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

by Natasha Lunn

Both made me more focused on the love I didn’t have rather than the love I did.

The thing I was longing for had changed, but the restless, searching feelings were the same. I understood then there would always be something to long for in love if I continued to see it in this narrow way – a boyfriend, a marriage, a baby, a second baby, a grandchild, another decade on this Earth with my mother, father or husband.

They helped me to see through the mist of longing, to see the love that was already in my life, all along.

we often ‘aggrandize our own confusion or lack of insight’ when we have no evidence of real intimacy.

this lack of evidence ‘becomes fuel for romantic mysticism. You think, I can’t explain it, so therefore it must be fate, it must be profound.

the shame I once felt has been replaced with compassion for the younger version of myself who so desperately wanted to find love, and was looking for it in all the wrong places.

best frame of mind to be in – for anything you want – is an 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.

how much fidelity are you going to bring to being certain of your own feelings?

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 muscle that’s been exercised in childhood.

No one really wants to be idealized – we want to be seen and accepted and forgiven, and to know that we can be ourselves in our less edifying moments. So to be on the receiving end of somebody’s idealizing feelings is alienating.

doesn’t matter who you meet or when you meet them; there’s pain and joy on each side of the ledger.

In my earliest efforts at love, imagination was a thief that stole truth and perspective and time.

It was a distraction from reality, which made me see love where there wasn’t any.

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.

When you want to change to keep a partner interested, that’s ‘adaption’, which is bad because you’re bending your identity to please another. Whereas when you change alongside another

person, that’s ‘mutual impact’, because you’re not putting on an act to please anyone. Instead, you’re growing, individually and together.

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.

It’s hard to put language around it because it’s really hard to wait for love.

Buddhist idea that pain comes from a failure to see things as they really are.

I’ve walked around Paperchase seeing Mother’s Day cards as a stinging reminder of my struggle to become a mother, instead of feeling lucky that my own is still alive.

checking my phone underneath the table, to see if a man who didn’t really care about me had replied, missing the fact that the people I cared about most were sitting right in front of me.

In this way his personality, the essence of who he was, only deepened my sense of failure.

the tender joy in front of me would not have existed if our other life had.

a lot of forgiveness for all the silly fuck-ups we make along the way.

The harder part is exposing and locating a vulnerability in yourself that you know the other person will never have to shoulder

we had sex for each other. We showed up: two people with a shared dream, committing to something neither of us particularly wanted to do, trying to be kind and generous to one another while we attempted it anyway.

‘People with shared history are very precious indeed, and yet new friends become old friends in time too.’

you lose a future in a moment, and then you are left to mourn it at a pace you can’t control.

To someone who cannot understand why a miscarriage can be a painful loss, I would say: imagine for the first time in your life you are not alone inside your own body.

there is suddenly another life in your inner world.

In the space of a few months – or in some cases longer – women who miscarry experience inside them the bookends of our existence: the beginning of life and the end of it. I would not describe that experience as a small one.

It’s not that material things mean nothing to me – I want financial security for my family – it’s that they’re the means to an end, and that end is a life.

‘Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.’