Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn
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| Conversations on Love e-book version |
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?
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Conversations on Love
Author : Natasha Lunn
Published year : 2021
Language : English
Pages : 309 (Playbook version)
Genre : Non Fiction, Essays
Where should I start? Rather than an expectation, I had a growing curiosity when I purchased this book on Playbook (big discount!). I saw several popular books raising the theme of love and becoming bestsellers. I guess this is the trend, and I would love to pick up some ideas.
Natasha Lunn, the author, is a journalist. She reads a lot and, of course, has access to other acclaimed authors like Philippa Perry (The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read) and Dolly Alderton (Everything I Know About Love). I imagine, when creating this book, Natasha Lunn sitting across from her interviewees, asking questions related to love to each of them, and providing opinions or summaries.
This book consists of three big ideas about love: How do we find love? How do we sustain love? And how can we survive losing love?
In the beginning chapter, How Do We Find Love, Natasha Lunn explores the love that we knew when we were younger. That time when we met somebody and fell in love, we found ourselves trying to be a better version of ourselves in the eyes of our loved one. We don't become our true selves until we feel secure in our relationship. Then, not unusually, we start to find other “flaws” after several months of being in a relationship.
The author also raises the issue that falling in love is not always about chemistry. Sometimes, we fall for someone super slowly. Sometimes, what makes a satisfying coupling is not thinking, “He or she is right for me,” from the start. Nobody is right for anyone. Actually, what makes somebody right is commitment.
Some people believe that they can only feel love when they feel worthy of love, and that includes doing things that make them feel good, like developing a career, becoming independent, and having friends. But actually, what’s more important is understanding our desires, urges, and complexity, rejecting dominant narratives about how weak, needy, bad, and broken we are, and defining for ourselves what we are instead.
Actually, there are a lot of ideas flooding and widening that sometimes overlap with the other parts. Since the author throws some questions about love, and the interviewees answer them, the flow follows their responses.
The next chapter is about sustaining love. There are some interesting ideas in this section: love survives not because our feelings remain intense, but because we learn to adapt to change. There is one of my favorite answers from the interviews:
“The most surprising thing is that when you find the right person, it’s not a lot of work. People often say, ‘Oh, love takes a lot of work,’ but I’ve found it’s an effort that doesn’t feel like work – it’s just maintenance.”
People change. Relationships change. Our circumstances change. Passion inevitably fluctuates, and a long-term relationship cannot constantly recreate the intensity of its beginning. So perhaps the more important question isn’t, “How do we keep feeling the way we did at the beginning?” but: How do we continue loving someone when both they and we are no longer the same people?
The book also reminds us that sustaining love is often remarkably mundane. Long-term love is built through small acts of attention: listening, remembering, apologising, checking in, repairing misunderstandings, and repeatedly choosing to care. It is less about grand romantic gestures and more about maintenance.
And perhaps most importantly, sustaining love isn’t about avoiding conflict. It is about learning how to repair the relationship after something has broken.
The last section, How Can We Survive Losing Love? In this section, the author tells us more about her experience of miscarriage, which becomes part of the book’s exploration of loss.
One of its strongest ideas is that grief isn’t necessarily something we “finish.”
We often imagine grief as: loss → grieving → healing → moving on.
But perhaps grief is less about eliminating the feeling of loss and more about learning how to live with it. Healing doesn’t necessarily mean no longer missing someone.
Instead, love may simply change its form. Someone who is no longer physically present can continue to occupy a meaningful place in our inner life.
After I finished reading it, funnily enough, what went through my mind was, “Where exactly is the author’s voice?” We read so many life lessons, tips, views, and ideas from so many people in this book (actually, far too many), yet they overwhelmed the author’s voice.
Maybe I need the author to synthesize it. She had an idea, threw it to the panelists, and instead of just validating the panelists, she should have provided her own opinion. Thus, the ideas feel like just a collection of sounds that didn’t reach my heart.
I mean, there is Natasha Lunn’s name on the cover, not Philippa Perry and Dolly Alderton, moderated by Natasha Lunn.
In retrospect, I think it is about preference. It’s like listening to music: some people prefer a carefully composed album, where every song contributes to a whole, while others enjoy a playlist where each song stands on its own. And perhaps this book is exactly that—a playlist about love. Natasha Lunn carefully curated all these voices and let the reader synthesize them, perhaps even create their own understanding of what love is.
Anyhow, there is also a bright side, of course. The diction is just beautiful—not flowery beautiful, but just exactly the right words. I even managed to add some new words to my personal vocabulary. Words that I had never read before.
Additionally, I read this when I finally understood relationships and my frontal lobe had just developed enough. I wonder if I had read this in my early 20s, maybe it would have been such an inspirational read—or maybe I wouldn’t have gotten it at all.
Hence, I still recommend this book, moreover if we are at the crossroads of loneliness, in our early 20s, falling deeply in love with someone, or just losing someone. Plus, there are some parts that shape of love is not limited to coupling, but also love in the friendship.
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