Conversations on Love: Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings

by Natasha Lunn

So how can you ditch the shame and not let longing sap all the happiness from your life? Part of feeling good through an intense period of longing is moving away from your old broken ways of experiencing intensity and towards one that is positive and thrilling. How do you take a sad story and live inside it without feeling crazy and sad? It can be helpful to go to the worst possible version of where you are and say, ‘Well, what would I do if this didn’t work out at all? What choices would I make if I knew ten years from now that nothing would ever come of this and I just would never meet someone, or never have a baby? Would I adopt? Would I travel? What would the best possible version of my life look like without the thing I am longing for?’ I push my husband to do this all the time, to talk about the wild worst-case scenarios and possibilities in front of us. There’s something heavy about that, but freeing too.