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

by Natasha Lunn

I’d date someone new, idealize them, keep parts of myself hidden, and perform the role of a woman more palatable than I believed myself to be.

‘means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind.

the risk of not doing so – of never being seen, of never expressing needs, of never giving and accepting real love – was far greater.

You can be seen by various people in different ways, and no one person, not even your parents, can really see the whole of who you are. So it’s about finding all the different people you can love, and seeing the positivity each of them brings to your life.

I wish I’d known that there is more to fear inside a relationship that shrinks you than in a life outside of it.

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.

It’s about finding someone you can be ‘you’ around without performing, without being the party person or the successful I’m-in-control-of-everything person. Someone you can experiment with being vulnerable in front of and accepted by.

That I needn’t worry about not being good enough. And that love is about finding a home.

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

There will always be temptations to hide from ourselves. The important thing is to notice them, to resist them, and to keep finding ways to be honest in our relationships.

I wondered if the ugliest shade of unhappiness comes, not directly from what you lack, but from wanting a different life to the one you’re living. Perhaps that feeling is not a state of longing after all, but a way of seeing. A choice disguised in a lack of one.

‘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.’

Maybe not having something you want wakes you up to another kind of romance. And when life forces you to live in the intensity of the unknown, between two possible futures, it’s also a chance to develop the inner resources and love that will serve you well in the years ahead.

to do so would be to steal the strange, complicated, sometimes tiring gifts of the unknown. The thrill of all the places she has yet to go, all the faces she has yet to know.

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...

‘You have to put on an artist’s mindset and get creative and paint a portrait of a life alone that’s breathtaking.’

But actually, I think what’s more important is understanding your desires and your urges and your complexity, rejecting dominant narratives about how weak and needy and bad and broken you are, and defining for yourself what you are instead.

‘our experiences are bridges not ravines’, however painful they are.

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.

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

while many of my relationships didn’t have the shape that I would’ve chosen, they were the shape that made sense for the connection I had with that person.

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 understand that love was the act of switching the way I responded to the moment; it existed in both the intention and the choice to consciously focus on it.

It is not the object you’re painting, but the process of learning to paint. It’s not admiring flowers from afar, it’s the act of nurturing them so they don’t die. It’s an ‘attitude’, a ‘power of the soul’ or an ‘orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole’.

it means being brave enough to hope for what you want, but wise enough to know that life is not one love story, but many.