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

by Natasha Lunn

As Hilary Mantel told me when I interviewed her, ‘Some mistakes have to be made, they are creative errors.’

Acknowledging your brokenness, pain and insufficiency is a rather romantic thing to do. Actually, an overemphatic self-admiration cuts you off from other people, whereas an engagement with your own vulnerability is key to building a bond.

Because, frequently, anyone you’re in a relationship with has a view on what’s right for you, or what’s right or wrong in the world. And the capacity to say, ‘That’s interesting, but I’ve got my own reality, and I’m not sure that fits in,’ depends on whether that’s a muscle that’s been exercised in childhood.

That makes me think idealizing someone is the opposite of love, because it means refusing to see the whole of them?

Could we imagine the many different ways there are to live a life? Could we imagine all the potential sorrows and joys in all those different stories? Perhaps, if we could, we would see that there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ stories after all – just the lives in front of us, full of possibilities.

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 – you just don’t know what it is yet.

In both, there’s this idea of understanding that all you have control over is how you react to a situation and how you treat others.

It’s shown me that meaning in life comes from the kindness and compassion you show to others, and also from a deep, peaceful acceptance that allows you to look disaster and joy in the eye with the same kind of level-headedness.

I want love to be a part of the puzzle that is my life. I don’t need it to be the full picture.

no one person can see the whole of who we are.

What makes a satisfactory coupling is not thinking, he or she is right for me, from the start. Nobody is right for anyone. Actually, what makes

somebody right is commitment.

Rather than having a relationship with your fantasy of that person you begin to have a real relationship with them; you’ve impacted each other enough to actually know each other. And to know someone is to love them. So you make someone the right person and they make you the right person. There isn’t someone the right shape out there for every person – that has to happen in relationships. That’s why relationships get better, because we allow mutual impact.

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. They reflect your goodness back to you, and you know you’ve got it.

Because if you don’t ask for your needs to be met, they won’t be, and that can make you needy.

It’s difficult to know the difference between forcing yourself to do something that’s not good for you, and being scared of doing something that is good for you.

What do you wish you’d known about love? That I needn’t worry about not being good enough. And that love is about finding a home. Our parents aren’t going to live for ever, so I think we need to find a tribe, a family, a community or a group that feels like home. A place where we feel seen, and where we can see.

Philippa showed me that part of falling in love is letting another person have an impact on you.

you’re altered by each other, ‘like two stones rubbing together until suddenly they fit’.

‘When you can get to the truth, even if it doesn’t resolve the actual issue, you are connected in some way.’ And when we don’t tell the truth – when we perform or pretend in love, or try on different versions of ourselves to get someone’s approval – we invite loneliness in.

I stared straight into my laptop screen and mentally climbed back down from the picture I’d built in my head of this kind-looking man.

I resented time for underlining my loneliness, and I resented myself for wasting it.

What I found tiring about looking for a romantic relationship was that there was no way

knowing for certain if there would ever be an end point.

Unless you believe in psychics, all of us will face some measure of this uncertainty – it’s part and parcel of existence. Maybe there is comfort in knowing that, whatever we have or don’t have compared to each other, we share this same vulnerability to randomness. Every day we wake up with no clue of when we might die or what might happen when we do. How easily we forget this big question, woven through everything. How small, by comparison, the other questions are. Not any less important, but perhaps more manageable in the context of it.

‘You make your life meaningful by applying meaning to it – it’s not just inevitably meaningful as a result of the choices you’ve made.’ We were discussing this in the context of choice, but I think it applies to circumstance too. The romantic relationship or family I wanted would not make my life meaningful; only I could.

‘When we feel lonely, we’re unhappy and long to escape this emotional pain. 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.’

Maybe, then, this is how you try to bear the burden of the mystery with grace: by finding humility where you once saw self-pity, and opportunity where you once saw absence. By saying, ‘Even if I don’t get what I want, I have a good life,’ then paying closer attention to the small details that make that life beautiful. And by never forgetting that not knowing what will happen next also means that anything could.

If I felt then that the men I dated saw me only as a faint pencil sketch of a person, 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. And so, in the space of loving and feeling loved by Marisa, I learnt to value myself.

True friends see through any level of performance or denial or avoidance.

How can we love someone in a way that brings out the best in them? How can we commit, not only to the whole of who they are today, but to who they could be in the future?

But the best definition of happiness is the ability to approach your life as this gorgeous, unfolding work of art that’s always changing, and never quite what you expect it to be, and then seeing that it’s more beautiful than anything that’s supposedly perfect and pristine. So learning to love someone for all their faults and layers of weirdness is a way of learning to be alive, fulfilled and satisfied with the life that you have.

You can still have everything that you want and be the person who saves herself. People tend to paint independence as an impoverished, compromised position, and when you love love a lot, like I do, it’s hard not to fall into that. But the truth is that being in love, or loving someone and being really happy, includes a lot of self-possessed behaviour. It requires you to feel your way towards what you want, make your own decisions, and save yourself.

I’m learning to value my imagination and my ability to create art more

than being adored by someone or adoring them. I can still have connections to other people. My marriage is still a big part of my life. But I do think there’s a joy in being alive that’s not dependent on any person at all. And there’s something permanent about recognizing that the defining energy of my life is now centred within me, not defined by anyone else.

that, as much as love involves consciousness, part of it requires us to close our eyes and jump without a plan.

if you can be kind to yourself, you can be kind to others.

I’ve learnt that the action of love is everything. It’s physical touch, it’s picking up the phone, it’s going to see someone, it’s saying what you believe or need to say, and it’s doing those things again and again. Love consistently asks you to be answerable to it in actions.

How can you make space in your life for love to thrive? Because if you don’t, it won’t.

It’s a sign of youthful arrogance that we think we know what’s right for us.

As humans we have a default setting that’s cranky and lazy and self-interested and slothful. The people I see that live good, meaningful lives have rigorous exercises to push back against that setting, whether through prayer, meditation, gratitude journals or running. We’re creatures of wanting, but also of consciousness. So the way that we can push

For me, I think reading is a way to push back on that default setting. Me too. It’s an emotional realignment, like somebody’s cracked my spine.

What have been the gifts of not getting what you wanted?

Instead of waiting for love, I could choose it. I could notice and listen and pay better attention to the people already in my life. I saw then that my search for love had been distracting me from the very thing I was looking for. Instead of asking, ‘Will I ever find love?’ I needed to ask a better question: ‘How could I love better?’ The first part of finding love had been to look inside myself. The second was to practise looking out.

What I had learnt is that you don’t really find love at all; you create it, by understanding that you are part of something bigger. A small speck of colour vital to a picture of life.

Because a relationship isn’t a course you can study for and then complete. Instead, it is a decision you make every day to build something meaningful with another person. Doing that takes awareness and understanding – of yourself and each other; and it takes effort and a belief that you can survive what life takes away from you and find a way back to one another when it threatens to prise you apart.

Around this time, I reread a line by relationship coach Susan Quilliam: ‘Love often goes wrong because of a lack of self-reflection and understanding.’ In order to be a good partner, she suggested, you have to understand what you need and fear, the insecurities that disguise themselves in other emotions.

To some extent, we each must carry our own sadness and I was the only person who could forgive my body and learn to be at peace inside

What I did learn is not to try to silence the sadness, but to focus more on living. Because love is rarely a pristine story. There will be shiny pavement kisses and painfully slow taxi rides.