Conversations on Love

by Natasha Lunn

‘I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me to do so.’

Because if being in your own company is fine on a Monday and a tragedy on a Saturday, the problem is not the objective fact of being alone, it’s the story you’re telling yourself.

You once told me when we use the word ‘love’, what we’re really talking about is connection.

Then another person might say, ‘I want intellectual stimulation.’ Well, does that depend on a relationship? Again, not necessarily. A lot of things we reserve for relationships are available elsewhere.

‘I’m a strong independent woman who doesn’t need a man’ can also be dangerous, because being strong doesn’t mean you don’t need people. We’re not born to be alone. We need community, however we choose to find it: with a partner, with friends, with family.

Because when you like who you are when you are with another person, you realize how important it is to be around people who make you feel that way.

There are plenty of moments when we are in solitude, connected to nature or purpose or meaning, and we don’t feel lonely.

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. And so, in the space of loving and feeling loved by Marisa, I learnt to value myself.

And it’s so important to spend your life with people who not only see the goodness in you, but bring it out too.

a friend can call to say, ‘Hey, sorry I’m not being very fun at the moment,’ and I’ll say, ‘I don’t require you to be fun. You’re not a performing monkey. I’m here for the good and the bad and everything in between.’

Why did we ever think that loss wasn’t part of what it is to be a human being?

The older I get, the more I realize the things I wanted were not necessarily the things that would’ve given me what I needed at the time.

The latter only appeared because, a few days before, I’d interviewed a woman who’d lost her mother, who said what she missed most was sharing the tiny, seemingly pointless details of each other’s lives.

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

So when you’re choosing a partner what you’re really choosing is how a person weathers change. You’re choosing how you weather change with and alongside them.

The same thing happens in unstable relationships: if you’re always worried your partner is going to leave, you may feel sexually motivated in that unstable connection, because your body’s trying to use sex as a way to stabilize the relationship.

And often when we find a partner, we’re searching for the force of love we got as children: total security and validity. In the end no other human being can give us that particular love we had from our parents.

If we were living in a more communal structure, with more than one person around us who is important to us, who we matter to and who matters to us, we would be no less hurt by betrayal, but we wouldn’t feel like we had lost our entire identity.

Somehow, in an affair, the dam is broken. There is nothing to lose, and people actually open up, and you know for the first time they have conversations about the quality of their sexual relationship, about all kinds of things they haven’t wanted to discuss because they wanted to avoid conflict.

It wasn’t until my late twenties I understood that sometimes old friendships evolve like plants whose roots outgrow their pots: they are still alive, still growing, but they need more space to survive.

To sustain friendships – old and new – I think we have to learn when to accept distance, and when to fight to repair it.

Because one day, when we’re walking in a park with a friend who can access an older version of us, and we find something silly to laugh about together in the April sunlight, it might save us, or them, in some small way.

This is what I now believe is part of the work of sustaining love: first, to create and make space for moments like these. And then? To notice them. To feel their fragility and their preciousness and their newness, even when they seem familiar.

I see there are three parts to the deeper story of my sadness: the loss itself, the loneliness that accompanied it, and the shame – a feeling that I should have moved on by now.

Perhaps by discussing heartbreak with the attention it deserves, we can find new ways to reach people in this complex form of grief, when they are mourning a person who remains part of this world, and yet no longer part of theirs.

At first you live in grief, then it lives in you.

And I grew to understand that the grief I felt equalled the love.

He says 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.

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