Conversations on Love
My life at a certain moment revolved about romantic love, and the urge to find a partner, i spent long time thinking about it envying the beautiful couples holding hands in the park, watching movies together in the cinema thinking will i ever find love? Am i going to be on my own forever? When will be my turn?
The question was consuming me, and this kind of drained a lot of other
forms of happiness from my life, because I believed that if only I could find
this romantic relationship then my whole life will be great, and everything
else would fall into place
When i looked at love, all I thought about is there's just nothing that i can
do about it.
It will either happen to me or not at all, all I did is sit and wait for it
miserably.
However, i never really stopped asking what love is like? What does it mean
to love someone? And what’s my definition of it?
While being obsessed with finding the one, i didn't really think about what
it might be like to give love or how i could contribute to it.
Sadly we're not really encouraged to prioritize love in the same way that we would do to our career or our health, nor encouraged to learn about it in the way we would learn grammar or geography or politics.
A fascinating read from Natasha Lunn,
profoundly moving, and thoughtful in its exploration of love, our capacity to
be happy, and being able to live a life worth living. Given the importance of
love, it is surprising that we know and understand it so little.
Lunn provides us with intimate details of her personal life, while interviewing
and discussing the subject of love from a widely disparate range of people and
their differing perspectives
Natasha in her book highlights
some important things if you are looking for longing:
1- 1-Chemistry and gut feelings that come automatically in love and not just
because they might not be a sign of real intimacy but also because they could
be a sign of a complete lack of it.
2- 2- Feelings are not enough to sustain a relationship firstly because we won't
always feel in love with our partners. Sometimes you might feel that deep love for
them and other times all you feel is deep frustration and irritation.
The book claims that love
doesn’t disappear in those moments. In fact, it's the decision to act lovingly towards
your partner, to choose this person even in these moments when love is absent, and to
demonstrate to them how important they are to us, to show intentions.
3- 3- long-term love is mysterious too
we can never really know another person, because when you are in a relationship
with someone you're not really choosing a person, you're choosing how you
whether change with it alongside them.
That would lead to each of you having different versions of yourselves that are
going to emerge and you have to keep getting to know those different versions.
This makes long-term love so amazing;
imagine there still can be mystery you can find in somebody even after 20 years. you can
always write new beginnings into your familiar love stories.
4- 4-Life is full of many different love stories, love has other forms than the
romantic one, there is the friends love, family one, self-love, the love you
find when connecting to a stranger in a vulnerable moment.
indeed, love comes in so many shapes
and forms and acts, but also that none of those things are acquired or given
and actually we have to learn and earn them and keep choosing them every day.
Finally, we know these things and we learn these lessons but we tend to
forget them so easily risking to get back to normal lives and those things slip
away again.
So, remember to not let the people in your life slip into the background.
Pay attention to all the small opportunities that exist for love inside
each day.
If i could only recommend one book in my life, this is that one book