Love Lives - The pain and pleasure of crushing on someone for over a decade, with Natasha Lunn

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

Support Millennial Love with a donation today: https://supporter.acast.com/millennialloveThis week, Olivia speaks to author and journalist Natasha Lunn.Natasha runs the popular newsletter called Conversations on Love, for which she interviews authors, celebrities and a wide range of experts all about love, dating and relationships.We discuss her new book of the same name, which features interviews with the likes of Roxane Gay, Alain du Boton, Esther Perel and more.Given that our books came out within a week of one another, this episode is split into two halves, with Olivia interviewing Natasha for the fast half, and then vice versa for the second.The two discuss the complexities of writing about your own love life and how it impacts your partner, why love is earned and not simply given, and the expectations placed on mothers to fall in love at first sight with their newborns.Follow the show on Instagram at @millennial_loveSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/millenniallove. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. will not die hosting the Hills after show. I get thirsty for the hot wiggle. I didn't even know a thirsty man until there was all these headlines. And I get schooled by a tween. Facebook is like, and now that's what my grandma's on. Thank God phone a friend with Jesse Crookshank is not available on Facebook. It's out now wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com Hello and welcome to Millennial Love,

a podcast from The Independent on everything to do with love, sexuality, identity and more. This week I spoke to the lovely author and journalist Natasha Lunn. Natasha runs the popular newsletter called Conversations on Love for which she interviews authors, celebrities and a wide range of experts all about love, dating and relationships. We discuss her new book of the same name which features interviews with the likes of Roxane Gay and Alain de Botton and given that our books came out within a week of one another we actually talk about both hers and my book in addition to the complexities of writing about your own love life the expectations

placed on mothers to fall in love at first sight with their newborns and why both of us spent the better part of a decade fantasizing over someone we never properly dated enjoy hi Natasha how are you hi Olivia I'm good thank you for having me oh thank you for coming I'm so excited to chat to you um so your book I think will be out the day or the day after this comes out how are you feeling about it yeah do you know it's funny I've um my baby's been sick and she gave it to me last week so I haven't really had time to get too worried or anxious about it because I've just been up every half an hour through the night so in a strange way it's been a blessing because I think otherwise I would be um a lot more nervous but I've just been mopping up temperature and sweat and um having her like snot all over me oh god how old is she she's nine months oh sweet she's great and so yeah no but I am really excited it's just um

you know all the cliches about a juggler true trying to do everything at once is uh yeah funny it's a lot um there's so much that I want to talk to you about as you know I have been a fan of conversations on love the newsletter since it started um so for those who aren't aware of it or don't subscribe to it can you start off by explaining a bit what what made you want to launch that because obviously that's what the book has come from so what made you want to launch that newsletter what do you think drew you to kind of examining the subject of love in that way in the first place I I I answer this question a lot of different ways because I think originally I used to always say oh we each have our questions in life and you know this was mine that I wanted

to find out more about love but I think we're all obsessed with love I think all of us have that fascination from the very beginning um and I think for me it was two things it was realizing by the time I fell in romantic love when I was in my 30s, how much I had misunderstood about love and what it really was and how all the things that I was longing for and looking for and hoping for had very little to do with being in a long-term relationship with another person. And so almost just getting that feeling of like, how have I got this so wrong for so long?

Where did that begin? Why did I where did I get all those ideas about love and obsession and longing from and being just fascinated in how I got to that point, really? And then another part of it was just understanding how narrow my view of love had been seeing it just as romantic love and I think that I you know there's lots of books and stories out there saying we need to not focus too much on romantic love and we need to you know focus on friendship focus on everything else but I had definitely found those conversations in context of being single so saying you know you shouldn't obsess over finding a romantic relationship, you should also value your friends and family. And then what I realized is actually know that is just as important when you are in a relationship, you know, even when I had met my

husband and fallen in love for that relationship to succeed, I understood how important it was not to load all my expectation for happiness onto him. And to just keep investing in all those other different relationships in my life. So I kind of came to the newsletters being like, right, how do I do this? How do I make sure that I am continuing to learn and try love and prioritize it? And given that, I don't want to spend the next decade overlooking it as I did the decade before. Yeah, I think that's so interesting about the idea of love being so different when you're in it to how you are conditioned to think about it. Because for me, it was exactly the same. And it's really funny, because I started the podcast and started this kind of like, you know, talking about love on a regular basis and thinking about it, not that I hadn't been doing that already but in a professional capacity and again it wasn't until

I was in a relationship like a long-term relationship that I realized this is completely different everything I thought it was going to be and actually it just makes you realize the way that we're reared to think about love and romance and intimacy is just completely different to the reality and I think that is changing thanks to thanks to newsletters and you know people like you who write about this stuff and the reality of it and talk to such fascinating people I mean my god you've spoken to so many interesting people for the newsletter in the book is there anyone in particular that you feel like a conversation just completely changed something that felt really personal to you about the way that you thought about your own love life

I think about so many of the lessons in the conversations all the time because I'm sure as you found Olivia you can learn about this stuff so much and then it's even worse because you find yourself making the mistake and then you're like oh I'm I'm doing this again. Um, and even like the other night, my husband, I hadn't really slept. And I was like, well, you had two hours sleep and he's like, you had three and a half. And there was a therapist said to me that competition is the enemy of a relationship. Like if you both try and win, you both lose. That's like the only time in a relationship that happens. Um,

so little things, little lessons like that and the Gottman stuff about bids for attention and when your partner is saying you know I've read this article today I want to tell you about it and not like scrolling through Instagram on your phone just looking at them and actually engaging with it little stuff like that but I think on a bigger sense something like the writer Sarah Hopola said to me so she wants to find a romantic relationship she hasn't yet and part of her part of the conversation is her realizing that she's got this amazing love story with her parents and also with her writing and just learning to see

love in a more expansive way as well and she said to me that she's realized like there's always going to be this low rattle of unhappiness. So for her, it was like when she was single, she had this low rattle of unhappiness, not knowing if she would ever find love. But then there might be that about something else if she did. And she kind of said this thing to me that perhaps like the low rattle of unhappiness is just part of what it means to be alive. rattle of unhappiness is just part of what it means to be alive and I was thinking about this because um part of the reason that I wrote the book is wanting to explore the parallels between looking for romantic love in my 20s and then trying to get pregnant in my 30s and how I long for this romantic relationship and then I found it and then I'm like longing for the next thing

and completely overlooking this thing that I spent two decades searching for. And I've come to realize that I'm sort of made peace with the fact that there will always be that thing that you're longing for or that what she calls the low rattle of unhappiness or something that you feel is missing or something you feel frustrated by. by and it's more about acknowledging that and not letting it distract you too much from everything else rather than trying to find a life where there's no low rattle because I think it's always going to be there so there's like lots of bigger things like that yeah that's a really interesting point someone um I did a Reiki course once in Ibiza and someone said to me the Reiki person said and you know I don't know if you know how Reiki works or for listeners but you know I went into this room it was a tent actually and we didn't really I didn't really chat to this woman but she kind of told me to lie down on this bed and kind of blew like ashes all over me and say it and felt my energy as they do and then we had a chat and she kind of talked

to me about the things that she discovered and it was really weird she kind of picked up on all of this stuff she knew I was a writer she knew all the stuff about my family and she one thing she said to me and this was like maybe six years ago she said there's a sadness in your heart and I think I've spoken about this on the podcast before. And it was brutal, right? And so you hit you hear something like that. And I've spent years trying to work out what is this sadness in my heart. And I pick it up to different things like blame my father blame this boyfriend blame this person. But it's it resonates with what you said about that rattle because it's like there's always a part of you that's gonna feel somehow like there's something missing or that there's something that you're longing for like you said or a fear you know yeah so I have it all the time now you know obviously part of the

book is longing longing for a baby but now I have so many fears about my daughter all the time and now I have so many fears about my daughter all the time. And I just, yeah, I have just learned that love is not a spotless experience. And actually, hopefully, by lining up all these conversations and showing sort of the many different joys and the many different problems. Now, when something does come up for me, that's a bit difficult, I, I just am more peaceful about it I think um because I just remember that it's arrogant to think that I can be here and not have any struggle or sadness or suffering yeah totally you're right it is quite arrogant and I think the more we can recognize that the better god there's so much I want to talk to you about but I guess I'll start with you know there are quite a lot of parallels in terms of our experiences of love you know obviously you're in your 30s I'm

in my 20s but I think in terms of what we both what you went through in your 20s and what I'm going through right now or have been through so I want to talk to you about how you start the book you start by talking about someone called Ben who uh ended up being a 15 year long crush for you so if I'm right in thinking that takes you from 14 to 29 yes so talk to me yeah it was 13 13 13 13 to 29 yeah I am so fascinated by this because as you know in my book I talk about someone who I was kind of infatuated and obsessed with for eight or nine years maybe maybe longer probably longer than that I just wanted to done it down I know as I was saying was it 30? Yeah um so talk to me about about this person you call Ben who was he and why why do you

think you spent so long kind of pining after him well like you I found it really interesting reading about Jack because I think you said at the end like you still don't you're kind of in touch and you check in but you still don't know really what it was and as I was writing there's a line in the end of it and I said you know do I keep want keep wanting to waste time on this nostalgic crush and originally I had nostalgic friendship and then I was like there's not really a word for what that was um it started out as a teenage obsession you know boyfriend and however you know relationship when you're a teenager is not really a relationship is it but you know go to the cinema with your 10 other friends and um but it was just an infatuation that was completely formed in absence in longing for him to notice me

in you know I blame a lot of it on Dawson's Creek it was very much this will they won't they nostalgic teenage romance and I say in the book my parents got together at 15 and they sat next to each other in art class. And my dad looked a bit like Rod Stewart. So my mum fancied him. And they've been like blissfully, sickeningly in love ever since. And they have this amazing relationship. So I think there was part of it, part of me that wanted to sort of emulate that. And yeah, it just, it's so difficult to describe because I look at it now and I'm so I it's difficult for me to

understand what I was basing the attraction on because there was just not much of a real relationship um but yeah we would sort of get together every year I mean have you heard the Taylor Swift song tis the damn season of course I have I'm so pleased you brought Taylor Swift up first because I was gonna do a whole thing about that later. But let's get into it now. go off to our universities lose touch have other partners and then you know when I would be bored or lonely I get back in touch and vice versa but it was just it felt like we're always circling each other but nothing really ever came together and I think that was part of the obsession and fascination for me because it's much easier to romanticize something when you've never spent any time in it and I'm sure if we had

have actually got together and had a proper year-long relationship it would have been pretty rubbish and I would have maybe moved on but it was just always the road not taken looks real good now um you know it was just and and I think it was a lot to do with me like that felt like home you know when you're growing up and things are a bit um scary and confusing like I just always go back to that because it was you know I I was in love with him before I even started my period you know it felt like something that was so childlike and then teenage and deeply rooted in me um that I just felt comforting to keep returning to it yeah I think maybe there's something about those childlike crushes that because they start when

you're so young they're always you always attach those young feelings to it and so that's why it's always like you can't ever move past it because you know you mentioned Dawson's Creek I'm thinking of like for me it would have been like One Tree Hill or some stupid show like that and it's just like there's always that really meaningful will they won't they thing and I've written about this a lot because I'm kind of fascinated by the way that popular culture to this day romanticizes and fetishizes that dynamic which is actually really toxic and it can be really toxic like in normal people um for example you know it's neither of those two characters really end up very happy and they're just circling each other but because it's this will they won't

they dynamic it's like you attach so much more meaning to it. And I think that can be really dangerous. And it can, you know, for me, this kind of infatuation obsession I had, it stopped me from dating anyone when I was at uni and really doing anything because I was just still holding on to, oh, but he sent this message last week and, you know, maybe he'll send me another one.

It just sounds so stupid, but you hang on to it and that's what I mean about the childlike stuff you know it is quite childlike and the kind of most interesting things I obviously when I'm having the conversations that chat I'm like trying to figure out what I was doing and why this happened and the two things that were really interesting is one a psychotherapist called Frank Tallis had said to me, when we don't have any evidence of real intimacy, we call it profound. We, you know, I used to be like, I love him in my bones. You know, it would be something that was sort of mystical and magnetic. And he said, that is a big sign that there isn't really any intimacy there because we almost haven't got any concrete evidence to latch on to so we say it must be profound it must be fate must be chemistry

but actually that's sort of one false inference feeding another um and then the second thing I can't know for sure if this was going on with me but Philippa Perry talked about this thing called erotic mutual transference where there might be somebody who like the way they push their hair off their forehead was similar to the way your mum did or your dad did or your nanny did and so even though you're not aware of it subconsciously you're drawn to that because it's from almost a memory you are not even conscious of yourself so it's sort of so deep within you you're just drawn to it and I I wonder if there was something in that as well

yeah so that's really interesting because the the Jack guy god poor guy I mean honestly I've brought him up so much and is his name Jack no no no no but like I've brought him up so much in the promotional stuff for the book and I just like we're like we're friends I saw him a few weeks ago like poor guy he's gonna he's gonna hate this if he's listening to it um but he lived really close to me um when I was a kid when I was growing up we lived in the same area in London and and I think that was a part that was a big part for me of why I clung on to it so much because I was like there was something really deeply familiar there because he lived around the

corner from me you know none of my friends lived in this particular pocket of London and because of that there was like a level of I don't know perceived intimacy on my part and some sort of like perceived history um and I know that you know not too long ago I dated a guy who lived in the part of London where I grew up in and I just that was definitely something that I could feel like subconsciously drew me to him um so that's definitely something I think worth like examining for sure and you said you know with with with um Ben he lived really close to you as well yeah five minutes away and um it's in the middle of the countryside so that you know there are not many

other people living around there um i'm so torn because i think part it's natural isn't it and it's you know the reason that we're obsessed with it is from call me by your name you know it is a kind of right of passage beautiful moment in your life if you can sort of leave it there and I don't you know people say oh would you just take that away and I wouldn't because there was something beautiful about it as a teenager and you know maybe we just should be allowed to love so intensely and live in our imagination and we have so much time on our hands that it's only natural. Perhaps we do that. My issue was just I didn't leave it behind.

And I just I could have done with like maybe putting using a quarter of the time I did and pouring some of that energy into other things. So I don't regret it completely. but I do regret how long it ran for and so it ended when you were 29 30 did was there a trigger to how it kind of came to an end was it that you met your now husband I was still in contact with him when I met my husband but we we were kind of I mean I say friends I don't know if you have a same thing I think you can often like trick yourself into thinking we're friends but it's not really a friendship um you're in touch and you're kind of keeping contact it wasn't really friends but I guess we were sort of texting every now and again but for me I think it was a cliche but approaching my 30s I just became tired of the same patterns and the same you know trying

to repeat the same things again and again and I think I bored myself and probably my friends and you get to that point where god I can't believe this is the set this has been 15 years and you know looking back on message threads and sort of shaking myself out of it a bit and thinking what are you doing um and I do think you know when I met my husband I was still really immature and I still was sort of in that game playing phase I put on Instagram the other day when I was I played him the Journey Mitchell song and said like oh isn't will you take me as I am strung out on another man the most romantic thing and he was just like no it's not romantic he's so he's so kind of simple in terms of just replying to messages straight away and just very much calling me on any bullshit or games

that I would try to play. And I just suppose there was no longer a need or space in my life to try and keep that going. But I think it's a combination of age and experience. You can kind of only fool yourself for so long I don't know what was it for you it's it's hard to answer because I don't I don't know but um it wasn't a dramatic moment that suddenly I was like oh cured of this no it wasn't dramatic for me either it was sort of just I think I think getting older and I think also I't know, I think maybe even doing the podcast and actually

becoming more conscious of it and how absurd it was and how much it was driving me insane and how much it was inhibiting me. And then, and then, you know, I started, because I didn't really date anyone properly until I was 23. And, and so I think it was then I started dating and that kind of shook me out of it a bit. And then I met my boyfriend a few months later when I was 24. And, and then yeah, I think you just, I just grew, I just grew out of it, I think. But it's funny. And like, you know, when I was writing that chapter, I sort of tapped back into all of those feelings again. And it felt very present.

And it's only, I don't know. I think it's only when I, it's only in retrospect. And I look at it now and I'm like, yeah, I'm over it. And it's fine. You know, I love what now and I'm like yeah I'm over it and it's fine you know I love what you say in the book about all forms of love not being given or acquired but being learned and earned because I think so many of us are kind of reared on this idea that love is something like you said just happens to us and people just fall in love with us and it makes it this passive thing that you know we think will complete us as a

person so when do you think you came to understand love differently from that was it was it when you met your husband do you think that it kind of shook you out of that way of thinking no well I there's a bit um I write about my 30th birthday and how I really was just desperate to have a boyfriend to take to this. Like it became this real obsession thinking, you know, as it grew closer, I just, anyone, I'll just take anyone from the app and I'll take them along to my 30th birthday. How insane is that? It would be like my family, my friends who I've known for decades, and then some random guy off happened that I met the week before but for me it just felt at the time like some sort of failure to not have found a relationship by them which is so ridiculous now but you build these things up no I think a lot of people feel

like that it's the pressure especially for women it's the pressure of turning 30 I mean I I know that that's something that I worry about as well and I'm just like and I don't know why and I know it's stupid and this is the thing I can recognize it yeah but this is the difference like you can you know I talk about love I write about love as do you I know all the things I don't know all the things but I know quite a lot of the things but that doesn't mean that I still don't do I still don't fall victim to them all the time and the only difference is I can recognize myself doing it well my mum even said to me at the time oh you know they had put a lot of effort and they were she was making all these like balloons and flowers and she was oh it's like your wedding and I think that she was like you're not probably going to have a wedding so we'll just make this

your wedding so there was just sort of there was just a expectation that maybe this would be a different kind of milestone but I did and and Ben was there in a friendship capacity as well um but it turned out to be a really romantic night and just one of those you know I just have been searching searching searching for something and I just sat there and thought I don't want to be anywhere else I'm not checking my phone under the table I'm so I feel so content and I feel so lucky and I never thought I would feel that way without a romantic partner so that was a real moment that I kind of tried to think back on you know when I did go back to that place again um and also just falling in love with friends in my 20s as a lot of people

are lucky enough to and getting to know my parents as an as an adult you know I think like in my early 20s again everything about my relationships and love was so egotistical it was like when will I find love when will I find someone to love me when will I find someone to look at me in a certain way it wasn't how can I be more curious about my parents now that I'm not so dependent on them and how can I make time for old school friends who I might have lost touch with at university or you know I think my love story is my friends family and I'm with myself I had a lot of time to work on those things in my late 20s and you know I don't think that work is a job should be a form of love but I did switch careers and start to become a writer and journalist for the first time and I had a

sense of purpose that felt like a form of love in my life at that time too um so I think it was a combination of all those things but specifically with romantic love yeah being in a relationship and doing the particularly I'd say after about two years when a different kind of relationship begins it was like it was just made me realize how much you know I had thought of maybe getting married as like the finishing line in in my immature way of looking at things and I just realized that it was a beginning and it was such a privilege to get to try it something this complicated and this challenging and I have found like every year I suppose that has been one of the biggest things that has surprised me I thought that long-term love was this sort of friendship companionship

safe thing where you know everything about each other and it's kind of cozy and familiar. But I have found long term romantic love to be so mysterious and erotic and just it surprises me at every turn. I mean, my husband is like much sillier than the way I describe him in the book. And he's just very funny and not too serious. And he left me a poem on the kitchen counter the other day and it was really serious actually I think I might post it on conversations love because it kind of sums up the book but I just thought who are you like where has this come from I kind of knew he wrote some poems but there's this side of him that I hadn't seen in a while that I sort of forget about and things like that I'm you know someone can surprise you after

six years together which is so sweet yeah that's lovely what um what does he think of the book he yeah I do hear it's funny when I'd send him bits saying oh are you okay with this he'd be like oh the comma's in the wrong place he's he's he's obsessed with grammar I was like yeah so is my boyfriend yeah I was like are you okay about the fact that I wrote about us masturbating he's like oh yes semicolon so I feel very lucky so funny I have to tell you a story so there is a bit in the book where I'm not going to say which bit but there's a bit in the book where I'm kind of like doing doing a bit of speech and um there's a bit where I'm like you know he said something like this and I sent him this little section to be like what do you what do you think of this

and he was he used the pseudonym it was like well I think it's very good but I don't think is going to be very happy with this because I don't think is the kind of man who would say this and do a splice comma I don't think uses splice commas so actually I think you should change that that's so funny I was like of all the things I love that that's so funny yeah and you know I think it takes if I had been writing about certain men that I had dated in detail um they maybe would have been more concerned with their egos and they might have certainly like men in the past have been a bit more funny about that but I think Dan is very generous and not he hasn't got a big ego and so I think he yeah I I'm I was like continually surprised by how generous he was.

And there was actually nothing that he had said no or asked me to take out. It was more me censoring and like maybe protecting us than the other way around. Hey, it's Mitch from SideNote Podcast, and I'm here to tell you about the new Google Pixel 9 powered by Gemini. Anyone who knows me knows the Pixel has always been my favorite out of all the phones I've ever had. Now, with Gemini built in, it's basically my personal AI assistant. Since I'm truly terrible at keeping up with emails, I use Gemini to give me summaries of my inbox, which is a lifesaver. And if I'm feeling stuck creatively, I just ask Gemini for help and bam, instant inspiration. You can learn more about Google Pixel 9 at store.google.com. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work

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When you're writing some sentences, and there's like particularly a fight when we're really drunk that I wrote that was very delicate to write and I felt like as I was writing it I'm kind of skating quite close to what I'm willing to share um but I kind of I want to go right as to the edge as far as I can go because that's what makes it good but it's just yeah you know where you can kind of push it to yeah that's the thing about writing about your own life because I think often the things that resonate with people the most are the things when you are the most raw and the most vulnerable and when you share the most but obviously it's not just your experience then and you're involving other people so you do have to be quite careful about it and the way that you do it and I think the way that I've always tried

to go about it is just write exclusively from well this is how it made me feel and this is how it happened as opposed to you know some sort of when you're talking about someone who has behaved badly and you're being like well they did this and then they did that and like accusing them it's not some sort of like vengeance exercise well I think my book was not that at all because annoyingly as I found about love often I was a lot more responsible for things than maybe I might have thought I think if I had written my book in my 20s I would have thought oh these men treated me badly or this. But now I just see a lot more clearly how I was guilty of idealizing them,

which is like a lovely place to be as a person where I was, you know, more driven by ego than getting to know. I just kind of annoyingly, a lot of stuff in love comes down to like self-possession and self-sufficiency um so you realize that mostly it's on you yeah 100% I mean it is it is mostly on me but there have been some rascals but they're not in the book well one or two of them are but

they deserve to be called rascals but it's not and I always think you have to be careful because like if you're if you're writing about something and you're and you haven't processed it yet and you haven't like had time to kind of look back on it retrospectively then you're not going to write about it well and you're not going to write about it with a full sense of understanding so I think there are some things I have purposefully left out of the book because I'm still processing them and I don't think I could write about them effectively or fairly because maybe I haven't come to the realization of my own part they own like my part I played and the things that happened you know

what I mean see I know that that's the advice but I have done the opposite of that to the close because the first section of the book finding love obviously I am looking back at dating disasters and all that stuff but the middle section of my book which is kind of and the last section which is over two years of my life I was writing it as I was living it so like there I left it like that but there are some moments when I don't know what's going to happen and I'm like can I even write? Because I don't want someone to ask me about this when I'm doing press for the book, if it goes wrong, all these things. So I did what you're not meant to do.

But I hope that it kind of has ended up like taking the reader on the journey as I was going on it. And talk to me a bit, because I love your honesty when you write about the love for your daughter and obviously that is very recent because as you mentioned your daughter was nine months old um so you wrote at the end of the book how it wasn't exactly like love at first sight with her and that's something that I think a lot of people really don't talk about enough um but I think it's probably a really common experience so can you explain what you meant by that it's funny isn't it that we expect to fall in love at

first sight with our children even though we know that it would be unrealistic with a partner or even with a friend but yeah I I certainly had that especially because I obviously am writing about love I thought oh my god I don't feel this like gushing and I did my husband did feel that um and you know I had been on so many drugs and had had as many people do a pretty rough labor um and I remember saying to Dan I think my neck is broken and I was like vomiting on myself you know it's not obviously my neck wasn't broken I was so high on all these drugs and I just I just felt like I need to I was just so focused on the fact that there was like someone stitching me up and I was just such a mess I felt so broken that I just I

don't think I had space in that emotion to be like this is the best moment of my life I was like I feel like I've just been in a car accident um and I'm just there's just so much to take in all at once so I I felt like a rush of like giddy connection to her and like devotion to her but it wasn't love in the way that I understand it to be now and you know as I said like I'm not surprised at that at all now because love is a choice and something we learn and something that we grow into and I actually I didn't feel too worried about it in the week's home because I had interviewed a writer called Mira Jacob who told me the same thing and she said it was actually beautiful to have this falling in love with a child. And we don't talk about falling in love with our children.

We talk about falling in love with people. But with a kid, it's meant to be like, oh, instant, like a spark. But my experience has been that a real falling in love. And I'm so glad it happened that way because it feels like I'm falling in love with her, way because it feels like I'm falling in love with her a person rather than just this a baby because I've had a baby and that's what you're meant to do as a mother um and I don't feel any shame about that because I had heard that story so that's kind of why I wanted to write that so hopefully other women who might be feeling that pressure when they've just you know been cut open or whatever um know that that is really normal and even you know I certainly love her so much more now than

I even did like three months in um because you start to see in the beginning they can't make eye contact with you they don't smile there's like a lack of response and then when you start getting them smiling at you laughing looking you in the eye of course that deepens love because you feel like oh we can interact um so yeah I'm actually writing about that and I I think it's good for us to be more honest about it yeah definitely I'm sure that'll resonate with so many women I think I mean I think it's just we do fetishize that don't we it's just like oh instant it's the same with it's the same with romantic love in a way not that you know like you said you don't fall in love at first sight but it's just like

there's all this stuff that we've been told about what that experience is supposed to be that when it happens to you and you don't feel like how you think you're supposed to you you feel so isolated and so sort of ashamed that you don't feel like that in a way and actually it's it's much more common than we think it's just people aren't talking about it enough well also I I just I never knew how many drugs you are pumped for like I never felt so high in a horrible way it was awful and just shaking vomiting over myself having people like chucking bloody rags as they're shouting there's not enough time to get surgery stitch her up now one man like stitching my vagina you know I can't it's not it's not an easy experience so the fact that we talk about that as this blissful like kiss on the wedding day moment it's yeah um yeah it wasn't that

no it's hardcore I um yeah I have a friend that's had a baby and she's told me all the gory details and and it's like love there's Lucy Kalanithi said like she always used to think like the kiss on the wedding day was the romantic bit but it's for her now she's lost her husband and she kind of was with him while he was sick and they went on that journey together and for her it's more about the fact that those people are deciding to stand there and be there when the other person's in hospital and be there when the other one's throwing up on a Sunday morning through sickness and health and just like having a baby for me it's the quiet like the other Sunday morning my Dan and Joni were just asleep next to me in bed and it was just this boring Sunday and I just looked over at them and felt just never more in love and it's just those quiet

moments in a relationship in friendships and family um and I guess that's what I wanted to do justice to and also because I didn't expect to fall pregnant when I was writing the book and I kind of had you know much like you I'm sure you didn't expect to fall in love while you're writing yours and I had this ending planned about uncertainty and not knowing and it was really important to me to to say even though I had this baby it's made my relationship really hard in terms of romantic relationship suffering and I wanted to say yes I'm so happy and this is amazing but of course that is another beginning of new challenges and different ways that love are going to kind of come in and out of my life and I'll have to adjust the way

I prioritize to different bits of it I'm aware that we we're sort of we've done 40 minutes already yeah Natasha has very kindly um said that she wants to ask me some questions about my book because we've both written about love so if you have any questions you want to ask me fire away I'm turning I'm turning this into a conversation on turn the tables well I uh so I wanted to ask you so you were falling in love as you were writing the book is that how is that how things happen so it's a little complicated anyway I started writing the book and then we actually broke up when I was writing the book uh in July last summer and then we got back together in September and then we broke up again in February for two weeks and then we got back together so it was quite tumultuous and um it was interesting in the sense that it did change

my perspective on certain things I had written about in the book because I'd never gone through a big breakup before um which which sounds silly considering I've written a book all about relationships and never gone through a big breakup before but it really informed my writing um because then as I was writing about I was rereading chapters I'd done on social media stalking and uh whatsapp and read receipts and stuff and I realized how much I was checking up on my ex and how how ashamed I felt of that and I just you know I would block him on everything but then I would find myself googling his profile just to check what he was up to another way without actually unblocking him and just doing it that way so that he wouldn't know and I went to very

bizarre lengths to to kind of feed my uh curiosity and so I ended up putting all of that in the book and it just yeah it just opened my eyes to a few things I hadn't because I hadn't experienced them and you know previously I was telling those experiences through the lens of my podcast guests but then when I went through them myself it just it changed my perspective on a lot of things so and that's the person you're the person you're in a relationship with now wow okay so you had a tumultuous beginning and do you think where you are approaching the relationship now what have you learned from writing the book that might help you in this stage of the relationship? I think, I think everything, I mean, to be honest, I think, I think the stuff that you've

written about actually have, and really prioritizing the effort that you have to make and how that, you know, it's, it's a, you choose that person every day and you have to actively work on it every single day you know relationships are not smooth sailing and you have to learn you have to adapt to things and you have to you know you have to learn to compromise you have to it's such basic stuff but you have to you have to actively make that decision to be in a relationship every day you can't just let it happen because that's when you get complacent and that's when things start to fall apart a bit and I think also trying to learn that you know every argument doesn't mean that it doesn't have to be this cataclysmic thing like you can actually have really healthy

outcomes from arguments and it can be a really positive thing if you just learn to communicate effectively with one another and I think communication is probably the most important thing I've learned in relationships because and this is funny in the book because I think when you're dating someone in the early stages it's really hard to communicate authentically with someone because you're doing it through all of these channels that are inherently inauthentic and come with all of these extra anxieties of you know seeing when someone's online and seeing when someone's ignoring you and I have to try and not get bogged down by that even now in my relationship because it's just I just think the way that these platforms are designed it's so toxic to your brain I think it can it's designed to just exacerbate your anxieties do you do you feel in a way because obviously a lot of the relationship stuff you

had similar to me is like the issues around not being yourself and withholding is there a way in which because you put all this out there in the book and he's read it that there is a level of intimacy and or just ease with which or freedom from telling him all these stories and being very honest about who you are and your relationship definitely definitely because I would have thought that none of what I'd written would be surprising to him and that he knew all of it already but actually I think he read it and kind of took a lot from it and realized that there was a lot that he didn't necessarily know about me and the way that my brain worked and I think it's it has been really helpful in that way I mean he's been a real trooper it's not easy you know I've written about a lot of other men in the book so it's not it's not been easy and you know I've written about a lot of other men in the book so it's not it's not been easy and you know I've written like promotional pieces as well for other publications that have been about

different different people so he's been he's been a real trooper about it he hasn't really uh if he has concerns he hasn't raised them with me he's been very um very mellow about it all so I'm very grateful for that see I think I find it fascinating or maybe I wouldn't in practice I always say to him I was like I want to know every I'm almost you know I'm sad that I didn't know this first part of his life and I'm like tell me about this relationship what happened in this one and why did this one I don't want to know I don't want to know that stuff I think when you get to a point where you've been together so long I certainly remember in the early stages feeling a

bit intimidated about ex or something but when you have got to a stage where it doesn't feel like that much of a big deal um I certainly am more intrigued but Dan has no interest in my ex love I think it was surprising for him who knows me as like a very confident person who is obviously writes about love and very interested in understanding and to read about some of the experiences where I did like shrink myself and sort of disappear in relationships I think he was just like this is so different to you um which I guess is the whole point isn't it you become different people and then yeah and also the part if you if you are shrinking yourself it's obviously a sign that you're not with the person you're

supposed to be with but that that's what I always used to do with with the men I dated I never felt like I could be with I could just be myself and be you know a bit silly and a bit strange and a bit like you know irrational and mercurial as I can be sometimes but um but no it's it it but I don't think that is about you're with the wrong people because I used to think that too and now I understand you know Philippa Perry said this in her conversation where she's like no one is right for anyone there isn't like the right shape person out there for you emotionally shaped she's like the work of relationship is you doing that together getting to know each other changing for each other not too much compromising and now I'm not saying that all the relationships I had in my 20s would have

worked out if I was a little bit more honest but I do think there are certainly some the reason that they failed isn't because they were the wrong person, I was the wrong person. It was because we weren't doing the work of being in a relationship together. Right. On both sides. I see what you mean. It's an interesting way to think about it because I would look at that and be like, well, there's a level of incompatibility there. But I guess it's about whether you blame that on the individual or the connection of the two of you. But I guess it's about whether you blame that on the individual or the connection of the two of you.

And I guess it's not about who that person is. It's more how much they want to be in a relationship. Yeah. Because it's, you know, I guess I don't really believe in types anymore. No, me neither. But I also think, I think a lot of the time what goes wrong in relationships is people don't realize what they want and so someone you know like you said someone will enter into a relationship and thinking that they want a serious relationship and they want to settle down with someone but actually subconsciously they don't really want to be in a relationship and that will manifest

slowly and slowly until they come to that realization and that's only natural I guess because you have to be you have to have a degree of self-awareness to know exactly what you want and you know I I'm still I'm still figuring that out and I wrote that in the book at the end in the last chapter you know I was kind of was obviously asked to write a conclusion and I wasn't going to come away thinking well this is everything I know and I'm all settled now and now I can go off and just be really knowledgeable and wise about love it was very much like I'm still learning every single day it's a work in progress I'm still learning about what I want the kind of person I am the kind of partner I am the kind of partner I want like I think it's an ongoing process you don't ever stop I don't think do you no and I think with

every year you realize you know even less yeah exactly exactly because it becomes more complicated and then obviously when you have children into the mix it brings a whole other whole other thing and I feel the I try to capture this of the it's almost like things are tipping in different directions each year and I certainly felt like in my 20s my friendships were so easy and I would say why is getting into a romantic relationship so impossible and so kind of anxiety inducing and friendship is so blissful and romantic and easy and you know we didn't even have to arrange things because we lived together and it was just this beautifully easy thing for me now friendship is so much more complex and painful in in ways that we have to allow each other to change and lots of my friends have lost parents a lot of them are in fertility struggles

some have got relationship issues there's just or sick parents there's so much more pressure in different ways and also we don't live close by and so yeah every decade or you know even every year I think there is like a new set of challenges thrown into the mix um but that's yeah that's what I was talking to a friend about the friendship thing the other day because I think friendships do actually become much more complex as you get older and they become you know relationships I think are always are always pretty hard but I think friendships get increasingly harder as you get older because like you said there's that distance thing you won't you won't be as close physically as you were to each other as you are as you go older people get partners people move away things happen and people change and

often we don't I don't think allow ourselves room for change within friendships we think that you know if we've been friends with someone for x amount of time we have to always have them in our lives and you know obviously what ends up happening is you get older and people change and people grow apart but I think it can be really hard to accept that and because you just want to cling on to it and you don't want to admit that you're losing you're losing someone from your life who was really important to you but it's just actually it's a natural part of life and you change and you move on and you're not necessarily as compatible as you once were or you are compatible and you just have to accept that there's a few years where you've got to kind of

trust in the friendship more and not see each other as much and you'll come together again yeah later point yeah or it changes because like yeah it's just it's it's not as easy as it was when you were at school and you had lunch with them every day and you saw them after school every day it's just or at uni when you live with them it's yeah it's different it's um it's tricky I interviewed a psychotherapist the other day who said obviously we don't have like a narrative arc for friendships in the same way as we do for romantic relationships societally as in like I don't know engagement moving in together boyfriend and girlfriend labels marriage or if you want any of those things um and she said there is something beautiful about that because we have so much more freedom within them and we all crave freedom so that is a beautiful part of

friendship but it also means that it's the easiest thing to drop off because we're not kind of bound to it in the same way and it's easier to walk away from it or neglect it. And she said to me, and she's a mother, she said, sometimes it has to be as important as eating, as drinking. And I hadn't heard someone talk about that as friendship. You know, we talk a lot about mum guilt and we talk a lot about prioritizing partners and all these things and I think that friendship you know lots of people I've interviewed have said oh I'm ashamed to say this but when I want a career family partner friendship does take a hit and I don't know why that is the case you know it shouldn't be the case and I think all things will have to take a hit at different times and we just need to make sure that sometimes we are saying that friendship is as important as

motherhood or as important as work or as important as everything else so yeah I was grateful for her saying that because it made me it made me think no sometimes that has to be at the top of the list because if it's always at the bottom of the list then it's going to fade so it's time for our lessons in love segment so this is where I ask every guest on the show to tell me something they've learned from their relationship experiences I feel like out of all of my guests Natasha you probably have the most lessons so since you've literally written a book pretty much about lessons in love so yeah no pressure gosh there's so can I have can I have two yes you can have two so I've learned so many different things but I think specifically in romantic love I wish I had known to tolerate the mystery in another person

and how actually that could be a gift um rather than a burden as they continue to surprise you decade by decade. But I guess the bigger lesson overall is just how expansive love can be and how many different places you can find it. I'd always look for it in one place, which was in the arms of a partner. one place which was in the arms of a partner and I have found it in nature in purpose in friendship in strangers in so many different forms and shapes and sizes and I feel when you can see love in this way you find more more of it like the more places you look for it the more you find it and now I think I am much better at not just waiting to find love but creating it um and I wish I'd done that sooner I love that so much I particularly love that you've included nature in that because I find in the last year with the pandemic obviously we've had so much taken from us and one of the one of the joys that hasn't been taken from

us is spending time outside and just engaging with our natural world a bit more and appreciating you know our local area and I don't know I went wild swimming the other day and it was just so lovely just you have these little moments and I think it's important to cherish those and recognize that they can give you that sense of fulfillment and that same sense of kind of validation, I guess, in a way sometimes. And the biggest, I include that because the biggest lesson from my book was, and the reason why I wanted to interview lots of different people is to try and pull back from my own love story in order to remind myself that we're all connected and parts of something much bigger and I think that nature is one way we do that and my journey in love certainly has been getting you know I I start from like really looking in and where I'm at now is trying to look out much more about how I can be loving and how I can give love to people in my life. And that has, you know, another thing is like loving someone is as rewarding as being loved.

And I never contemplated that. It's been really rewarding. That's it for today. thank you so much for listening if you're a new listener to this show you can subscribe to us on apple podcasts spotify acast or anywhere else you can comment and leave us a rating too so that more people can find us keep up to date with everything to do with the show on instagram just search millennial love and my book millennial love which is based on the podcast is out now with Fourth Estate and you can buy it at all good bookshops

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