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

by Natasha Lunn

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.

I’m matching the other person then we’re a match, but that makes them more insecure because they’re not being themselves.’

Adrienne Rich said that responsibility to yourself ‘means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.” ’

there’s pain and joy on each side of the ledger. So don’t stick rigidly to one story about what your life means, because it’s likely to be wrong. In fact, there are many ways of living this life.

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

Because if you don’t ask for your needs to be met, they won’t be, and that can make you needy.

when we perform or pretend in love, or try on different versions of ourselves to get someone’s approval – we invite loneliness in. Although we are trying to attract love, really we’re blocking it. Instead of trying to be known and seen, we are hiding, holding back.

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.

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 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.

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.

although you have to work at a relationship, you shouldn’t have to work at convincing someone to love you. Either they do or they don’t. The loving and being-loved part should be easy.

getting to know someone is a never-ending story: a partner can still be a mystery to you, even after years of knowing them. And by accepting that, instead of resisting it, you can fall in love with them again and again. What she helped me to see was that long-term love offers everything I had assumed was reserved for the early years: mystery, eroticism and even romance, if you pay enough attention.

Just when I think, I know this guy really well, he changes: a new part of him emerges that I hadn’t known before. Figuring out who he is now is deeply interesting to me.

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.

but what people lose in a long-term relationship is kindness. They lose it for a number of reasons: because once you’ve got close to somebody, they can much more easily push your buttons than a stranger can, and vice versa. You’re unlikely to throw a temper tantrum if a friend does something that irritates you. But with somebody you love and who loves you, often it’s easier to shout than it is to step back and think, no, I ought to treat my partner almost as if they were a stranger. I should be kind and keep a little distance.

‘Hold on, you disagree with me? That must mean you don’t love me, because you never disagreed in the beginning.’ You can either react to the threat of difference by nagging each other all the time, or by shutting down, having no connection at all and putting your attention on work or children or elsewhere. A constant problem for couples I see is that balance between keeping the connection while also keeping sufficient distance, so that you can be kind to one another. Whereas other things can vary, this underlies most of the problems I’ve seen.

a balance between you where your lives are intertwined, but they’re not so intertwined that you lose your own identity and the elements that brought you together in the first place.

It’s about being close, but not so close that you treat each other badly.

be as kind to your partner as you would to a stranger. Don’t rely on them to meet all your needs (or to make you happy).

See arguments in context. Don’t expect them to put up with every flicker of emotion that you feel. Sift through your own feelings first.

Love, whether in friendship or romantic relationships, goes wrong when we forget to tell people who we are and forget to ask who they are.

We think of our lives as linear, but they’re not. Although one day follows the other, we’re just as likely to be recalling what happened last week as musing on the events of a decade ago, or indeed our hopes for next year.

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).

Development demands loss – it’s unbearable, we resist it, but if we are to grow, we must endure this pain.

the best marriages – by which I mean the strongest, most resilient marriages – are remarriages to the same person. Strengthened by working through their difficulties, these couples rediscover or find new aspects to love in their partner, rather than seeking another.

‘Love is a frequency we can either choose to tune into or ignore.’ We can decide to move through the world in a loving way. We can look at our phone while ordering coffee in the morning, or make a connection.

Love will always flow through our lives in this inconsistent, unknowable way, and we cannot press pause on the joyful bits, nor fast-forward the suffering. All we can do is keep noticing when there is an imbalance, keep adjusting our efforts to make sure the people we love know that they are important to us.

We have to remember to keep up the little acts that say ‘I’m here’: to post the birthday card, to look into someone’s eyes, to call, to kiss, to hug, to ask questions and to say ‘I love you’ – and not in a throwaway way.

to tell the truth, to accept impermanence, to retain separateness, to see beyond ourselves, to understand that, although other people’s flaws are annoying, so are ours; and to keep catching ourselves. By ‘catching ourselves’ I mean tapping into a self-awareness that allows us to pull back from a mistake while we are making it. Like explaining why we are irritated, before jumping further into a fight.