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

by Natasha Lunn

I still believed the act of showing yourself fully to a new person was a risk, but somewhere inside me a fresh knowledge was unfolding: that the risk of not doing so – of never being seen, of never expressing needs, of never giving and accepting real love – was far greater.

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.

Essays in Love,

The Course of Love,

When it comes to self-love it’s not so much about loving yourself, but accepting that all human beings have their less impressive sides, and so your less impressive sides don’t cut you off from the possibility of having a good relationship. They don’t mean that you’re a terrible person who doesn’t deserve love. They just mean you are part of the human family.

We’re not great at knowing what there is to fear, nor are we great at knowing what there is to love (and in what quantities).

If you’ve forgotten you’ve just met another human being, not a divine creature, then ultimately that person’s going to be very frustrating when you realize they are just another flawed person.

sometimes we’re fed up and aware of somebody’s glaring faults, but still very much on their side. They annoy us and we still love them.

That makes me think idealizing someone is the opposite of love, because it means refusing to see the whole of them?

They might just not fancy you, which is deeply unfortunate, but something to be accepted, not fought over, like bad weather.

that things would work out or they wouldn’t, and even then, that would be fine too.

All the times I had been casually rejected, I realize now, were either future blessings or facts to be accepted, rather than resisted.

For every depressing date, there was a precious friendship formed. For every lonely Sunday, a new ambition discovered.

‘If being loved is your goal, you will fail to achieve it.’

If I do meet someone, he will be a normal human being who is trying to figure out his way through the world, who is flawed and who will make mistakes, just as I will.

I want love to be a part of the puzzle that is my life. I don’t need it to be the full picture.

I spent a lot of time thinking that love was loading an expectation on to one person to see me for who I am and love me regardless.

Nobody is right for anyone.

It’s the ghost of a memory, and when we latch on to ghosts of memories

you make a shiny shell that appeals to people to make yourself feel great, but that shell is a fabrication, a sort of forced identity, rather than your inner being.

A place where we feel seen, and where we can see.

always believing I was just on the edge of meeting someone, seeing opportunities everywhere, then feeling a little pathetic when they never quite materialized in reality.

It’s easy to see now how short-sighted my approach to this portion of life was. How focused I was on receiving love, instead of giving it; on waiting for it, instead of building it.

The romantic relationship or family I wanted would not make my life meaningful; only I could.

my longing for love made me more alive to small moments of beauty in solitude: the transcendental strings in a happy-sad song; the precise power of a sentence perfectly assembled; the way half a dozen petals fell off a rose with no warning, twirling in the air before settling on the ground.

And by never forgetting that not knowing what will happen next also means that anything could.

Friendship feels easy to me in a way romantic love doesn’t.

it’s like you build a private religion with another person, and honesty and vulnerability have to be a part of it.

the best definition of happiness is the ability to approach your life as this gorgeous, unfolding work of art that’s always changing, and never quite what you expect it to be, and then seeing that it’s more beautiful than anything that’s supposedly perfect and pristine.

And there will be times, too, when love is just one thread in a tapestry of ambitions and hopes and discoveries.

Just as I had learnt that a beautiful life contains joy and suffering, the people we love have amazing and frustrating layers. They will be mysterious and sexy and funny. And they will be boring and insecure and gross.

Maybe seeing them as funny or endearing, or beautiful pieces of a whole person, is what it means to love.

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.

Similarly, from not having it early on in my life, 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.

How do you not let the love you haven’t had distract you from the love you do?

I’m the source of the problem. Which is incredible, because I’m also the solution.

I’m talking to you from King’s Cross station, and everybody here has got their unique story. But what we share is that every single person in the station, all of us, wants to love and be loved. When you understand that, you empathize with people. You understand that we’re all part of something bigger.

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.

And sometimes the uncertainty fuels your longing for someone. In situations like that I’ve often wondered, if things worked out, would it have been easier to see the other person’s flaws, rather than romanticizing what could have been in their absence?

But the truth of this life is that there’s a lot of pain in it.

If I get lonely, I reach for those pieces of writing that feed the soul.

I didn’t get everything that I wanted, but the things that I got were really great. And maybe not getting what you want allows you to see the beauty of what you have. Without that, it’s too much of a smooth ride.

I wanted my mum to keep on talking, to always be there on the other end of the phone,