Natasha Lunn

“This book might just change your life” ―Sunday Times 'Wise, wonderful, moving and brilliant... will leave your heart in a much better place” ―Stylist After years of feeling that love was always out of reach, journalist Natasha Lunn set out to understand how relationships work and evolve over a lifetime. She turned to authors and experts to learn about their experiences, as well as drawing on her own, asking: How do we find love? How do we sustain it? And how do we survive when we lose it? In Conversations on Love she began to find the answers: Dolly Alderton on vulnerability Stephen Grosz on accepting change Candice Carty-Williams on friendship Lisa Taddeo on the loneliness of loss Diana Evans on parenthood Emily Nagoski on the science of sex Alain de Botton on the psychology of being alone Esther Perel on unrealistic expectations Roxane Gay on redefining romance and many more...

Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings

Conversations on Love

Helen Borham

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 So you make someone the right person and they make you the right person. There isn't someone the right shape out there for every person - that has to happen in relationships. That's why relationships get better, because we allow mutual impact.

Harley V

Phoebe Waller-Bridge spoke about how you spend your twenties figuring out who you are, and so by the time you've carved out an identity you share less with each other, because the stakes are higher.

Lizzy Jensen

“As someone who searched far and wide for somebody to love her, I feel I missed that the great love story of my life is really that I was born to two parents who love me, and that I never had to ask for their love.”

It's an emotional realignment, like somebody's cracked my spine. If I get lonely, I reach for those pieces of writing that feed the soul. That can lead you back to the best in yourself, or articulate the things that you can't find words for. 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.

If I felt then that the men I dated saw me only as a faint pencil sketch of a person, [my friends], by contrast, didn't just see me clearly but brought out all the colours. When you spend time around a friend who makes you feel this way, you're left with a lingering sense of peace. Their questions nudge you closer to knowing yourself, their love shrinks your insecurities. And so, in the space of loving and feeling loved, I learnt to value myself. 

You're not meant to lose sleep or cry over love. You shouldn't have to fight for it. If it feels like a fight, don't waste your time.

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 would not be the person I am now without my friends. They point out my successes when sometimes I can't see them. They show me the good parts of who I am when I don't like myself. That sounds dramatic, but sometimes it is true. 

I'm talking to you from King's Cross station, and everybody here has got their unique story. 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.

Conversations on Love quotes

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