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

by Natasha Lunn

When you are not being honest in a relationship – to another person or to yourself – it is a little like screwing on the top of a jam jar when the ridges are out of line.

The best frame of mind to be in – for anything you want – is an ability to walk away from it, were it not to come right. Otherwise you put yourself at the mercy of chance and people abusing your desperation. So the capacity to say, ‘I could be alone,’ is strangely one of the most important guarantees of one day being with somebody else in a happy way.

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.

Arguing itself is not the problem, it’s the attitude to arguing that can be the real issue.

sometimes old friendships evolve like plants whose roots outgrow their pots: they are still alive, still growing, but they need more space to survive.

you lost the love, then you were left with the grief. One was the price for the other.

It’s enormously valuable to learn to accept the things you cannot change.

Sometimes, I realized, we lose more from fear itself than the thing we are afraid of.