Conversations on Love

by Natasha Lunn

Solitude, by contrast, is a state of peaceful aloneness … it is an opportunity for self-reflection and a chance to connect to ourselves without distraction or disturbance.’

Marisa, by contrast, didn’t just see me clearly but brought out all the colours. When you spend time around a friend who makes you feel this way, you’re left with a lingering sense of peace. Their questions nudge you closer to knowing yourself, their love shrinks your insecurities.

Buddhist idea that pain comes from a failure to see things as they really are.

We have to rebuild the relationships we value again and again, even when our hearts or egos are wounded (perhaps especially then).

Now it was like a plant – we couldn’t just pour a whole watering can on it once and hope that it survived for ever. Instead, we had to take turns to water it, frequently, in order to nourish its roots. As it grew, it would change shape. And if we neglected it for too long, it would wilt and die.

‘Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky.’

distance in a relationship is not a threat; it is a door to a more rewarding connection.

delicate balance you need as ‘interdependence’ – a balance between you where your lives are intertwined, but they’re not so intertwined that you lose your own identity and the elements that brought you together in the first place.

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. What do you do to let the other person know and yourself that that’s the case? If you let it go, that is the neglect.

Love is not a state of enthusiasm. It’s a verb. It implies action, demonstration, ritual, practices, communication, expression. It’s the ability to take responsibility of one’s own behaviour. Responsibility is freedom.

‘All companionship,’ Rilke wrote, ‘can consist in only the strengthening of two neighbouring solitudes.’

the people we love are a constellation. In loving them, it is our privilege to see and bring out all the different worlds and colours and depths within them, just as they have the potential to do the same for us in return.

And most of all, to fully understand and see all the versions of ourselves, so that we might find the courage to show them to another human, in the light, and trust that they will love us for all of them.

‘It’s OK to howl at the moon.’

The capacity to love – the opposite of narcissism – is the capacity to see other people, their lives and feelings, as real; the capacity to love is the ability to separate this more objective picture of the beloved from the picture that is produced by our fears and desires.