Conversations on Love

If someone asked you "How do you find love?", what would you say? Natasha Lunn's answer: I don't know, so I went and asked a lot of people.

She was features director at the British magazine Red, and for years love felt far away from her. So she started a newsletter called Conversations on Love and interviewed writers, therapists and philosophers: Alain de Botton, Philippa Perry, Esther Perel, Stephen Grosz, Roxane Gay, Dolly Alderton and more. In 2021 those conversations, woven together with her own story, became this book. It's organized around three questions: how do we find love, how do we sustain it, and how do we survive losing it. She writes about years of unrequited love, her marriage, a miscarriage and becoming a mother, honestly and without milking it.

Being able to be alone is the best foundation for a good relationship. That's de Botton's point. People who are afraid of being alone tend to grab the first person who shows up.

Nobody is born "the one." Philippa Perry says being right for each other is something two people grow into by investing in and shaping each other. It isn't one person endlessly giving way to please the other.

Love is something you do, not just something you feel. Esther Perel points out that we now expect one partner to fill the roles a whole community used to. Love has to be practiced, continuously.

Reviews are mixed in a familiar way. Some readers find the first part a bit too greeting-card, with the sections on sustaining love and on loss more solid. Others say it widened what they think love is: not just between partners, but between friends, parents, even strangers.

This book took me longer to finish than I expected.

Read it if you have a lot of questions about love and don't want a standard answer.

Grief is something you live in and then eventually it lives in you. (Ariel Levy)