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

by Natasha Lunn

Sense and Sensibility: ‘It was every day implied, but never professedly declared. Sometimes I thought it had been – but it never was.’

I learnt that the loneliest place of all is lying in bed at night next to someone who makes you feel small, with your back to theirs, still hoping they will turn over and put their arms around you.

“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.”

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. After years of feeling passive in love, I understood then that we do have a choice, even if it’s difficult to see. Mine was this: to stay in the fantasies inside my head, or to climb out and live.

The 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.

It hasn’t always been this way: in early-nineteenth-century Germany having a good friend was seen as more important than having a lover, and much closer to the roots of happiness.

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. They don’t mean that you’re a terrible person who doesn’t deserve love. They just mean you are part of the human family.

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. It looks like we’re being seen and admired like never before, but actually, many important parts of us are being forgotten.

Because we live in a very individualistic society, we focus on what we want and what we deserve, and we can forget the world doesn’t owe us anything. There are billions of people on this Earth and, 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. It is constantly humbling and helpful.

It has helped me to relinquish control over how my love story or life might pan out. Giving up that control is about having faith that things happened as they’re meant to, and if a plan doesn’t go accordingly that’s because there’s something else waiting for you – you just don’t know what it is yet. I recently listened to a podcast about Stoicism and I saw the connection to Islam. 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.

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. And that one approach to fighting that fear is looking for different ways to feel less alone.

Of course I have different friends across every spectrum, but to be understood without having to explain everything all the time has been a precious thing.

But I do think there’s a joy in being alive that’s not dependent on any person at all. And there’s something permanent about recognizing that the defining energy of my life is now centred within me, not defined by anyone else.

Neither experience is more painful or more difficult than the other. Once we free ourselves from asking who we feel most sorry for, or who has made the best choice, and just allow those pains to coexist? I think that is the key to intimacy in your friendships.

True friendship is about taking it easy on each other, knowing that life has tides that take you to various places, and that you’ll find a way back to each other at different points.

An old friendship is one of those things that helps you remember who you are in the world, and that’s so valuable.

consciousness is at the core of connection. And that love is not inevitable, even in families. We still have to choose to keep it alive.

This is what I now believe is part of the work of sustaining love: first, to create and make space for moments like these. And then? To notice them. To feel their fragility and their preciousness and their newness, even when they

‘a broken heart is an open heart’.

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.

Life requires of us that we let go of places, things, people that we love, to make room for new life, new love. Development demands loss – it’s unbearable, we resist it, but if we are to grow, we must endure this pain.

Sometimes we want the new, and yet we can’t let go of the old.

The most powerful instrument to help us understand love is suffering. It is what allows us to have knowledge of our own hearts.

What I take from this stark version of what we have been discussing – this most extreme point of love and loss – is that even when everything we love is gone, there is relief in gratitude.