Conversations On Love Natasha Lunn Quotes

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.

As I grew older, I learnt that the expectation that someone will save you from who you are, or from what you have or don’t have, is a fallacy. Expecting someone to fill in a hole that’s within you? That’s expecting too much of any one person. That’s not your friend’s job or your partner’s job. That’s your job.

Love is not a state of enthusiasm. It's a verb. It implies action, demonstration, ritual, practices, communication, expression. It's the ability to take responsibility of one's own behavior. Responsibility is freedom.

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.

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.

But the truth of this life is that there's a lot of pain in it. There's more loss and grief than we want to believe. How we make peace with that is the journey we're all trying to figure out.

When you stumble on something you didn’t know that somebody else felt too, you think, oh my gosh, I’m not the only one. That is a falling in love – it’s the self recognized in someone else. A union of souls.

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

We spend our whole lives trying to meet targets set by someone else. We lose sight of who we are, because we're so busy chasing external things.

Love is a place where we feel seen, where we can see.

The best definition of happiness is the ability to approach your life as this gorgeous, unfolding work of art that's always changing, and never quite what you expect it to be.

hope I will remember that love is not a narrow thing. That love is what makes us care, connects us to each other and the world. That love is a quest, a promise, a home.

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

Sometimes, I realized, we lose more from fear itself than the thing we are afraid of.

Now I think it’s about separating the idea of ‘I will only be happy if I have a partner’ from wanting companionship. Because it’s not the wanting love that’s the problem, it’s believing that you can only be happy in a relationship.

When you are not being honest in a relationship – to another person or to yourself – it is a little like screwing on the top of a jam jar when the ridges are out of line. An onlooker might think you are screwing it on just fine, but you can feel a stiffness developing that warns you it’s not on properly, and you know then that, however hard you try to keep turning it, the lid will never tightly seal.

For me, the most beautiful thing about long-term love is understanding that a person has become necessary to your life. My life doesn’t make sense without my partner in it and I feel as necessary to her life as she is to mine.

It doesn't matter who you meet or when you meet them; there's pain and joy on each side of the ledger. So don't stick rigidly to one story about what your life means, because it's likely to be wrong. In fact, there are many ways of living this life.

Nobody is right for anyone. Actually, what makes somebody right is commitment. Then when you’re committed to each other and you have true dialogue, that means you allow the other to impact upon you and they allow you to impact on them. You’re not rigid and unchanging; you are moved by each other. It’s like two stones rubbing together until suddenly they fit. You have your initial years of sexual attraction and then something deeper can hook in. Rather than having a relationship with your fantasy of that person you begin to have a real relationship with them; you’ve impacted each other enough to actually know each other. And to know someone is to love them.

And I grew to understand that the grief I felt equalled the love. - Greg Wise

Love is a lifelong project, a story that we can’t skip to the end of. How lucky are we, to know we will never finish it? Because there is never a final page, only a series of beginnings.

Through all of these small moments - the joyful familiar Sunday afternoons and the painful drunken fights - we have a choice. In the joyful ones, will we overlook the beauty, or will we be consciously present? And in the painful ones, will we decide it's easier to shut the conversation down than to dig for the uncomfortable truths? Or will we find a way back to a loving place?

I'm not referring to books or novels about love, specifically, but rather to passages of writing that have the power to make you feel a little more alive. The paragraph that gives you a tingle of recognition. The lines that feel as if they are directly written for a deep, secret part of you, that you weren't necessarily even aware of until it was woken up by words. Reading such a passage is, I think, a form of love. Like any relationship, that intrinsic recognition is a way of understanding and being understood, of seeing and being seen.

All of us take so much for granted. Life is beautiful and we don’t have time to realize it. We let silly and petty things rule us and lead us into criticism. We find fault with life because we are tired and grumpy, instead of relishing the fact that we are with other people who are healthy, who love us and want to be with us.

Even if I don't get what I want, I have a good life.

And in my friendships, I need to work on breaking out of my role as caregiver, because that’s rooted in wanting to be needed. I’ve woven a big part of my identity through looking after people, and I know that part of love in friendship is asking for your needs to be met too.

We need to stop tying ourselves so narrowly to this punitive vision that we've got to date in our twenties, find the ideal partner by twenty-eight, and have our first child at thirty-one, otherwise our life will be miserable. If that sort of narrative happens, it'll be great in some ways and it'll be awful in others. We need to show more imagination about what a good life might look like.

The best frame of mind to be in for anything you want is an ability to walk away from it, or 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.

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

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.

Until you stop skim-reading your friend or lover or family member, and instead read them more closely, as a never-ending story. A story whose plot you cannot control, or rewrite, or ever fully finish.

The search for any kind of love, I now believe, is a continual process of looking in and out. Looking inwards to understand yourself, to be curious about your needs and desires and gifts and flaws, to develop generosity and self-compassion. Then looking outwards to use the power those things give you to love other people, and the life you are living too. What I had learnt is that you don’t really find love at all; you create it, by understanding that you are part of something bigger. A small speck of colour vital to a picture of life.

We learn to keep our jagged bits inside for fear of appearing unattractive. I always thought there was a part of your messiness you saved for yourself, that no one else would ever see. It’s enormously humbling to realize how many times and ways my partner will pierce that. I can pretend I have all sorts of things together, but when I am at my most broken, he is still the person I turn to.

I'm here for the good and the bad and everything in between". True friends see through any level of performance or denial or avoidance.

I hadn't really needed an answer; I just wanted to say our worst fear out loud to take away its power.

My longing was a restlessness that spread out into my life like a mist. I could not see anything clearly with it there.

The bigger challenge, I think, is how do we carry those losses inside us without letting them distract us too much from our lives

In that way my strength comes from love; at the roots of resilience – the ones that go deep in the earth and stop a tree getting blown over – is love.

The bigger challenge, I think, is how do we carry those losses inside us without letting them distract us too much from our lives...it's worthwhile to realize that we are still ourselves, that there is an essential self that's still there, separate to the future you might have lost.

As the writer Jeffrey Kluger puts it in The Sibling Effect, ‘From the time they are born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and co-conspirators, our role models and cautionary tales . . . Our spouses arrive comparatively late in our lives; our parents eventually leave us. Our siblings may be the only people we’ll ever know who truly qualify as partners for life.

Diana Evans once said to me: 'I do sense that there isn't an end to love and that people you love never really leave you. You never lose their love because it adds something to you.' It seems we go on loving people after they die because the love we shared with them changes us, becomes a living part of us, a piece of them we can never lose.

Why did we every think that everything was perfect? Why did we ever think that loss wasn't part of what it is to be a human being? Why does it come as such a shock to us?

It's important when you've good news to tell the right people. People who understand the dream or have a dream of their own. Otherwise, you end up feeling deflated.

y. Isn’t that an unhelpful fact of life, that insecurity can trick us into craving sex with someone who cares for us so little?

The truth is it’s hard not to have found a relationship and it’s brave to go into a relationship and it’s hard to find one and then to lose it. All of us, at some point, have to learn how to get our hearts broken.

The important thing, she explained, was not to make the ‘right’ or ‘best’ decision, but ‘to closely bind yourself to whatever you’re living’. She said, ‘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.’ We were discussing this in the context of choice, but I think it applies to circumstance too. The romantic relationship or family I wanted would not make my life meaningful; only I could.

Now I realize that what these answers point to is that, although you have to work at a relationship, you shouldn’t have to work at convincing someone to love you. Either they do or they don’t. The loving and being-loved part should be easy.

If someone's lost a cat, but the cat was the most important thing in their world, to me that needs to be taken seriously -- that's as important as someone else's loss of a person. It's weird that people police grief and decide whose loss necessitates more care.

We’re encouraged to learn about economics and grammar and geography, but not to know about love. It seems strange to me, how we expect so much from love, and yet devote so little time to understanding it. Like wanting to dive into the sea but having no interest in learning how to swim.

I used to think love was the feeling hanging between me and my mum on that phone call, a mix of what I felt for her and what she felt for me. But now 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.

my friends have treated me with more kindness than a romantic partner has. And it’s so important to spend your life with people who not only see the goodness in you, but bring it out too. I know I need to get better at being open to a romantic relationship, but I feel that building and investing in healthy, loving, joyful friendships is just as important.

I will have longevity in a relationship like that, but my guess is that I will never grow that tree, and it’s OK, because I’m going to grow a more varied garden. So I’m realizing that there isn’t necessarily going to be one long love for me, but maybe a series of shorter love stories. Just as making peace with what I don’t get is going to be a series of acceptances.

As trite as it sounds, I think the key is that, when women start having children, it’s sometimes very painful and stressful and claustrophobic and boring and lonely. And what is also a fundamental truth is that it is incredibly painful, stressful, claustrophobic, boring and lonely to not have a family when you want one. Neither experience is more painful or more difficult than the other.

Commitment is important. Do you need the piece of paper? Not necessarily, but I do think marriage is more than that, and it’s a strange reflex to minimize the commitment to just ‘a piece of paper’. For me, marriage is about saying, ‘Yes, we’ve already committed, but now we’re going to make vows to each other in front of our friends and our family, and they’re going to hold us accountable for those vows. We’re going to hold each other accountable for them too. We’re going to try to stay together, no matter what. We’re going to stick it out. We’re not going to run away when it gets too hard or too scary, and we’re going to try to always see the best in each other: today, tomorrow and twenty years from now.’ The fact that you’re willing to do that with someone? To commit to really trying to make it work? I think that’s a very sexy, lovely thing. Sometimes it doesn’t work out and there’s nothing wrong with that. But marrying someone means that you’re going to give it a go anyway.

Well, here’s the gift: our experiences are bridges not ravines. They allow us to understand the world and its dysfunctions more. Why did we ever think that everything was perfect? Why did we ever think that loss wasn’t part of what it is to be a human being? Why does it come as such a shock to us? Actually, the good and bad things that happen give us a great opportunity to connect with the world and to others.

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 that we don't fully understand? I think that is a kind of magic.

I used to think it was love that I was longing for, but I was wrong. I was obsessed with the idea of love, not the truth of it. All those years and nights I spent asking, ‘When will I find love?’ I never paused to think about what precisely it was.

Why did I keep trying to make it work? When he kissed another girl at school it was my first experience of rejection, which dented my self-worth at a formative age. From then on his affection felt like a prize I could win back, one that might mean I was lovable.

So I don’t regret my first romantic fantasy. But I do regret the template for love that I drew from it, and all the subsequent years I spent trying to mould myself to fit it.

The irony is, I was confused because I had carried over the unhelpful lessons from this teenage infatuation into other relationships in my twenties. My pattern was often the same: 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. This woman never asked for anything.

this way I could always feel something in these relationships was out of sync from the beginning. Moving through the motions of intimacy with this dread pulling at the back of my mind was an anxious state to exist in, always suspecting that a person did not want to be with me but being too afraid to ask. It meant I got so good at pretending I didn’t need anything that I forgot how to be myself.

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

When I asked psychiatrist Dr Megan Poe why people lose their sense of self in relationships, she said it’s sometimes because they’re trying to ‘echo-locate the other and not reveal the self’ and merge with them.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “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.

We reach for words like ‘chemistry’ or ‘gut feeling’ because we have nothing tangible to base a feeling on – no examples of kindness or care or connection, just a magnetic draw. Tallis said 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. But that’s just one false inference feeding another, and each inference takes you further away from reality.

Because, as Tallis told me, we often ‘aggrandize our own confusion or lack of insight’ when we have no evidence of real intimacy. We reach for words like ‘chemistry’ or ‘gut feeling’ because we have nothing tangible to base a feeling on – no examples of kindness or care or connection, just a magnetic draw. Tallis said 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.

It was between immaturity and growing up, between fantasy and reality. Did I want to keep avoiding intimacy and lean back into the safety of a nostalgic crush that didn’t require me to do anything differently? No. I wanted to form real relationships that existed in the real world. To do so would require courage and self-understanding, maybe a little loneliness, and a lot of responsibility.

Did I want to keep avoiding intimacy and lean back into the safety of a nostalgic crush that didn’t require me to do anything differently? No. I wanted to form real relationships that existed in the real world. To do so would require courage and self-understanding, maybe a little loneliness, and a lot of responsibility.

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.

It’s a strange feeling, thinking about who you were in past relationships: a mix of sadness and humour, of mortification and frustration. But as well as learning to laugh with friends at some of the more embarrassing stories – one of the few upsides to errors in dating – 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.

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.

if being in your own company is fine on a Monday and a tragedy on a Saturday, the problem is not the objective fact of being alone, it’s the story you’re telling yourself.

You once told me when we use the word ‘love’, what we’re really talking about is connection. That made me think of times I felt I didn’t have love in my life, when actually I did. Is it helpful to re-evaluate what the word ‘love’ means?

It’s hard to see clearly what you learn from what you lose. At first, I thought the lesson of my loss was to protect myself from a similar ambush in the future, by holding back love. And now? I see that the uncertainty love requires is not a problem to be fixed; it is what makes it beautiful. It invites courage. It asks us to hope, without evidence, without knowing.

His affection felt like a prize I could win back

I got so good at pretending I didn't need anything that I forgot how to be myself.

...the lonilest place of all is lying in a bed at night next to someone who makes you feel small, ... , still hoping they will turn over and put their arms around you.

If being loved is your goal, you will fail to achieve it.

That makes me think idealizing someone is the opposite of love, because it means refusing to see the whole of them? Yes, you’re not witnessing them properly. 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.

A big question in love I’m wrestling with is control. Because in some ways I think we are more in control in love than we have been led to believe, and it’s important to know that our role isn’t passive.

You can think that by saying the right things, or by reading every book on the subject matter, you will somehow reduce your chances of failure and increase your control. But that’s only partially true. You can’t tell where somebody else is in their life. They might just not fancy you, which is deeply unfortunate, but something to be accepted, not fought over, like bad weather.

I had wasted energy trying to keep these relationships afloat; there was no need to waste more asking why someone didn’t love me, or what I could have done differently to change the outcome. The only outcome was the one that happened.

As the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck wrote, ‘If being loved is your goal, you will fail to achieve it.

In Ayisha’s debut novel Sofia Khan is Not Obliged, and its sequel The Other Half of Happiness, she not only explored what it was like to date as a Muslim woman, but captured the humour, heartbreak and necessary self-awareness involved in anyone’s search for love.

Figure out what you’re looking for outside of yourself that you’ve not found within. Are you looking for a relationship because you genuinely want one? Or because you don’t love yourself and you think that if you meet someone who loves you it will validate your self-worth? Sometimes people do get into relationships to validate what they think they lack.

when we stop relying on one person to make us happy, we not only find more confidence to question a relationship that isn’t working; we live a more varied and interesting life. As she said, no one person can see the whole of who we are.

building a strong romantic relationship required self-sufficiency and self-understanding: two things I had lost in earlier relationships. Before I could find them, as Ayisha explained, I had to figure out what I was looking for outside of myself that I had not found within, then understand who I was in the present in relation to my past.

I’m able to be more vulnerable with friends, because when I show them my true self it somehow feels less of a risk. There are so many societal expectations of what a romantic relationship should be: becoming ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’, moving in together, marriage, children.

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.

Often someone feels those things, not because of something bad they’ve done, but due to a free-floating shame that exists because they learnt as a child to believe they were bad.

For the last hundred years or so we’ve trained children not to ask for anything, because it’s a nuisance. Children are told, ‘Those that ask don’t get.

Nobody is right for anyone. Actually, what makes somebody right is commitment. Then when you’re committed to each other and you have true dialogue, that means you allow the other to impact upon you and they allow you to impact on them. You’re not rigid and unchanging; you are moved by each other. It’s like two stones rubbing together until suddenly they fit.

It meant I got so good at pretending I didn’t need anything that I forgot how to be myself. It also meant I mistook instability for attraction, because the scraps of affection men tossed me were more thrilling for their inconsistency: the surprise of a text message at 1.30 a.m. that said, ‘Are you out?’, or the promise of a drunken ‘I love you’ never mentioned again when sober. The men I dated never called the relationships off, but never fully committed to them either.

We often ‘aggrandize our own confusion or lack of insight’ when we have no evidence of real intimacy. We reach for words like‘chemistry’ or ‘gut feeling’ because we have nothing tangible to base a feeling on – no examples of kindness or care or connection, just a magnetic draw. Tallis said 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. But that’s just one false inference feeding another, and each inference takes you further away from reality.

Often we have crude models of the lives of others, which aggravate our despair of being on our own. We tend to imagine, when we’re alone, that everybody is in a happy relationship other than us. It’s easy to think, I’m the only vaguely decent person to whom this has happened. And that’s not true; lots of dignified and capable people have, for one reason or another, found themselves on their own. It doesn’t have to be a tragedy.

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.

Optimism and faith is not enough; 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.

The things I flew past in the race to get what I didn't have were actually the gifts all along.

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.

It’s the scale of the idealization. If you’ve forgotten you’ve just met another human being, not a divine creature, then ultimately that person’s going to be very frustrating when you realize they are just another flawed person. So having a certain pessimism about what people are like is useful. But I think that’s compatible with kindness and enthusiasm.