Conversations on Love

Journalist Natasha Lunn opens the book by acknowledging years spent obsessed with the idea of love rather than its truth. She longed for text replies, affirmation, and romantic relationships but never paused to examine what love actually meant. Citing author and cultural critic bell hooks's argument that learning faulty definitions of love when young makes loving difficult later, Lunn frames the book around three questions: How do we find love? How do we sustain it? How can we survive when we lose it? Over four years, she interviewed writers, therapists, and experts for an email newsletter called Conversations on Love, and those conversations expanded her understanding far beyond romance. After a miscarriage and a painful struggle to conceive, she noticed that her longing for a baby in her thirties mirrored her longing for a boyfriend in her twenties: Both fixations blinded her to the love she already had.

In Part One, Lunn traces how fantasy distorted her early understanding of love. She recounts a fifteen-year crush on Ben, a boy she first kissed at fourteen, whose inconsistent affection she interpreted through the lens of her parents' lasting romance. Her parents had met at school at fifteen, and their love became her earliest template. Throughout her twenties, Lunn repeated a pattern: idealizing partners, suppressing her needs, and mistaking instability for attraction. She references psychiatrist Dr. Megan Poe's concept of "echo-locating the other," matching a partner rather than revealing oneself. The turning point arrives on a Soho pavement, where Lunn decides to choose reality over fantasy and let go of her attachment to Ben.

Her interviews deepen these insights. Philosopher Alain de Botton argues that the capacity to accept being alone is paradoxically one of the best foundations for being happily partnered. Psychotherapist Philippa Perry contends that nobody is inherently "right" for anyone; commitment and what she calls "mutual impact," two people allowing themselves to be changed by each other, create compatibility over time. Perry distinguishes this from unhealthy "adaption," where one person bends out of shape to please the other. Author Juno Dawson describes how living as a man for twenty-nine years made authentic love impossible, and how transitioning allowed her to show up honestly in relationships.

Lunn then explores the weight of uncertainty. She describes lonely Sundays in a Mediterranean cafe, the unbearable not-knowing of whether love will arrive, and a visit to her grandmother that reframes unknowns as possibilities. Meeting her close friend Marisa at twenty-seven teaches Lunn to value herself in a way romantic relationships never had. Poet Lemn Sissay, who grew up without family love after his foster parents returned him to social services at twelve, describes how that absence gave him the gift of understanding love's importance and how forgiving his foster parents became an act of self-love. Memoirist Sarah Hepola discovers that the search for love is also the search to recognize the love one already has, particularly from parents still alive.

Part One closes at Lunn's thirtieth birthday party. Surrounded by friends and family, she realizes that instead of waiting for love, she can choose it by paying attention to the people already present. She references psychoanalyst Erich Fromm's view that love is not the object one is painting but the process of learning to paint. Finding love, she concludes, requires both looking inward to develop self-understanding and looking outward to actively love others and the life one is already living.

In Part Two, Lunn turns to sustaining love. She recounts her first kiss with Dan, her husband, on a pavement in Canonbury after a date, then jumps forward four years to the same pavement: They are now married, returning by taxi from the hospital where a doctor has removed their ten-week fetus. Months of trying to conceive follow, marked by pregnancy announcements from friends and a growing silence between her and Dan. She feels her body is failing them both. The turning point comes one night over pizza, when she tells Dan everything, including her fear of what the fertility journey might do to their relationship. He squeezes her hand and reassures her they will be all right regardless. By their first-anniversary trip to Puglia, Italy, Lunn begins to see the beautiful parts of their life more clearly and realizes that the tenderness of love deepens rather than fades.

Her interviews explore what sustaining love demands. Essayist Roxane Gay describes her relationship with partner Debbie Millman as maintenance rather than work, finding romance in everyday gestures such as Post-it notes with hearts. Couples therapist Esther Perel discusses how modern relationships bear expectations once distributed across a whole community and insists that love is a verb requiring action and responsibility. Lunn also examines the evolution of friendships, describing the guilt of receiving pregnancy announcements while struggling to conceive and reflecting on the bittersweet gaps in her long friendship with her university friend Jen. Psychotherapist Susie Orbach explains that envy among friends is often a signpost to one's own hidden longings rather than literal jealousy, and advocates for "separated attachments," where friends remain connected but allow each other room to develop independently. Part Two closes with a scene of ordinary love: Dan lending Lunn ski goggles to chop onions, the two of them dissolving into laughter, a moment she recognizes as the kind of scene one of them will miss most when the other dies.

In Part Three, Lunn confronts loss. She describes the aftermath of her miscarriage: the surgery and the small painful reminders, such as a baby scan photo tucked in a book and a barista who remembers her decaf order. She identifies three layers of sadness: the loss itself, the loneliness that accompanied it, and the shame of feeling she should have moved on. She reflects on her grandmother, whose infant daughter Louisa died at twenty months, a loss the grandmother never discussed openly.

The interviews in this section examine grief from many angles. Psychotherapist Stephen Grosz argues that life is a series of necessary losses and distinguishes the pain of loss from the additional suffering of believing one deserved a different outcome. He references writer Andre Dubus, who began using a wheelchair after a car accident and was subsequently left by his wife, on the importance of gratitude for whatever life remains. Journalist Ariel Levy recounts giving birth to her son at nineteen weeks in a hotel bathroom in Mongolia, then meeting her now-husband, the doctor who treated her. She notes that grief shifts over time: At first you live in it, then it lives in you. Dr. Lucy Kalanithi, widow of When Breath Becomes Air author Paul Kalanithi, describes how Paul's terminal cancer diagnosis made their love bigger and collapsed time so that past, present, and future felt simultaneous. She references psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's three sources of meaning: love, purposeful work, and courage in the face of difficulty.

In the book's final chapters, Lunn discovers she is pregnant again in February 2020. She and Dan emotionally tiptoe around the pregnancy, afraid to invest in a possibility that may not come to be. She realizes her caution is like cutting a ribbon too short out of fear of wasting it. At ten weeks, she sees blood and rushes to the hospital. Dan races across London to hold her hand. She decides to resign her attempts at self-protection and love the possibility regardless of the outcome. The doctor, the same one from her miscarriage, performs an ultrasound and finds a heartbeat. Lunn concludes that the uncertainty love requires is not a problem to be fixed but what makes it beautiful.

In the conclusion, Lunn admits she did not fall in love with her daughter Joni immediately, but that love grew through daily acts of care until it became as much a part of her as her organs. She recounts a terrifying night when six-week-old Joni appears to stop breathing, reinforcing how precarious it is to love another person. She identifies love's enemies: self-pity, neglect, ego, and always wanting more. Its companions are responsibility, discipline, listening, humor, forgiveness, gratitude, and hope. She reflects that these conversations expanded her understanding of love into something vast and boundless, existing in Post-it notes, poems, the kindness of strangers, and ordinary afternoons. She closes with the hope that at the end of her life she will know she noticed love when it was happening, and will think that love and life are astonishing.