togetherness) can often be the root of the most painful (unkindness and resentment).

All of this, I think, comes back to a word I never used to associate with love: responsibility.

Don’t rely on them to meet all your needs (or to make you happy). See arguments in context. Don’t expect them to put up with every flicker of emotion that you feel. Sift through your own feelings first.