Conversations on Love

by Natasha Lunn

I think that the search for love, as I understand a lot of my life and my work to be, is also the search to see that I already have it.

‘The lack of love in my life was not a reality but a poverty of imagination and a carelessly narrow use of an essential word.’

What would I say to my younger self? Keep your feet well planted. You know it’s not just about who you find, it’s also who you’re going to be.

Because Susie made me realize that my envy was not only rooted in wanting what others had. Really it grew from a fear of being left behind, and of loneliness.

‘If you tell me, “I care about my partner,” then my second question is, “How do you show it?” The fact that you feel it isn’t enough.’

It is a constant reminder that intention is not enough, and that even if our friends and family and partners know that we love them, sometimes they deserve a little evidence.

In some of those moments, the relationship between love and loss seemed simple: you lost the love, then you were left with the grief. One was the price for the other.

The complacency of modern life is that a lot of us believe we are immortal, and that we deserve happiness. We think it’ll come to us, when actually we need to stop and look around in order to see that it’s already there.

Without love we are nothing; an isolated person, a lump of cells. Love gives everything meaning but is too easily thrown away.

Moments like these make me think that this is a strange gift of loss: how it makes us more alive to the glimmers of connection that are all around us, when we need them the most.

Development demands loss – it’s unbearable, we resist it, but if we are to grow, we must endure this pain.

‘I do sense that there isn’t an end to love and that people you love never really leave you. You never lose their love because it adds something to you.’ It seems we go on loving people after they die because the love we shared with them changes us, becomes a living part of us, a piece of them we can never lose.

A lot can be extracted from less.

We cannot line up our losses alongside each other and expect someone to confirm whose is worst. I know I have felt utterly broken after the end of a three-month relationship, and only mildly sad after a two-and-a-half-year one finished. I know that for my dad losing his dog was as devastating as losing a family member. I know friends who found the early days of parenthood more painful than their miscarriage, and others who found watching their parents grow old more difficult than watching them die. Heartbreak is too tailored and too sprawling for comparison to be of use to anyone.

How different life might be, I thought, if we made goals like these, to connect rather than to achieve.

there are three sources of meaning: love (for humans and for experiences, like a sunset), purposeful work (what you’re trying to do in and for the world), and the courage you find in the face of difficulty.

I think suffering creates room for connection, because you see everybody else’s pain and you connect to people in a deeper way.

Wouldn’t disappointment hurt less if I never truly believed in a happy outcome in the first place?

Don’t all of us feel this way at times? People die. Hearts break. We love and we lose. And then we have to summon the courage to reckon with our losses and get back up, knowing there is no assurance we won’t get knocked down again.

We see other people’s losses as terrible, faraway things; we say we can’t imagine them, but we must. It is the only way we will get better at saying, ‘I’m sorry.’

We’re all in it together, this life, and when we go through it with our individual missions, never looking up or out, we miss so much.

All these mundane bits, or painful bits, I never would have picked them. And yet they are all small pieces of a reality that’s more beautiful than any fantasy, than anything that I could have imagined.

How grateful I am, not only to have known love, but to have known just how important it was, to pay attention to it.