Posted on by Asia Lenae

Dolly Alderton on Friendship as a More Satisfying, Everlasting Form of Love & How Friendship Metamorphoses

When we’re young, friendships are romantic, intense, intimate.  We see our friends nearly every day.  Usually, they’re are at most a few blocks (if not a few doors) away.  Because our most pressing responsibility is turning in our term paper by 5 o’ clock on Friday, we have plenty of time to see each other.  Weekends overflow with mimosa brunches, spontaneous day trips, Saturdays in wine country.  In our twenties, our pals are there to help us weather life’s catastrophes and crises.

In our thirties, things change: people get married, have children, move several cities (or states) away.  Rather than see each other every day, we see each other only occasionally.  Burdened with the responsibility of working a full-time job and raising a family, we might only see our closest confidante once every few months instead of nearly every day.

In her poignant interview “The Beauty of Vulnerability in Friendship,” one of many profound pieces from Natasha Lunn’s Conversations on Love, millennial memoirist Dolly Alderton explores this at times heart-wrenchingly painful change.  In an insightful moment, Alderton explains why it becomes harder to be honest in friendship:

“…you spend your twenties figuring out who you are, and so by the time you’ve carved out an identity you share less with each other, because the stakes are higher.  I think that’s true, you do spend your twenties trying to work out what your job is, what your politics are, what part of the world you want to live in; and you do that with a band of brothers and sisters.  You create an identity patchwork in a group, as well as on your own.  Then when you get to your thirties, you have to declare who you are in a permanent way.  It’s either, ‘I’m someone who is going to live in the suburbs’ or ‘I want to be a stay-at-home mother’ or ‘I want to retrain and start a new career.’  Your identity hardens.  You have to defend this edifice of who you are, because it’s too late in the game to change it.  One you declare that, it can feel more dangerous to say, ‘I don’t know if I should have married that man’ or ‘I don’t know if my job makes me happy.’  To admit that in an authentic, vulnerable connection with someone close to you is scary in a way that it’s not in your twenties, when everything is in flux.  For all those reasons, letting people in and allowing yourself to be unsure or vulnerable becomes harder.  It’s more of a potential threat.”

In our thirties, lives diverge in several different directions: many buy houses, settle down, have kids.  If our friends choose one path and we choose another, it’s hard not to feel abandoned.  Why isn’t our married pal making more of an effort to stay connected?  Sure, she just had a baby, but she can’t spare 5 fucking minutes to return our call?  Is she really so preoccupied with the all-so-important, all-so-consuming task of changing diapers that she can’t reach out?

It’s heartbreaking when we see our close friends, who were once starring characters in the story of our lives, fade into the background.  Rather than play one of the lead roles, they become minor characters who show up every few episodes.

In college, our best friend knew everything about us: they understood the dance move that signaled we were blacked out drunk; they could decipher the hidden meaning behind our text messages (ellipses meant we were upset about something/”I’m fine” translated to mean “I’m verging on a mental breakdown…come over with Cruel Intentions and some Haagen Dazs”). 

10 years later and our best friends no longer know the most basic facts about us.  When we do reconnect, we have to tell them what’s going on in our lives— they’re not there to witness them themselves.

At first, this shift in our relationships is devastating.  As she transitioned to her thirties, Alderton found herself missing her friends, who were once her surrogate family.  She yearned for the simpler days when she could spontaneously call one of the gals and meet up for martinis.  Now her former partners in crime were too busy juggling mortgage payments and engagement rings.  If she wanted to hang out, they had to make plans months in advance.  She missed their former intimacy.  Though her twenties was a turbulent period in her life, her friendships were marked by an effortlessness and ease.  Then her life was manicures and margaritas; now it was unanswered text messages and the blaring silence of the phone not ringing.

Though Alderton initially struggled to cope with the shifting topography of her friendships, she eventually learned to navigate the terrain.  Part of growing older, she realized, is coming to terms with how friendships change.  Yes, her and her friends might not see each other as often and yes, many of her friends with spouses and children might occasionally forget to return a text message, but that didn’t mean their bond was any less significant:

“…because your twenties are a fraught time, you spend a decade adjusting to the fact that you’re parentless.  I spent those years creating a surrogate family within my friendships, and that meant that I could go out and have a wild, risky and exciting time, both creatively and romantically, because I always had that unit to return to.

Now I’m more relaxed about how often friends and I speak or meet up, or how much time they spend with their partner as opposed to me.  I’ve sunk into the safe, precious solidness of their love for me, and I know that, although it will take work, it is also a love that will be there forever.  True friendship is about taking it easy on each other, knowing that life has tides that take you to various places, and that you’ll find a way back to each other at different points.”

Alain de Botton once said our lives are defined by two great love stories: the quest for romantic love and the quest for love from the world.  I’d argue our lives our defined by yet another story: the quest for friendship, what the ancient Greeks called philia and regarded as the highest form of love.  Though our culture glorifies romantic love, in many ways, the love between platonic pals is more long-lasting and far less fraught.  Lovers come and go— lifelong friends take up permanent residence in our hearts.  So though our friends might momentarily sail out to sea and stray far from shore, if they’re true friends, they’ll always return to port.

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 1 Comment

Sarah Hepola on Books as a Source of Community, Companionship & Connection

Though “love” is an expansive word containing a multitude of meanings, most of us have a rather restricted definition of the term.  Love, we believe, is limited to wedding bands and chocolate-covered strawberries, candy hearts and Valentine’s Day cards.  Rather than celebrate love in all its fathomless forms, we tend to glorify romantic love.  Indeed, our monomaniac obsession dominates films and top 40 music charts.

Despite our cultural fixation with eros, there are many perhaps more important and enduring types of love.  In her gorgeous, glorious book Conversations on Love, generous spirit Natasha Lunn celebrates reading (and writing) as one as of the purest, most perfect expressions of love.  If love is— as Lunn suggests— “a way of understanding and being understood, of seeing and being seen,” nowhere can we find more love than in the shelves of a local library.

Though as human beings, we fundamentally want connection, companionship, and community, we’re more lonely than ever before.  We’re not getting married, we’re having less sex, and studies show we have fewer close confidantes.  Books offer the intimacy we lack in the alienated modern world.  What’s wonderful about books— and films and paintings and poems— is they connect us with the finest minds from centuries and civilizations ago.  With the turn of a page, a lonesome 21st century reader can find a friend in Tolstoy or Kafka, Hemingway or Fitzgerald.  

Like a close friend who comforts us during dark nights of the soul, a good book can cheer and console.  Books remind us we’re not alone in our anxiety and neurosis, our despair and sorrow.  Losing ourselves in the world of another, we realize our feelings belong to the whole of the human race— not us alone.  Books are rafts we can cling to when life’s thunder-stricken storms leave us stranded far from shore.

In her insightful interview from Conversations on Love, unflinchingly honest memoirist Sarah Hepola suggests reading can be an inexhaustible source of love.  Though she has yet to meet someone in her 40s, her life isn’t without a love story: she has the love of family and friends and, most of all, of books and writing.

Poet J.D. McClatchy once observed that “love is the quality of attention we pay to things.”  Sadly, most of us overlook the simple pleasures and little delights our lives bring.  The first cup of coffee in the morning.  A bouquet of tulips.  The fact that nearly every day we possess the freedom to do whatever we want.  Instead of notice the magical and miraculous, we focus on what we don’t have, what we have yet to achieve, why who we are and what we’ve accomplished isn’t good enough.  Our habit is to stumble mindlessly, mechanically.  Our natural state is discontent, dissatisfaction, craving.  But to be happy, we must shift our perspective and appreciate our bountiful blessings.  As Hepola writes so beautifully, 

“As humans we have a default setting that’s cranky and lazy and self-interested and slothful.  The people that I see that live good, meaningful lives have rigorous exercises to push back against that setting, whether through prayer, meditation, gratitude journals or running.  We’re creatures of wanting, but also of consciousness.  So the way that we can push back on longing is to pay attention to what we have.  I can see the fact that I live in a house alone as a prison sentence.  Or, like this morning, I can wake up and spend time with my beautiful cat and feel so grateful to be alive in this world.”

When Hepola feels lonely or self-pitying, she finds company in her library.  For her, reading is a passionate love affair, a marriage of two like-minded souls.  The pages of a book are a one-of-a-kind space where two people— of different genders, of different races, of different ages, of different sexual orientations, of different cultures— can infiltrate the walls of “us” vs “them” and find commonalities where there seem to be none.  In those magical moments when a book expresses exactly something she’s seen or heard or thought or felt, she remembers her interconnectedness with all of humanity and feels less alone: 

“[Reading] is an emotional realignment, like somebody’s cracked my spine.  If I get lonely, I reach for those pieces of writing that feed the soul.  That can lead you back to the best in yourself, or articulate the things that you can’t find words for.  When you stumble on something you didn’t know that somebody else felt too, you think, oh my gosh, I’m not the only one.  That is a falling in love— it’s the self recognized in someone else.  A union of souls.”

When asked Lunn’s final question— “what do you wish you’d known about love”— Hepola responds:

“That the love of a partnership can be an incredibly important and transforming experience, but only one of many important and transforming experiences…I think that the search for love, as I understand a lot of my life and my work to be, is also the search to see that I already have it.”

For more warm-hearted wisdom on the love, read Natasha Lunn on love, loneliness & the torment of not knowing, Alain de Botton on idealization as the opposite of love & the manifold miraculous ways to live this life, Juno Dawson on having high standards while dating, and Emily Nagoski on the myth of “normalcy” & how letting go of impossible expectations can improve your sex life.

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Natasha Lunn on Love, Loneliness & the Torment of Not Knowing

After you’ve broken up with someone, your calendar transforms into a terrifying abyss.  Without a significant other, weekends becomes an agony of loneliness.  While you used to look forward to the weekend, overflowing as it was with adventure and excitement— mimosa brunches and flea markets and seaside picnics and romantic dinners and day trips — after a breakup, Friday thru Sunday feels as interminable as a root canal at the dentist.  As Elena Ferrante once said, an empty day is a “noose to hang yourself with.”

The weekend feels especially lonely if most of your friends are in serious long-term relationships. While your married friends are busy with soccer games and children’s birthday parties, you have too many hours and too little to fill them.

In her lovely essay “The Unbearable Unknown,” one of many insightful pieces from Conversations on Love, wise, warm-hearted writer Natasha Lunn reflects on the sometimes intolerable loneliness of being single.  As a single twenty-something, Lunn always made an effort to visit a cafe on Sunday mornings to combat weekend loneliness.  Though she was still alone, she felt comforted by the grinding of coffee beans and murmur of strangers’ conversations.  On weekends like these, empty hours beckoned with possibility: she could read a novel, she could take a yoga class, she could go on a hike, she could visit an art gallery, she could take the tube to the city.  Yet none of these things sounded appealing without someone to do them with.  “I resented time for underlining my loneliness,” she writes, “and I resented myself for wasting it.”

What’s the most difficult thing about the quest for love?  Lunn argues it’s the torment of not knowing whether you’ll ever find it: 

“The obvious story was that I was unhappy being single.  Beneath that, a private fear that I always would be; and worse, an anxiety born from not knowing either way.  The simple fact of the unknown was one I could not resist wrestling with.  Like hauling a heavy suitcase up the stairs at a station, I imagined it would be easier if there were an endpoint in sight, because when you see the top of the station stairs or the finishing line of a run, it’s easy to dig deep for an extra bit of strength to get there.  What I found tiring about looking for a romantic relationship was that there was no way of knowing for certain if there would ever be an end point.  I would tell friends, ‘I don’t mind if I don’t meet anyone for another ten years, I just want to know that it will happen one day.'”

Unfortunately, uncertainty is a fact of our existence.  We can never know if a meteor will strike Earth, if Europe will erupt in world war, if the stock market will crash or if human civilization will obliterate itself in the next hundred years.  We can never know how long we’ll live or when we’ll die; we can never be completely assured that our choices were “right.”  Did we make the right decision when we walked away from our tumultuous ten-year marriage?  when we quit our office job to study French cooking in Provence?  Though this “not knowing” is often torturous, it’s what fundamentally unites as humans.  As Lunn so beautifully writes, 

“Unless you believe in psychics, all of us will face some measure of this uncertainty— it’s part and parcel of existence.  Maybe there is comfort in knowing that, whatever we have or don’t have compared to each other, we share this same vulnerability to randomness.”

The unknown is a terrifying void, a fathomless, frightening darkness.  However, it can also shine with potential and possibility.  Not knowing when (or if) she’ll ever find a partner, Lunn finds herself suspended between two possible futures: how will her story end?  She isn’t sure but she knows the experience of being single will teach her invaluable lessons in resilience and self-reliance: 

“Maybe not having something you want wakes you up to another kind of romance.  And when life forces you to live in the intensity of the unknown, between two possible futures, it’s also a chance to develop the inner resources and love that will serve you well in the years ahead.”

In her pursuit of romantic love, Lunn forgets a crucial fact: love can take many forms.  Though she doesn’t have a partner, her life never lacks love.  In fact, her so-called “lonely” life already overflows with many of the things she wants: connection, companionship, passion, tenderness, intimacy, physical touch.

Most of us imagine we’ll be happy when we attain “x”: when we buy a house, when we get married, when we land the promotion.  Happiness, we contend, exists in the future— not this moment.  Lunn is no exception.  Throughout her single years, she believes the equation for happiness looks something like this: happily ever after = finding the “one” to share her life with.  The result?  She misses boundless opportunities for contentment in the present.  Love, she soon realizes, isn’t going to gallop into her life as a charming prince— it’s right here, right now in her life as it’s currently constituted:

“[I was so] focused…on receiving love instead of giving it; on waiting for it, instead of building it.  Many of the things I was looking for a relationship to provide— physical company; connection; the opportunity to be a mother— were actually available to me without one.  And yet, at the time, I could not see the role I played in my own loneliness.”

Rather than bemoan her unfortunate fate, Lunn decides to write a more empowering story about her singledom.  She doesn’t have to be a lonely cat-lady spinster who dies alone under mounds of decades-old newspapers— she already has the love she desires.  In the end, romantic love is only one piece of the puzzle: the good life consists of the unbreakable bond of family, the miracle of friendship, the unparalleled feeling of fulfillment upon reaching a long-awaited goal, the magic and marvels of small moments.

After what feels like an endless stretch of singledom, Lunn eventually does get her “happily ever after.”  In a contemplative moment, she imagines looking through the space/time continuum at her former self, the sad, lonely girl at the cafe who worried she’d never find a partner:

“Part of me wants to…tell her…that one day she will sit at the exact same table, eating pancakes with a primary schoolteacher she’s been seeing recently who she’ll grow to love.  And that, even then, even though that will be wonderful, it will only be one of many memorable mornings she will spend in that cafe.  There will be the coffee with a new friend who will become a great love; the one time she will come there to grieve; the breakfast she will share with her brother in the sunshine when they first to decide to move into a flat together round the corner.  And then all the Sunday mornings she will come there on her own, to write this book, to understand— finally— the difference between loneliness and solitude, and the romance of trying to find meaning in the latter.  But perhaps I would not tell her, even if I could, because to do so would be to steal the strange, complicated, sometimes tiring gifts of the unknown.  The thrill of all the places she has yet to go, all the faces she has yet to know.

Maybe, then, this is how you try to bear the burden of the mystery with grace: by finding humility where you once saw self-pity, and opportunity where you once saw absence.  By saying, ‘Even if I don’t get what I want, I have a good life,’ then paying closer attention to the small details that make that life beautiful.  And by never forgetting that not knowing what will happen next also means that anything could.”

Want more thought-provoking and heartfelt essays from Conversations on Love?  Read Alain de Botton on idealization as the opposite of love & the manifold miraculous ways to live this life, Sarah Hepola on books as a source of community, companionship & connection, Juno Dawson on having high standards in dating, and Emily Nagoski on the myth of “normalcy” & how letting go of impossible expectations can improve your sex life.

 

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Alain de Botton on Idealization as the Opposite of Love & the Manifold Miraculous Ways to Live this Life

What is love?  Though we often imagine love is restricted to the romantic arena, there are many kinds of love: there’s the helpless obsession a young girl has for her first crush; the tender, unconditional love a parent has for their child; the deep intimacy shared between a brother and sister; the miraculous mutual understanding of friends who’ve known each other since they were 12.

Love can be romantic, platonic, erotic, familial.  It can last a single night or persist over a lifetime.  It can be as red-hot as an affair in Paris or as routine as folding laundry, as fun and frivolous as flirting or as serious as cosigning a mortgage, as giddy as a middle school crush or as steady as a 25 year marriage.  As Cheryl Strayed so beautifully said, love “can be light as the hug we give a friend or as heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children.”

Love is easy and effortless and hard and steep; love is rapture and torment; love is ecstasy and agony.  Love is everything and nothing.  Love is both in the small moments and grand gestures, the open doors and “good morning” text messages, the string quartets and bouquets of flowers.  Love touches our tenderest branches and shakes us to our very core.  

In her lovely, large-hearted book Conversations on Love, Natasha Lunn explores this mysterious element of the human experience.  Determined to shed light on this oft-uttered, but often misunderstood concept, Lunn asks artists and writers, philosophers and psychologists, sex experts and advice columnists to share their experiences.  Her conversations focus on 3 central questions: how do we find love?  how do we sustain love?  how do we recover when we lose it?  Part personal memoir, part reportage, Conversations on Love features interviews with wise, wonderful minds along with Lunn’s own musings and meditations.

One of my favorite chapters comes from Britain’s beloved philosopher of love Alain de Botton, whose work I cherish and write of often.  Botton, who himself has written extensively on the subject, argues the trouble with love is we romanticize it: we think our significant other should be our soul mate, a divine, consummate creature— not an ordinary mortal with difficult flaws and displeasing habits.  

With the cynicism that is characteristic of his British heritage, Botton suggests we’d be better off if we adopted a more realistic attitude and patterned our romantic relationships after the less rose-tinted love between children and parents: 

“One of the best models of love is how parents love their children.  At the same time, sometimes they don’t like them— they get bored of them, they think they’re awful, they want a break from them.  And all those things go on in the love that an adult might have for another, too; sometimes we’re fed up and aware of someone’s glaring faults, but still very much on their side.  They annoy us and we still love them.”

Botton defines love not in terms of what it is but in terms of what it is not.  Despite the romanticized portrayals of love in cheesy rom-coms and sappy Hallmark cards, love is not idealization— it’s seeing (and accepting) someone for who they truly are.  As Botton observes, 

“No one really wants to be idealized— we want to be seen and accepted and forgiven, and to know that we can be ourselves in our less edifying moments.  So to be on the receiving end of somebody’s idealizing feelings can be alienating.  It looks like we’re being seen and admired like never before, but actually, many important parts of us are being forgotten.”

For those of us who have yet to find a life partner, how do we hold on to hope, especially when our society expects us to “date in our twenties, find the ideal partner by twenty-eight, and have children by thirty one”?  Botton maintains we must let go of timelines and relinquish control.

Sometimes we’ll love someone and they won’t love us back.

Sometimes we’ll endure countless dull conversations in dimly-lit bars and go home alone to an empty bed.

Sometimes we’ll sign up for every dating app and go on date after date after date and still not find someone.

Our fates are a convergence of choice and chance.  The idea that we’re masters of our fates is a reassuring but ultimately untrue myth.  We can’t control if we’ll meet someone— or when.  We can only create a Tinder profile and put ourselves out there again and again.

No matter what our society says, there are no “right” partners, no “right” choices, no “right” ways to live.  We can follow the well-trodden road— get married, have children, buy a house with a white picket fence— or forge our own path.  We can find the love of our lives in college or when we’re 77.  We can choose to commit to one person or stay single.  We can get married in a poofy princess dress in a formal ceremony or barefoot on a Brazilian beach in front of only a few people.  Our dream life can contain toothaches and play dates and Play-Doh or world travel and boundless freedom.  When asked what he’d wished he’d known about finding love, Botton says:

“To be calmer about the whole process.  And that things would work out or they wouldn’t, and even then, that would be fine too.  This black and white model of ‘it’s got to be like this and then it will be perfect’ just doesn’t work.  It doesn’t matter who you meet or when you meet them; there’s pain and joy on each side of the ledger.  So don’t stick rigidly to one story about what your life means, because it’s likely to be wrong.  In fact, there are many ways of living this life.”

When a relationship ends, we often find it difficult to move on because we imagine the life we could’ve had is infinitely better than our life as it actually is.  We’re haunted by the phantom of our other possible existence.  What if we could have actually worked things out?  What if I/they finally changed?  What if we suddenly reconciled all our issues and fundamental incompatibilities: our dissimilar taste in movies, our contrasting views on marriage, our completely opposite political beliefs?  What if we finally moved to our dream city and built our own life in our own house?

In a poetic, profound passage, Lunn suggests it’s unproductive to romanticize what could have been.  Would we be happy if we didn’t end our relationship?  Perhaps, but that doesn’t negate the possibility for happiness in our lives as they’re currently constituted.  Every choice involves gain and loss.  If we chose the other path, our lives wouldn’t necessarily be better— just different.  As Lunn writes, 

“Alain made me see the situation of being alone not as an unflattering reflection of my ‘less impressive sides,’ but as an unimaginative story I was telling about connection.

All the times I had been casually rejected, I realize now were either future blessings or facts to be accepted, rather than resisted.  I had wasted energy trying to keep these relationships afloat; there was no need to waste more asking why someone didn’t love me, what I could have done differently to change the outcome.  The only outcome was the one that happened.  And as Alain pointed out, ‘There’s pain and joy on each side of the ledger.’  If I’d stayed with someone I’d met in my early twenties, moved to the seaside, got a dog and had a baby at thirty, there would have been wonderful and mundane chapters to that story, just as there were wonderful and mundane chapters to the life I lived in those years instead.  For every depressing date, there was a precious friendship formed.  For every lonely Sunday, a new ambition discovered.”