Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn
Updated: Jun 07, 2023
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.
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. In 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.
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. At the time, I recognized this suppressing of the self as a private, graceless shame; only now do I understand it to be an unoriginal problem. I’ve spoken to countless people who – despite feeling confident at work, with family, with friends – have lost themselves in relationships. Have squashed their personalities into a different shape and forgotten their own needs and desires in an attempt to second-guess a partner’s. This shrinking of the self starts in small ways: pretending you want to see a horror film at the cinema; making Spotify playlists of songs that might impress them instead of the ones you really want to listen to; buying a dress you can’t afford just because you think they’ll like it.
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." ’ When I looked up the original Jane Eyre line I found the one that precedes Rich’s quote: ‘I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me to do so.’
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.
When I was searching for love in my twenties, there seemed to be two types of people who were looking for romantic relationships: those who easily fell into them and were content in the spaces between when they were – albeit briefly – single. And those who found falling in love an impossible task, who couldn’t seem to find happiness on their own, but couldn’t get past the starting-block stage of a relationship either. I had always been in the latter camp.
Updated: Jun 11, 2023
And later from his book The Course of Love, I learnt about the challenges of intimacy long after the initial sheen of desire has worn off. Few people chronicle love with as much meticulous rigour and pragmatism as Alain.
It suggests that if the search for a partner didn’t work out then it would be a tragedy, that your life would essentially have been wasted. That sets up a frantic, unhelpful backdrop to the search for love. 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.
Updated: Jul 02, 2023
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.
It sounds odd that you could lose touch with your own self. How could that be possible? You are you; how could you become less you by being in contact with somebody else? But we receive data from our senses and emotional selves, which can be overruled by data we get from other people. A classic example is if you say, ‘I’m a bit sad,’ and another person goes, ‘No, you’re not, you’re fine. You’re doing so well.’ You might then think, my point of view is not legitimate. They are right, I’m fine. When actually, it might be important for you to step back and acknowledge that things are difficult.
Because, frequently, anyone you’re in a relationship with has a view on what’s right for you, or what’s right or wrong in the world. And the capacity to say, ‘That’s interesting, but I’ve got my own reality, and I’m not sure that fits in,’ depends on whether that’s a muscle that’s been exercised in childhood. Often it hasn’t been, because many aspects of a child’s reality are overruled by parents.