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

by Natasha Lunn

I realized that whoever came up with the definition for the word ‘hony moone’ got it wrong. The tenderness of love does not wane over time – it deepens.

Our relationship had become something new too: a living thing, separate to us, that we had both made a pact to keep alive. 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.

we need different people in our life to see different parts of who we are.

a slow-burn love story, no less poignant for its undramatic beginnings on a dating app. It introduced me to the beauty of knowing the whole version of someone, rather than your fantasy of who they are. And the quiet sturdiness of real love, which, like anything meaningful in life, requires effort.

It’s also about believing your partner when they articulate where they’re at emotionally, instead of trying to talk them out of their feelings.

Romance is about finding ways to show someone they are appreciated.

What do you wish you’d known about love? If it’s a true, solid love, then it can withstand difficulty. It can withstand you being human and being flawed and being unhappy or having a problem

with your partner. I wish I had known that love doesn’t disappear when you aren’t quiet and perfect.

that. I can pretend I have all sorts of things together, but when I am at my most broken, he is still the person I turn to.

I’ve also had to realize that sometimes I’m just going to be furious because I have a lot to be furious about.

The harder part is exposing and locating a vulnerability in yourself that you know the other person will never have to shoulder – and not resenting them for that.

I’m of the firm belief that our bodies often know things before our minds are ready to process them, and, in that way, sex becomes a kind of subconscious language, a way to make sense of a part of you that can’t be put into words, much like art or music.

And I like to be open to the idea that sex can have numerous outcomes. There’s not one kind of sex you have with a partner. You definitely have to work at it, though, and by that I don’t mean sprinkle rose petals around the house. I mean: shut your brain off and just go for it. We have to stay in constant conversation with someone we love, and sex is a different way to have a conversation with them. Which is why I think it’s exciting when you’ve been with someone for ever and then you suddenly have a different kind of sex than you’ve ever had before. You think, what just happened? I thought I knew you.

It was the first time I understood that spontaneous desire for sex beforehand was not directly related to the quality of my pleasure during it.

So what are the characteristics of extraordinary sex that Kleinplatz found we should be prioritizing? 1) Being completely present in the moment, embodied, focused and absorbed. 2) Connection, alignment, being in sync. 3) Deep sexual and erotic intimacy. 4) Extraordinary communication and deep empathy. 5) Being genuine, authentic and transparent. 6) Vulnerability and surrender. 7) Exploration, interpersonal risk-taking and fun. 8) Transcendence and transformation.

I had to take responsibility for my own feelings in order to sustain love

There will always be times when you come together and connect, and times during even the best relationships when there is distance between you. You have to be grown up about it and say, ‘Right, we’ll work at coming back together, but we’re not going to panic, because we trust each other.’

Actually, your partner can’t make you angry, because you have the ability to control your emotions. As soon as you rely totally on your partner to make you happy, you run into trouble. Because your partner has no hope of fulfilling that expectation; no one person can ever meet all your needs.

The healthiest couples are those who can argue without feeling threatened, come back together quickly after an argument and see the conversation in context. Arguing itself is not the problem, it’s the

attitude to arguing that can be the real issue. In a healthy fight about who is tidy and who isn’t, one person might say, ‘You know what? You’re allowed to be untidy. I’m allowed to be tidy. How are we going to find a practical solution? I don’t mind you being untidy, but please don’t be unhygienic.’ And the person who leaves their coffee mugs all over the place says, ‘OK, I accept that in my office I can do that, but I promise not to leave mugs around so long that they grow mould on top.’ The distinction is that both people are working together and making compromises – there’s a devotion to ‘we’ instead of just ‘me’. But if what you are really saying in an argument is ‘Do it my way’ and ‘No, do it my way’, then it can damage a relationship in the long term.

Every relationship – not just intimate ones – is an unconscious negotiation around that balance between ‘I’ and ‘we’. Sometimes both or one of you needs to say ‘I’. But if you’re only ever saying ‘I’, then you don’t have a relationship. On the other hand, if you’re only ever saying ‘we’, you’re enmeshed or you’re codependent. All the time you’re balancing this out, and when something big in your life changes – if you have children, for example – you have to renegotiate that again. It’s about being close, but not so close that you treat each other badly. It’s the ability to take responsibility for your own feelings, to step back and treat your partner with respect and kindness. If you can do that, and your partner can reciprocate, then you can get back on track.

That’s why it’s useful to think as both ‘I’ and ‘we’, to live together and apart, to trust the distance between you as individuals and learn to share your life with another person too.

The truth is, there are going to be times when you don’t feel ‘in love’ with your partner, or when you wonder if someone else might make you happier. It’s useful to know and accept that, instead of thinking it means there is something wrong.

In the US, in the last twenty years, studies suggest we have lost between 30 and 60 per cent of our social connections.

Happiness is not a pursuit these days, it’s a mandate. You have to be happy. And you are entitled, in the name of your happiness, to do all kinds of things. So people are constantly asking, ‘Is my marriage good enough? Could it be better? Maybe I don’t have to deal with this, I’ll find myself someone else.’ The consumer mentality of ‘I can do better’ . . . You know ‘good enough’ is not in vogue any more, it’s all about the best. So you don’t just leave because you’re really unhappy, you leave because you believe you could be happier.

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. Sometimes it’s amazing, this thing called love. One day you just think, I’ve had it, I’m out of here, I’m so done with you, I can’t take another minute of this. The next morning you wake up and you squeeze the person and say, ‘I’m glad I’m waking up with you.’ It’s this bizarre thing, it just comes and goes, and it’s really complicated. So invest in it. Learn about relationships, don’t just read about everything else. Because you learn how to be in a relationship – it’s not a given.

No meaningful relationship can be consistently easy. Even the closest friends will neglect or misinterpret each other, say the wrong thing, feel rejected by change when different life stages pull them apart.

So the envy you project on to others is a sign of what you want but can’t get for yourself. It is a signpost to your longing, rather than literal envy for the other. It’s showing you what you want.

It’s true that when you’re in one of those life shifts you don’t notice what happens to others as much. But you get better at that as you get older, I think. You learn to understand that one friend’s problem doesn’t take precedence; they can both coexist as difficult situations.

I think separated attachments are what we should be aiming for in friendships: when two friends are separate but connected, so they can each feel whole in themselves.

That’s the thing that becomes difficult, when giving space for change within female friendships when some people start having kids and some don’t: childless or child-free women have to give so much time and respect and sensitivity for the changes that mothers are going through, and often that’s not paid back.

one. Neither experience is more painful or more difficult than the other. Once we free ourselves from asking who we feel most sorry for, or who has made the best choice, and just allow those pains to coexist? I think that is the key to intimacy in your friendships.

True friendship is about taking it easy on each other, knowing that life has tides that take you to various places, and that you’ll find a way back to each other at different points.

An old friendship is one of those things that helps you remember who you are in the world, and that’s so valuable.

I’ve learnt that the most important thing to give to children is love. Because in my childhood, I wasn’t very aware that I was loved, or that I was valued, and so it’s always been important to me that my children know that they are deeply loved.

This means that, in our conversations, I feel all the layers of the people we used to be.

love is not inevitable, even in families. We still have to choose to keep it alive.

It is easy to notice someone when they are not there, when their absence makes you crave their return. It is harder to pay attention to someone when they are right in front of you, every day, their life so closely intertwined with yours that – if you’re not careful – you can forget to see them in context of their separateness to you. Just as you can’t take in the full beauty of a vast painting if you stand too close to it.

(A reminder that intimacy sometimes allows us to hurt the most the people we know the best.)

‘I think that’s a lot of what makes a relationship work in the long run,’ she said, ‘if you can understand each other’s perception of reality and not dismiss it. If you are able to be honest about it, even when it’s not flattering to you, rather than just keeping that knowledge for yourself.’

love is in the act itself: the noticing, the forgiving, the reflecting, the trying. And part of the trying is finding ways to show up. During this period I turn Esther Perel’s words over in my head: ‘If you tell me, “I care about my partner,” then my second question is, “How do you show it?”

it’s as if a sadness sits just below the surface.

pay attention to the moments in which you feel irritated, because hidden in your anger are often clues to the deeper story.

Grief did not follow or replace love – each thing existed inside the other. And loss was not a faraway thing, but a part of every loving, fading moment.

what we risk every time we choose to love someone: not just that they might outlive us, or we them, but that they might break the heart we place in their hands.

You never entirely get over it, but you do rise to the challenge, until eventually you live with the loss and it becomes part of you.

terrible things do happen, but that doesn’t mean that you have to live in a constant state of fear. If you do, the bad things might still happen anyway, but you wouldn’t have enjoyed all the pleasures of being alive.

But what I discovered is that you go on loving somebody even if they’re dead. My sister is dead, but the love we shared is still astonishingly alive, and continues to be intensely meaningful to me.

getting over a loss was an impossible goal. Instead, we learn to live with our griefs inside us, and to let them transform us, until they reveal our resilience.

beautiful and we don’t have time to realize it. We let silly and petty things rule us and lead us into criticism. We find fault with life because we are tired and grumpy, instead of relishing the fact that we are with other people who are healthy, who love us and want to be with us.