Name: antonia maria wagner she/they's review of Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn
Item: Conversations on Love
Rating: 5
Author: antonia maria wagner she/they

Natasha Lunn

A celebration of love in all its forms, with contributions by: Alain de Botton on choosing the 'right' partner * Candice Carty-Williams on friendship * Philippa Perry on self-acceptance * Diana Evans on parenthood * Roxane Gay on re-defining romance * Emily Nagoski on the science of sex * Gary Younge on loss * Esther Perel on infidelity * Lisa Taddeo on a broken heart * Dolly Alderton on vulnerability * and many more _____________________________________________________________________________ Every day we think about love, and every day love eludes us. Maybe you're hoping to begin a new relationship, or in a secret place in your heart, gathering the courage to leave one. Maybe you're in a long-term partnership, wondering how to sustain love through life's many storms. Maybe you're a parent and you want to be a better one; or you've lost a parent, and that loss suddenly dwarves everything else. After years of interviewing people about their relationships, Natasha Lunn learnt that these daily questions about love are often rooted in three bigger ones: How do we find love? How do we sustain it? And how do we survive when we lose it? Interviewing authors and experts as well as drawing on her own experience, Natasha Lunn guides us through the complexities of these three questions. The result is a book to learn from, to lose and find yourself in. The real-life love stories will leave you feeling hopeful and seen, while the insights from experts will transform the way you think about your relationships. Above all, Conversations on Love will remind you that love is fragile, sturdy, mundane, beautiful; a thing always worth fighting for. Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn is available to pre-order now

Conversations on Love

sina (she/her) 

It's a sign of youthful arrogance that we think we know what's right for us. The older I get, the more I realize the things I wanted were not necessarily the things that would've given me what I needed at the time.

What do you wish you'd known about love? That I needn't worry about not being good enough. And that love is about finding a home.

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.

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.

ReadwithZanariah 

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived

Love is stronger, more lasting than fear 

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. Do many of us? We don't learn about love at school, we don't research it, or take a test in it, or review it once a year. 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. And yet, whether we think about it or not, love leaks in and out of all of our lives, every day, freely, cruelly and beautifully. 

"The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.' (Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook)

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.

antonia maria wagner she/they

Bulan

Stas

I deeply enjoyed the richness and wisdom of this book. A mus read for everyone that wants to understand how to love. 

kaitlan

If the 7+ billion people on this planet read this book, the world would be so lovely it might explode. Mostly I mean that this book makes us better, kinder, softer people, and I think we all need to be all of those things, more and all the time.

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.

Mostly I mean that if I had an infinite supply of money, I would buy a copy of this book for every person I know and text them daily to ask if they've finished reading it. 

Conversations on Love deals with desire and longing with candid, poetic tenderness. It points us to what we know is true but often distract ourselves from: that we need and want love, and that is okay—even good—we just often distort good love with fear and fantasy. Instead of "Will I ever find love?" this book drives us to ask, "How could I love better?" 

True loving means letting others be, seeing them as real and full, and then being real and full alongside them. And while we cannot control the flow of people and events (and even love) in our lives, love does require our intention and care. Love requires curiosity, self-reflection, honesty, commitment, and still, space to be and grow into its own. 

If I'd stayed with someone I'd met in my early twenties, moved to the seaside, got a dog and had a baby at thirty, there would have been wonderful and mundane chapters to that story, just as there were wonderful and mundane chapters to the life I lived during those years instead.

I've been lucky to have my life as it's unfolded.

this book reminded me that to love is to be changed. that love is spacious, joyous, disappointing, and hard at times. i will definitely be coming back to this book again and again. 

antonia maria wagner she/they &
Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn

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antonia maria wagner she/they &Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn

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antonia maria wagner she/they &
Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn