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

by Natasha Lunn

In my earliest efforts at love, imagination was a thief that stole truth and perspective and time. It was a distraction from reality, which made me see love where there wasn’t any. But Alain made me wonder if there was a way to use imagination to expand our idea of love, rather than to obscure it.

Alain convinced me that searching for love from a place of fear was not a good beginning to any love story.

Even if you’re completely fine with being single, the minute someone pities you, you think, am I not living the way I’m meant to? We spend our whole lives trying to meet targets set by someone else. We lose sight of who we are, because we’re so busy chasing external things. In love that means people search for what’s outside of them (a romantic partner) and lose sight of what’s inside them (a potential for self-development and understanding).

Figure out what you’re looking for outside of yourself that you’ve not found within. Are you looking for a relationship because you genuinely want one? Or because you don’t love yourself and you think that if you meet someone who loves you it will validate your self-worth?

building a strong romantic relationship required self-sufficiency and self-understanding:

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. You have to let them in.

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.

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.

When you want to change to keep a partner interested, that’s ‘adaption’, which is bad because you’re bending your identity to please another. Whereas when you change alongside another person, that’s ‘mutual impact’, because you’re not putting on an act to please anyone. Instead, you’re growing, individually and together.

It was more important to be fully myself and be single than it was to pretend.

Instead of tantrums and storming out, you learn how to read signals and when to back off and which hills to die on. These are all things that are difficult to navigate without self-understanding.

It’s like mixing paint: sometimes when you mix two people together they make a horrible colour. Some people do bring out the absolute worst colours in you and, if that’s the case, it’s the relationship that’s flawed, not you. You’re not meant to lose sleep or cry over love.

‘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.

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.

The problem is, if you say to yourself, ‘I don’t want to hear about your pain because I don’t complain about mine,’ then that’s the death of love. You have to be tolerant and give the other person what they need.

It’s giving up on trying to control what happens. When you’re trying to manage your obsession around something you want really badly, it’s soothing to try to let go of your sense that it is all up to you to make it happen.

Because our past experiences are part of us, and to deny mine would be to deny who I am. It’s what allows me to appreciate what I didn’t have. All of us have unique stories and we seem to be looking to make them less unique. Or to deny them because we think that makes us ‘normal’. Actually, it’s OK if something painful happened to you. That’s part of being human for a lot of us.

So learning the difference between self-compassion and self-pity is one way we can be kinder to ourselves.

And if you can be kind to yourself, you can be kind to others. I find that when I’m not kind to myself, that becomes harder.

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.

Because for those who are deprived of love – and everybody is or will be deprived of it in some way or another – there are negative emotions that will try to fill that gap: guilt, anger, shame, bitterness, envy.

That’s exactly what it was, but it had to be true forgiveness. I had no idea that I would feel good, I just knew I had to trust myself. That’s the other thing forgiveness does: it allows you to trust yourself. I’m not asking other people to do that, I’m just saying I’m the last person I thought would be able to forgive, but, in doing so, a weight was lifted from my shoulders.

All those different people moving through King’s Cross station, each with their own stories, their own private hopes and disappointments and yearnings, all connected by a desire to love and be loved.

Until then I hadn’t understood how lucky you can be when somebody leaves you. It’s a sign of youthful arrogance that we think we know what’s right for us. 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.

I do believe in the Buddhist idea that pain comes from a failure to see things as they really are.

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.

edge of the bed and really listened to my mum’s voice: the way she

But when life took something from me – from us – for a while I forgot it all. I was too busy looking back, at what had been lost,

It did, however, turn out to be my most romantic relationship: 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 something that grows, where there is patience and humour, where you can be furious with someone and still love them.

I appreciate that now, especially because I’m older and I’m in a functional relationship. It has certainly shown me that you can have a spark and excitement and romance with someone who’s also going to be there in the morning when you haven’t brushed your teeth.

Feeling cared for at all times, being truly seen, being accepted for who I am – the good and the bad – and being held to a high standard.

For me, the most beautiful thing about long-term love is understanding that a person has become necessary to your life. My life doesn’t make sense without my partner in it and I feel as necessary to her life as she is to mine. And also – it sounds obvious but it’s important – we make each other laugh every day.

The most surprising thing is that when you find the right person, it’s not a lot of work. People often say, ‘Oh, love takes a lot of work,’ but I’ve found it’s an effort that doesn’t feel like work – it’s just maintenance. What I love, and what has been unexpected, is that in a good relationship loving someone can be easy.

I never used to believe in soulmates. Now I think my fiancée is absolutely my soulmate. I feel I’ve known her a hundred years and yet every day there’s still more to get to know about her. I love that potential, the unknown that can exist in the familiar.

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.

Now I see that these small gestures aren’t just maintenance, but a form of romance too. Tiny, everyday details that quietly say, ‘I love you.’

The truth is you don’t ever really choose a person, because they change, and your lives do too. 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.

Like you, your partner is always work in progress. As someone who loves them, your job is to keep knowing them, to keep being curious. One of the things I’m proud of in my marriage is how curious I am about my partner and how curious he is about me. When a day ends, there’s no one that I want to tell things to the way I want to tell them to him.

I do feel my partner is committed to the idea of my growth. Every time I’ve had a new project come up, or something I’m scared of trying, he always says, ‘You can do it. You can figure it out.’ And inherent in his confidence in me is an understanding that doing that new thing will change me.

That’s a good parallel: all human beings need to individually be able to survive alone, emotionally.

The healthiest couples are those who can argue without feeling threatened, come back together quickly after an argument and see the conversation in context.

The distinction is that both people are working together and making compromises – there’s a devotion to ‘we’ instead of just ‘me’.

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.

So at first I did not understand what the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm meant when he said that love is ‘a “standing in”, not a “falling for” ’. But this, I think, is the process Susan describes: standing in love. Developing the emotional maturity it takes to remain steady, to hold your balance, to have control over your position. To give the person you love the gift of spaciousness. To not lean wholly on them, but to stand beside them.

An adult relationship is one in which people negotiate disclosure, intimacy, openness, what is together, what is apart.

What would I say to my younger self? Keep your feet well planted. You know it’s not just about who you find, it’s also who you’re going to be. 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.

I noted down two lessons: 1) New friends soon develop their own history; and 2) even when life experiences divide old friends, there is a way to keep connecting, just as long as you’re willing to try.