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

by Natasha Lunn

My pattern was often the same: I’d date someone new, idealize them, keep parts of myself hidden, and perform the role of a woman more palatable than I believed myself to be. This woman never asked for anything.

Moving through the motions of intimacy with this dread pulling at the back of my mind was an anxious state to exist in, always suspecting that a person did not want to be with me but being too afraid to ask. It meant

I got so good at pretending I didn’t need anything that I forgot how to be myself. It also meant I mistook instability for attraction, because the scraps of affection men tossed me were more thrilling for their inconsistency: the surprise of a text message at 1.30 a.m. that said, ‘Are you out?x’, or the promise of a drunken ‘I love you’ never mentioned again when sober.

More consistent than any affection was a careless – perhaps unintentional – cruelty that I silently accepted and used as further proof that I was unlovable.

I learnt that the loneliest place of all is lying in bed at night next to someone who makes you feel small, with your back to theirs, still hoping they will turn over and put their arms around you.

we often ‘aggrandize our own confusion or lack of insight’ when we have no evidence of real intimacy. We reach for words like ‘chemistry’ or ‘gut feeling’ because we have nothing tangible to base a feeling on – no examples of kindness or care or connection, just a magnetic draw. Tallis said this lack of evidence ‘becomes fuel for romantic mysticism. You think, I can’t explain it, so therefore it must be fate, it must be profound. But that’s just one false inference feeding another, and each inference takes you further away from reality.’

Both of us, I think, were looking for answers to the problems of adulthood and intimacy in each other; a place where we would never find them.

No. I wanted to form real relationships that existed in the real world. To do so would require courage and self-understanding, maybe a little loneliness, and a lot of responsibility.

After years of feeling passive in love, I understood then that we do have a choice, even if it’s difficult to see. Mine was this: to stay in the fantasies inside my head, or to climb out and live.

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.

Acknowledging your brokenness, pain and insufficiency is a rather romantic thing to do.

No one really wants to be idealized – we want to be seen and accepted and forgiven, and to know that we can be ourselves in our less edifying moments.

So to be on the receiving end of somebody’s idealizing feelings is alienating. It looks like we’re being seen and admired like never before, but actually, many important parts of us are being forgotten.

I had wasted energy trying to keep these relationships afloat; there was no need to waste more asking why someone didn’t love me, or what I could have done differently to change the outcome.

If I’d stayed with someone I’d met in my early twenties, moved to the seaside, got a dog and had a baby at thirty, there would have been wonderful and mundane chapters to that story, just as there were wonderful and mundane chapters to the life I lived during those years instead. For every depressing date, there was a precious friendship formed. For every lonely Sunday, a new ambition discovered.

searching for love from a place of fear was not a good beginning to any love story. It meant motivations were often selfish – to avoid loneliness; to outsource happiness – and would lead in the wrong direction. As the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck wrote, ‘If being loved is your goal, you will fail to achieve it.’

As I grew older, I learnt that the expectation that someone will save you from who you are, or from what you have or don’t have, is a fallacy. Expecting someone to fill in a hole that’s within you? That’s expecting too much of any one person. That’s not your friend’s job or your partner’s job. That’s your job.

It has helped me to relinquish control over how my love story or life might pan out. 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.

But when you relinquish control over how things happen, it lessens that fear of losing something. Which is important, because that fear of loss can force people to make bad decisions when it comes to love.

A friend once asked me, ‘If you had the choice between marrying the love of your life and writing, what would you choose?’ And I said writing. I think maybe it is the love of my life, because what you get from it is an understanding of the human condition. We’re all searching for the truth, and I find it in words. As a writer, you’re also showing the readers parts of yourself. It’s only looking back that I see the purpose I’ve found in work might have been the love I was seeking.

started dating in my early twenties because it was something I thought I should be doing, not because I wanted to. I dreamt about wanting it. I watched films about wanting it. But in reality I wasn’t ready for a relationship.

Figure out what you’re looking for outside of yourself that you’ve not found within.

I wish I’d known that there is more to fear inside a relationship that shrinks you than in a life outside of it.

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.

You like or love someone when you like or love yourself when you’re with them – and that takes a long time to know.

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 being yourself in a relationship is a risk. It means showing someone the real bits of who you are – the spots beneath the make-up; the self-doubt beneath the cynicism – and finding the courage to say, ‘This is me. Take it or leave it,’ and to really mean it.

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.

I attach a fear of abandonment to the early stages, because I’ve experienced someone who is meant to love me leaving. But

That’s something I’m working on: understanding how people see me, understanding myself, and vocalizing how I feel, rather than assuming people know.

The paragraph that gives you a tingle of recognition. The lines that feel as if they are directly written for a deep, secret part of you, that you weren’t necessarily even aware of until it was woken up by words.

had never really loved the men I’d dated and idealized in my twenties. I had not been invested in helping them grow, or in seeing the whole of who they were, because I was more interested in how I looked in their perception of me. It was a half-hearted version of love, rooted in ego.

Growing up, I read and watched a lot of romantic comedies and dramas, which generally give you a grand sense of love and romance, not necessarily a realistic one. Now, rather than that instantaneous flash of new love we often see in stories, I am more interested in the love that deepens over time.

None of us can protect ourselves from tomorrow, the next day, the next month, the next year. All we can do is try our best not to squander love on a fear of something that might or might not happen.