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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

this idea of understanding that all you have control over is how you react to a situation and how you treat others. So faith has shaped the way I see love because it’s shifted my focus from myself as an individual to the other people around me. It’s shown me that meaning in life comes from the kindness and compassion you show to others, and also from a deep, peaceful acceptance that allows you to look disaster and joy in the eye with the same kind of level-headedness.

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.

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.

Love is about finding a home

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.

Sometimes I called him because I was lonely. Sometimes I think he called me because he was lost.

Because 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.

when we don’t tell the truth – when we perform or pretend in love, or try on different versions of ourselves to get someone’s approval – we invite loneliness in.

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.

As Sydney Smith says, ‘Why destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may never come at all, or you may never live to see it? For every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them shadows of your own making.’ Instead, try to focus on the fact that what you have around you is love, and a good life.

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, and then seeing that it’s more beautiful than anything that’s supposedly perfect and pristine.

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.

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

And the fact that we took that leap, without knowing that everything would work out? Perhaps that act of faith, of hope, might carry us through tougher times, when we look back and marvel at it, and think, how little we knew, how easily we could have found a reason not to jump.

I think that the search for love, as I understand a lot of my life and my work to be, is also the search to see that I already have it.

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.

If you tell me, ‘I care about my partner,’ then my second question is, ‘How do you show it?’ The fact that you feel it isn’t enough.

Love is not a state of enthusiasm. It’s a verb. It implies action, demonstration, ritual, practices, communication, expression.

I delved into one of the biggest challenges we face in love: the balance between distance and security.

This is going to sound like a cliché – once I’ve said it I will expand on it because it’s complicated – but what people lose in a long-term relationship is kindness.

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.

And frankly, that’s one of the most exciting things about being in love. I don’t want to get to know someone new, I’ll tell you that for sure. I’m old and I am done. I have had it with trying to figure out someone’s new quirks. I want the quirks I already know!

I had never really loved the men I’d dated and idealized in my twenties. I had not been invested in helping them grow, or in seeing the whole of who they were, because I was more interested in how I looked in their perception of me.

The fleeting parts are tiny pockets of time like these, which we must do our best to pay attention to.

I think we have to find a way to balance the messaging about being independent and self-reliant with the human desire to be connected, to love and be loved.

Perhaps I am romantic because I don’t like being taken for granted and so I don’t ever want someone I’m with to feel that way either. Inevitably, at some point in the course of a relationship, one of you will take the other for granted. That is just the way it goes. But when that happens, I want it to be an aberration, and not the norm.

I do believe in the Buddhist idea that pain comes from a failure to see things as they really are

We’re creatures of wanting, but also of consciousness.

How did I get so insatiable? Can I learn to ask for a little less from everything? I have been allowed to travel, to build a writing career, to have an unusual and fascinating romantic history. All of this I am grateful for, even though it has not led to the sustained love relationship and family that I wanted. In another lifetime, I think I would have been a great mother. But I also think that in this life I’ve been a great seeker. I didn’t get everything that I wanted, but the things that I got were really great. 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.

Part of that is luck, part is circumstance, the rest is mystery. But one of the lessons I’ve had to learn is that, while many of my relationships didn’t have the shape that I would’ve chosen, they were the shape that made sense for the connection I had with that person.

I do sense that there isn't an end to love and that people you love never really leave 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.

But you never know the story. There’s always a new chapter.

Our emotions are not entirely reliable: they tend to overshoot or undershoot the target. Think, for example, of fear. We tend to be afraid of the wrong things and overlook the real things we should be afraid of. We’re afraid of ghosts, but we’re not that afraid of how short our lives are, or that we’ve neglected our true talents. We’re not great at knowing what there is to fear, nor are we great at knowing what there is to love (and in what quantities).

If you’ve forgotten you’ve just met another human being, not a divine creature,

You can find independence through connection too.

I knew you can only feel love when you feel worthy of love, and that includes doing things that make you feel good, like developing a career and becoming independent and having friends.

It’s also useful to recognize that intensity doesn’t have to mean sadness, and longing doesn’t have to mean desperation. Longing can actually be a generative stance that’s lovely to feel.

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.

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.

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.