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.

But for me, faith is about love. It’s something I can rely on. It’s something that gives me a sense of belonging. It’s there, whether I feel it or not, even in times of despair. When you feel completely alone and at sea, a short prayer can give you the strength to go somewhere inside yourself to find love.

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.

Creativity is not the monopoly of artists.

This is at the core of why desire is bullshit. I would love people to stop putting desire at the centre of their definition of sexual well-being, because all it means is that you’re motivated to engage in sex – regardless of what the motivation is – and often that motivation may be slightly twisted, or not good for you.

When we feel the release of compressed energy in our body, a mixture of acceptance, tenderness and lust; the indescribable feeling of being deeply in tune with another person in a way that we don’t fully understand? I think that is a kind of magic.

What do you wish you’d known about love? That it is infinitely harder and infinitely more glorious than I’d ever imagined.

It’s the ability to take responsibility of one’s own behaviour. Responsibility is freedom.

So if we give up on a friendship every time our lives are out of sync? At the end of our lives, we might find we don’t have many left.

For that reason, envy becomes part of how women understand themselves: they can project on to others the things that they want, because actually activating their own longings feels impermissible.

because, for me, something being constant meant that it was successful.

Our siblings may be the only people we’ll ever know who truly qualify as partners for life.’

terrible things do happen, but that doesn’t mean that you have to live in a constant state of fear. If you do, the bad things might still happen anyway, but you wouldn’t have enjoyed all the pleasures of being alive.

Moments like these make me think that this is a strange gift of loss: how it makes us more alive to the glimmers of connection that are all around us, when we need them the most.

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

Iris Murdoch once said that ‘love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.’ She’s right – we achieve love by overcoming our narcissism.

The understanding that no one’s going to find a good life for you, you have to find it for yourself.

How different life might be, I thought, if we made goals like these, to connect rather than to achieve.

All I knew was I didn’t want to let my fear of loss drain any more colour from my life. Enough had been wasted.

It asks us to hope, without evidence, without knowing.

And yet they are all small pieces of a reality that’s more beautiful than any fantasy, than anything that I could have imagined.

I hope that on my last day on earth I’ll look back on it all and think, love is astonishing, life is astonishing. How grateful I am, not only to have known love, but to have known just how important it was, to pay attention to it.