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

by Natasha Lunn

To sustain friendships – old and new – I think we have to learn when to accept distance, and when to fight to repair it.

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. The question, then, is not how to avoid these painful missteps, but how to keep trying to tell the truth to each other, regardless.

Our desires have become so hidden and forbidden that we’re not even aware of them on a conscious level. You could argue that, because people want to be rich or famous, those wants are visible. But materialistic desires often don’t relate to ordinary needs for connection and understanding, or the need to be seen, recognized, cherished and heard. In a way, the desire for fame or success is a cover, which then obfuscates the fact that people don’t really know how to accept or admit more fundamental desires. On the surface you might crave status, or the right type of car, when really what you are afraid to want is to be valued for being you. And so we measure ourselves in relation to our friends or colleagues instead.

There are so many different types of love. There’s love for friendship, love for children, love across the generations, romantic love, love of work, love of cooking. I wish I’d known how big that word is, how capacious it is, how many different expressions it can have, and how many ordinary graces people can give to each other.

At times, that ongoing conversation might include sharing painful things. Saying, ‘I’m proud you are achieving so much in your career, but sometimes that reminds me I’m struggling with mine.’ Or, ‘It’s amazing to see you content in your relationship, but often I feel there’s no room in your life for me any more.’ Or, in my case, ‘I love seeing pictures of your baby, but they also remind me how sad I am about not being pregnant.’ Because Susie made me realize that my envy was not only rooted in wanting what others had. Really it grew from a fear of being left behind, and of loneliness.

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.

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.

All of us take so much for granted. Life is 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.

Without love we are nothing; an isolated person, a lump of cells. Love gives everything meaning but is too easily thrown away. If we find it, we don’t work hard enough at it (and you do have to work at it). You can’t make assumptions. You can’t run away from the bad stuff. Put it this way: if love between two people is profoundly tested by something, and you do get through to the other side, your relationship will be forged at a deeper level.

Life requires of us that we let go of places, things, people that we love, to make room for new life, new love.

In my clinical work, I’ve seen patients – more often men than women – who repeatedly marry and divorce; some, I suspect, would have been more content if they had simply remarried the person they were originally married to.

It is my view that the aim of psychoanalysis is not to help the patient – it is to understand. Understanding is the medicine in psychoanalysis.

The most powerful instrument to help us understand love is suffering. It is what allows us to have knowledge of our own hearts.

It made me realize that all you can control is what you do with love and whether or not you choose to prioritize it.

I don’t know why anyone would – how anyone could – write to a woman who had lost her child with mean words instead of kind ones. Had my grandmother blamed herself, reading that letter? I hope not. I hope she had a friend who tore it up, who pointed out that often people are cruel for reasons that have little to do with those they are cruel to.

‘I do sense that there isn’t an end to love and that people you love never really leave you. You never lose their love because it adds something to you.’ It seems we go on loving people after they die because the love we shared with them changes us, becomes a living part of us, a piece of them we can never lose.

end, love is not the only thing that matters. When she told me that,

At first, I thought the lesson of my loss was to protect myself from a similar ambush in the future, by holding back love. And now? I see that the uncertainty love requires is not a problem to be fixed; it is what makes it beautiful. It invites courage. It asks us to hope, without evidence, without knowing.

I’d learnt about love’s enemies (self-pity, neglect, ego, laziness, always wanting more) and its companions (responsibility, discipline, listening, humour, forgiveness, gratitude and hope). With this new knowledge, I anticipated I might be able to avoid future problems in love, or at least find some shortcuts.

Some of us are good at remembering; the rest of us need a little help. As Sarah Hepola pointed out to me, the people who are the best at staying present develop certain strategies: they pray, meditate, write and run; they find tiny, significant ways to be grateful. And I hope that’s what these conversations will do too: provide small but precious reminders to pay attention to the lives we are living. Through asking people how to love, all along I have been finding out how to live.