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

by Natasha Lunn

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.

‘I don’t adore myself, but I’m interested in myself and I can communicate the truth about myself to other people,’

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.

Because, frequently, anyone you’re in a relationship with has a view on what’s right for you, or what’s right or wrong in the world. And the capacity to say, ‘That’s interesting, but I’ve got my own reality, and I’m not sure that fits in,’ depends on whether that’s a

we’re in a crush.

We can play a similar sort of observer and feeler division in the early stages of love.

parents love their children. Parents really love their children. At the same time, sometimes they don’t like them – they get bored of them, they think they’re awful, they want a break from them. And all those things go on in the love that an adult might have for another, too: 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.

We need to show more imagination about what a good life might look like.

when I realized how profound, heartfelt, generous and consistent those friendships could be.

God has been solid and consistent in a way that absolutely nothing else in life has.

in the grand scheme of things, you are but a tiny part of the whole. My faith is a compass that reminds me of that.

In both, there’s this idea of understanding that all you have control over is how you react to a situation and how you treat others.

Part of trying to figure out what you really want from life is ensuring you’re selective about who you surround yourself with,

This idea of – I’m using air quotes – ‘I’m a strong independent woman who doesn’t need a man’ can also be dangerous, because being strong doesn’t mean you don’t need people. We’re not born to be alone. We need community, however we choose to find it: with a partner, with friends, with family. I think there’s a danger of pulling away from love in order to own your feminism, when, actually, you learn to understand yourself in relation to people around you. You can find independence through connection too.

So it’s about finding all the different people you can love, and seeing the positivity each of them brings to your life.

Nobody is right for anyone. Actually, what makes somebody right is commitment.

That’s why relationships get better, because we allow mutual impact.

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.

When you start to feel lonely. If you’re seen more or less how you see yourself – or perhaps expanded by how someone else sees you – then you feel met in a relationship. If you’re diminished, then you don’t feel met. If you’re not seen at all, and someone continues having a relationship with their fantasy of you instead of with you, then that’s lonely. And if that’s a negative fantasy? It’s toxic.

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.

If the fear is excitement, then feel it and do it anyway. But if it’s about the massive amount of willpower that’s required to do something out of societal pressure, then that’s different.

The obvious solution is to not pretend to be someone you’re not,

There’s so much emotional literacy that goes into being with someone: instead of dramas, there are compromises. Instead of tantrums and storming out, you learn how to read signals and when to back off and which hills to die on.

It’s like mixing paint: sometimes when you mix two people together they make a horrible colour. Some people do bring out the absolute worst colours in you and, if that’s the case, it’s the relationship that’s flawed, not you.

This was how I spent the twilight of my twenties: 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.

Unless you believe in psychics, all of us will face some measure of this uncertainty – it’s part and parcel of existence. Maybe there is comfort in knowing that, whatever we have or don’t have compared to each other, we share this same vulnerability to randomness.

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.

would not tell her, even if I could, because 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 will happen next also means that anything could.

‘We learn about ourselves from a loved one not so much because of what he tells us, but rather by observing our own reflections in him.’

They taught me love could be consistent and solid and steady, that it could make me feel safe. I know some people prioritize romantic love over friendship, but the truth is I love my friends more than I have loved any partner. They are the people who have shown me what it means to love and be loved. Friendship feels easy to me in a way romantic love doesn’t.

To me it’s about demonstrating love, investing time, having an awareness of people – their history, their desires, what they need. And seeing and accepting the different facets of who they are.

But what’s more important than replying to a message instantly is to give someone your absolute attention and focus when you do speak.

to describe the crazy act of choosing to love someone without sugar-coating the process. Because it is crazy, if you think about it, to decide to commit to another person even though you have no clue who each of you will be in ten, twenty, thirty years’ time. You make a pact to build a life with someone without knowing what that life will look like. Without knowing who will get sick or who will lose their job, whose sex drive will change or whose in-laws might need regular care. This is what we do when we begin a relationship: we commit to something unknowable.

You have to be tolerant and give the other person what they need. If you don’t do that, it’s easy for both of you to drift into your own worlds and to stop sharing yourselves.

these boring, insecure, gross bits are the things we might look back on fondly one day too. Maybe seeing them as funny or endearing, or beautiful pieces of a whole person, is what it means to love.

I find that when I’m not kind to myself, that becomes harder.

How can you make space in your life for love to thrive? Because if you don’t, it won’t.

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.

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. The older I get, the more I realize the things I wanted were not necessarily the things that would’ve given me what I needed at the time.

As humans we have a default setting that’s cranky and lazy and self-interested and slothful. The people I see that live good, meaningful lives have rigorous

exercises to push back against that setting, whether through prayer, meditation, gratitude journals or running.

One of the tricks of this life is being grateful for the things that you are given.

sudden awareness of the fleeting beauty of this phone call.

what she missed most was sharing the tiny, seemingly pointless details of each other’s lives.

I wanted to tightly bind this conversation to memory.