Hello there. It's been a while, hasn't it? It took me a while to get to reading Conversations On Love. Partly because life happened, partly because I was in such a reading slump that I just couldn't read no matter how hard I tried but this definitely got me out of my reading slump. I'm not really a huge fan of non-fiction because I end up zoning out while reading and I'll just put the book down and pick up something else. However, when I had a look at the list of books Viking Books had for book reviews, I decided I would take a chance on Conversations On Love. And I'm glad I did.
Information About The Book:
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?
In Conversations on Love she began to find the answers:
Philippa Perry on falling in love slowly
Dolly Alderton on vulnerability
Stephen Grosz on accepting change
Candice Carty-Williams on friendship
Lisa Taddeo on the loneliness of loss
Diana Evans on parenthood
Emily Nagoski on the science of sex
Alain de Botton on the psychology of being alone
Esther Perel on unrealistic expectations
Roxane Gay on redefining romance
and many more...
My thoughts:
At first glance, I thought Conversations on Love was about romantic relationships only. It didn't click in my brain that it was about the entire spectrum of love. Platonic love, family love and romantic love. How we find love, how we sustain love and how we survive the loss of love.
I loved everything about this book the one thing that really stuck out for me was the first interview of the book. Natasha Lunn interviewed Alain de Botton for the section called The psychology of being alone in How Do We Find Love. Here is a paragraph of what Alain had to say:
"The Psychology of being alone is interesting, because it can be experienced as more or less humiliating, depending on the story we tell ourselves. If you're alone on a Monday night, for example, you don't feel particularly bad about it. You think, I've had a hard day at work, there's a long week ahead, I'll spend time on my own. Whereas if you're alone on a Saturday night, you can think, what's wrong with me? Everybody else is out having a lovely life with other people." Page 13
What Alain de Botton says in this interview really hit home with me because at the time of reading this, earlier this year I experienced something that caused a change in my routine and I found myself at home on weekends more often than not. I started to feel really bad about it but then I realised that there's nothing wrong with being on your own and there's no difference between being on your own during the week than there is during the weekend. I just had to get used to it and do all the things that I enjoy. I'm currently writing this review at 11:30 on a Friday night and that's fine. In fact, that's more than fine. I'm really enjoying it and if I had decided to go out instead, I'm sure I would've enjoyed that as well.
I think everyone has either experienced or will experience some form of finding/sustaining/losing love and I also think that Conversations On Love is the perfect book to read about that!
Favourite Quotes:
"This doesn't mean pretending that you don't want to meet a partner - or have a child or make new friends or find whatever love it is you're searching for; it means being brave enough to hope for what you want, but wise enough to know that life is not one love story, but many. It means trying to build love with a partner - if you want one- but also in purposeful solitude, in creating something that others connect to, in a stranger's kind words, in friendship, in family, and in the sometimes-bright-sometimes-grey sky that's always been there, all your life. It means understanding, too, that all these forms of love are not given or acquired; they are learnt and earned."
How Do We Find Love? Page 89
"Actually, your partner can't make you angry, because you have the ability to control your emotions. As soon as you rely totally on your partner to make you happy, you run into trouble. Because your partner has no hope of fulfilling that expectation; no one person can ever meet all your needs"
How Do We Sustain Love? Page 137
"What do you wish you had known about loss?
That it's coming, for all of us. Some people are luckier than others, obviously, but everybody's going to have the rug pulled out from under them at some point. I don't think you can know that until it happens to you. Even though you know - in theory- that you are going to lose people, until you experience it it's hard to believe it. But loss is part of the deal. It's part of being a person. It's part of that it means to be alive."
How Can We Survive Losing Love? Conversation between Natasha Lunn and Ariel Levy. Page 239
Love is a choice - and sometimes it's choosing to love someone even when we don't feel lovingly towards them. The feeling of being 'in love' comes and goes, ebbs and flows, but the action of loving is a decision. One we make every day.
What I Wish I's Known About Love. Page 283.