Sex Talks With Emma-Louise Boynton - *LIVE* Rethinking Modern Love with Natasha Lunn

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

*This episode is a live recording of a previous Sex Talks event.* Natasha Lunn is the features editor at Red Magazine and the creator of the widely acclaimed email newsletter, Conversations on Love, which she recently turned into one of my favourite books of the same name.  In it she explores three fundamental questions: how do we find love? How do we sustain it? And how do we survive when we lose it? In this Sex Talks summer special, I sit down with Natasha to discuss everything she’s learned in her years long exploration of this most universal of topics, and what advice she has for those of us who feel lost in love. I hope you enjoy this discussion as much as I did.

Hello and welcome to sex talks, focused on engendering more frank, open and vulnerable discussions around sex. I'm your host, Emma Louise Boynton, co-founder of the Female Focus Production Agency Her Hustle. And throughout this series, I'll be exploring a range of topics surrounding sex, desire and the female pleasure taboo. I wanted to start this series because while sex is everywhere, sex cells remember, what we're most often confronted with is a heavily sanitise, an often idealised version of sex, depictions which only really serve to reinforce reductive stereotypes around the kind of sex we should be having,

how we ought to feel about sex, and what a sexy body is meant to look like. So while sex may be everywhere, it's still a topic shrouded in social taboo and the source of so much shame for so many. After doing sex therapy myself for a year, I realised how the issues that show up in the context of sex, like not being able to orgasm, for example, are often reflective of so many broader personal, as well as social and political issues.

It fast became an area I really wanted to explore, and thus, Sex Talks was born. If you want to join me at the next live Sex Talks event, head over to the event bright link in the show notes, or else to my Instagram page where I post all the juicy event details. Okay, I hope you enjoy today's show. Welcome, everybody. Thank you so much for coming. Yeah, for coming. I can't speak today.

I flew back from Italy last night. I spent a week in a haunted house, which has utterly fried my soul. I probably need to go through a whole, like, cleansing thing because the poltergeist might have had some adverse impact on my soul. So bear with me. If you see any weird glitches,

No, it's the poltergeist hangover, okay? But really, thank you so much. This is a really, like, special version of sex talk. So if anyone who's come pre-be... Who has come to a sex talk before? Woo! I love the woo! Gentleman over here, thank you. Okay, brilliant.

I love to have some return customers. So usually we're in the basement, and it feels it's quite like, vibey, strobe, strobe, kind of like club night. But tonight feels intimate and gorgeous, and obviously they gave us a penthouse suite, which feels quite nice. And it feels very appropriate, I think, to be discussing Natasha Lund's book Conversations on Love, which is one of my favorite books.

So as soon as Natasha came in, I was like, this book has changed my whole perception on love. And for anyone who can see, basically every, it kind of, when you, when you bend over every page, it slightly defeats the point of depending it over. So when I was writing my notes, I was like, Emily, where do we begin on this? Which I think was reflecting the questions. But it really has, I've read this book a couple of times now, and I think I am someone who can be quite cynical about love and will definitely go into it and have felt, I think through being a bit brokenhearted, have become quite like, you know, fuck romantic love. It's all about friendship love, you know, whatever, whatever. And I think Natasha, you've thawed my heart. I'm very happy to hear this. So thank you. So just by way of a brief introduction, I think I was inundated with messages from people saying how much Natasha's book had also affected them. So I feel like you don't need any introduction, but I'll do it anyway. Natasha is the Featured Editor at Red Magazine and is the creator of the popular and acclaimed email newsletter, Conversations on Love, which she obviously turned into this fabulous book. Natasha, is there going to be a follow-up with all the other? No pressure, but I got, not right now. I'll say that, not right now.

Well, I'm eagerly waiting. Very busy. Yeah, yeah, you're busy. Get that done and then can we do another one to further thaw my heart? You'll be one of the first to know. Excellent, I can't wait. Brilliant. So what I want to come to structure this interview.

So what we'll do is we'll kind of discuss very briefly why you wrote it and kind of what your interest and love, where that stems from. Again, help me thaw, help me thought. Maybe this thawing of the heart will also help shed the polder guy's spirit. So, you know, we'll be killed two birds with one stone. And then we'll really go through. Natasha's book is structured in kind of asking three fundamental questions around love.

How do we find love? How do we sustain love? And how do we mourn the love? How do we get over the loss of love? Survive losing that. Survive. Survive. So we'll go, the interview time,

we'll go through those three questions and we'll really explore. I think what I really want to get to is kind of how the kind of cultural ideas around these different topics trip us up and then what Natasha has learned through interviewing such an array of amazing people and what we can all learn from what Natasha's learned.

Sweet that. No pressure. No pressure. All the biggest questions. All the biggest questions about life, love and everything in between. And I said this before, I did think reading it, it's as much a book about how to live as it is about how to love. And I think that's what really struck me.

So before I go into another like fan girl moment, let's take a step back at my Natasha. Tell me, why have you started writing about love? Why is this a topic that you care about and have spent so many hours pouring over? Well, first of all, I was going to say, if anyone wants a seat, there is it and they don't want to stand. There is a spare chair at the front here. if anyone's feet get tired. So I kind of went from being obsessed with love to being like you very cynical about love

and sort of like yo-yoing between the two, but thought that I was somebody who was just had thought about it intensely from a very young age and sort of like everything I read was about it and all my conversations were about it. And I felt like all those years and hours that I pulled into it, I must know a little about it. and I was so surprised to find actually despite all these hours and nights obsessing over it

I didn't really know much about what I thought love really was what I was obsessing over was basically some guy I was obsessed with who didn't like me back that was that was that was that was that was that was love as a category if you like divided my conversations up that was all I was you know embarrassingly just all I would think about was finding somebody to love me I never would think about what it might mean to give love or could that be interesting and rewarding and could I I guess like move beyond my own ego it was all very like egotistical fear I'm never going to find someone to love me I'm going to be on my that means I'm going to be on my own forever and miserable so then I kind of just started to realize I guess probably like late 20s early 30s that I just

didn't really have a definition of love that was useful or realistic And then when I did fall in romantic love, I was like, oh my God, I've got this even more wrong than I ever thought, not just what romantic love was, you know, I was always like, that will be the sort of some kind of end point rather than a beginning. But also, I think we talk about like, well, I certainly have been like, well, because I haven't met a boyfriend, I need to focus on all these other forms of love and that's really important. So I'm less lonely along the way. And that was the sort of story I told myself. but I was like oh my god this is just as important like when you're in a romantic relationship having prioritizing all these different forms of love and it just sort of opened up my way of seeing it and just basically how I got it dramatic like dramatically wrong for so long so actually I need to you know if I am somebody who really cares about the stuff I need to learn more I need to kind of understand why did I get it so wrong why where did all like the fear come from why did I just you know I felt like with my career I could sort of try at it with my health I could like go to the gym or and with love like I would do this thing with my friend where very in January we do like this. It's called like circle of life. So I draw this like diagram. I have all this different aspects of my life and I'd be like what is kind of going what went wrong last year? What do I want to do? And it was just really fun in all the other sections. When I get to love I was like oh, there's not much I can do. It's just a disaster again and I would just always feel like why is why is every other area something that I can.

kind of try and put effort into but love feels like this thing that just I'm waiting for it to happen and it never does just speaking to literally everything I think about so often and that's why I've got this kind of slightly hardened heart I'm just like I don't like not being good at things and I seem to be very good at dating I pick I pick terribly but we are going to go into that in section number one so I'm going to put a little pin in that we've wet your appetite um And just before we go on to delving into the fundamental questions around love that you have addressed so brilliantly, why do you think it is so important that we study love and that we learn about it? Because I think you mentioned this at the beginning of the book, that even though love and relationships are so pinnacle to so many of our lives,

it's so central to everyone's life, whether romantic love, familial love, friendship love, cousin love, every type of love. we don't yet we don't get equipped with the tools necessarily growing up to actually be able to I mean like you said you said you didn't really fundamentally understand what love was and what you were looking for so tell me why do you think it is something that we should study more closely and really seek to understand in a more kind of maybe holistic deeper way well again this has changed because I think if you'd asked me that maybe four years ago I would have said what I thought even coming into this writing this newsletter I was like my aim is that I can learn everything so I can be like a great friend and a great daughter and a great partner and I will learn all these lessons and I'll never mess up and I'll be brilliant at it. And now I'm just like, well, no, not possible. You know, I make all the mistakes that I've written about again and again.

I'm just more aware that I'm making them. So I don't think that it's not that I think we should study love so we can kind of learn all the therapies so that we can always be happy on our own when we are and just move through it in this easy way. I think maybe studies the wrong word that I used, but I think it's more understanding that it just takes effort. And that was when I was talking about the diagrams.

For me, it was like, well, obviously if you want to get fit, you would try and exercise. And obviously, if you want to succeed in your career, you would sort of, I don't know, write a plan and have a review and think about what you're doing. But to me, it was so embarrassing to try a lot. love and I had friends who sort of like ended up with their university sweet art just I don't know it just seems so easy for everybody else and I was like why do I have to like flog myself why do I have to

go on a dating app and try and come up with something witty why can't it just happen to me that so I felt like I was like this out of date product on the supermarket shelf that I was trying to like convince people to buy and and I just that was the that was the narrative I had it's embarrassing to try at this because if you were desirable or if you were you know a good character you wouldn't have to try and now I'm just like isn't it mad like there's nothing good in my life that I have now that hasn't been really tricky to get or not tricky hasn't taken like a lot of effort yeah and now I'm like isn't that so I think for me it's about reframing the effort it takes and the kind of just like where it should be in your list of like prioritising things you try at

and you've segued us so nicely into section number one anyone who has come to sex before knows. I love having a very clear structure because I'm like, right, segue, point number one, section number one. It's the only way I can like organize my otherwise utterly chaotic brain. So thank you for segueing us so nicely into section number one. How do we find love? So you've just spoken there about something that I think about often. And I think it's Candice Carty Williams, who interviewed in the book speaks about the kind of almost the kind of humiliating component to searching for love. And it's something that I've definitely thought about a lot recently. and I think hearing you say that,

I've said to Ellsworth, who is my best friend to I live with, who always gets a shout out. I'm like, right, I'm no longer doing any dates where I sit across from a person and have a drink. It's a waste of my time. I'm not learning, I'm not growing, and ultimately it's not going to work out anyway, so fuck that.

They can come down a wakeboarding lesson with me, or it's not happening. Or like, they can come to. So I've just become, there's like, really, and I'm like, because I can't, I can't be, I can't, and it's not be seen publicly. It's like internally, I'm, The idea of being, of saying, I want to find love when you're not finding it,

when it's not something you can control, feels at its essence humiliating. Because as you articulate in the book, and I've heard you say in multiple interviews, it feels like it's something that you're almost like advertising that you are failing, that you're not good enough, that you are the outdated product on the supermarket shelf. That I think is so rooted in such a myriad of misconceptions around love. that get pumped out through popular culture what do you think that so so let's so let's come go into this what do you think that is kind of rooted in how do we kind of how do we try and overcome that I think um by the way if you can get someone to go wakeboarding

with you honestly try me I'm gonna try this week so I will report back this poor guy was like you want to go for a drink or a coffee and I'm like nope I was like I might have a weight boarding lesson that night Yeah, and I felt exactly, I mean, it is, it is kind of crazy that we, that the way we try to find a relationship is to have three hours with somebody where you kind of like reel off these talking points or maybe tell a few familiar stories that you think, try and give us someone a picture of who you are. Like, the whole thing is hideous. And I think what is really unhelpful, certainly like when you're talking about the narratives about love, that I had. It's kind of, I'll try and say two things. It's like with everything and love, it's such a contradiction. But for me, it was like, the two problems were like that it was,

it should be really easy and it's also a lot of work. So like two different things. But I'll explain what I mean is that I definitely had this, you know, I remember going with a friend who she was meeting someone on an online date and there was two guys and I came along as like the friend. And I met his friend. And I remember saying to my, we went to the loo and I said, I'm going to marry that man and he I think he had just I just probably had one conversation with him but it was that instant like before sunrise you know if you there's that idea that I would just be sitting on a train and it would happen and it would hit and it would just be so instant and easy and that was what it was based on

that kind of connection gut instinct just feeling and so that was like one issue I had but then the other one was that this tumultuous love was so something I was so obsessed with and it there were meant to be obstacles and it was like this kind of twilight-esque Wuthering Heights sort of there's so much difficulty and that's what makes it so you're a vampire I'm not oh how are we gonna overcome this but I'm so hooked to something in that that's like so addictive to me like that kind of I mean as soon as someone like dumps me that's when I'm like you're a vampire I'm a human I must win

I must win the wampire. Yeah, as soon as there's obstacles in the way, it that's, because it's the idea of like, I kind of think that stems back. There's like want of control. It's a kind of like you want to win at something that feels really intangible and unwinnable. And that's the other contradiction.

I was saying to you before the effort thing and how that is humiliating and that is really vulnerable. But then there's also an element to it where like, you're not in control. You can put in all the effort. and then it might not still happen. So you have to kind of hold that in your head too, I think, because it's like I definitely like had this period.

I think like I write about in the book where I was turning 30. At the time I was like, oh, you know, I just had it in my head that I wanted to have a boyfriend by the time I turned 30. You know, I don't know where this came from, but I was having this big part. You know, so I just want someone to like take. And so as it grew closer, I was like, well, I'm signing up to online dating.

I've got this new, like, really positive attitude to it all. So of course it's going to happen. because I'm really relaxed and I've got loads of other stuff going on and I'm approaching this really healthy way and of course it didn't happen. So I was like, well, I've done this sort of like desperate, obsessed, romantic bit. But now I've also done the like positive healthy bit.

Yeah, so I was like, but it still didn't work. And I would think then, oh, there's something wrong, you know, with me. And I think that it's Heather Haverleski who gave one of the best piece of advice on this, I think, in the book of course. She said a lot of this stuff is like, like not draping an extra story of shame over whatever you find. So like, yeah, so with dating for me, it would be like, well, not kind of layering on to the fact that I just haven't met somebody,

which is just a thing that's happened, a bit of bad luck or that people I've met didn't work out with, not then layering onto that, the story of like, that means I am X or, and the same with trying for a baby. It's like the story of shame, like if I would, if that wasn't working and it was something about my body like I'm somehow bad at womanhood or this kind of like weird made up like false story that we can kind of layer over something that makes it more painful. I'd so great that I always think of that I feel like this is just like a line that we see on the internet now ain't that deep and I'm like it ain't that deep. Every time I get too like what did it

mean what did I do wrong? I'm like Emma it ain't that deep um literally to myself and it's so easy to do that. And I think, so you begin the book by interviewing one of my favorite philosophers who I quote ad nauseum, Alan de Botton, who is constantly bashing the overhang of the romantic era and how much that has really kind of poised, maybe poison to a suitorial word, but how that has shaped our relationship to love and romance. So he's, his first book, for anyone that hasn't read it, is brilliant. Essays on love is that right um is really kind of trying to disassemble um the uh the disassemble kind of the hangover romantic of the idea all the kind of romantic idealization that we can fall into really easily and kind of take that apart and I think why love in that book is how he shows

ultimately like the ordinariness of love and the kind of the fluctuations of love and it's just two people meeting liking each other a lot having great sex and then being like actually I don't like you so much, not having goat sex, an ending, and I've read that after so many breakups because I find it so reassuring because it is that counter to this romantic idealization. He made a couple of really great points in the interview that you did with him

that kind of continued that school of thought and sought to highlight and to show the kind of ridiculousness of some of the things that we've kind of just touched on there. They're kind of like the love at first side, the feeling that like you need to have the instant connection, the spark, all these sorts of things. What did you really take away from that interview? I think, you know, when I also love that book and for anyone who hasn't read it, like the couple,

they meet on a plane, don't they? Do you know how many times I've found in a plane and been like? Yeah. But he kind of lists out the odds of that happening, like in numbers and he said breaks it down. Yeah, really like. and I am so unlikely to happen on the tube I have followed someone on the tube to try and be like yeah but then again it has happened

I'm always amazed yeah but I think the problem is thinking that it could yeah but I think the problem is thinking that the love or the romance is going to be from the meeting and I mean I think because I was when I met my partner now I didn't have that at all like in any way there was no kind of

rush instant first love at first sight thing it was like i even read an email i'd sent to my boss and i was like well yeah kind of met this guy and he's a teacher not really sure where it's going but it's kind of good to know that there's like nice guys on dating apps i guess like it was so sort of you know it just wasn't like that at all and and almost like every relationship had been like that for me so i didn't um i guess where that's where that kind of like hangover is not helpful to us is it kind of terrifies me now like I could have missed that because I didn't recognize it as like obviously it wasn't love at that point like I said it's like crazy to think that you would go for a drink for a few hours and know whether or not you could love somebody or could build love with

somebody but where it kind of gets serious I think and is that for me that that kind of like mystical romantic idea almost like got in the way of me giving love a chance because what I assumed it would be was something that I needed to know then and actually I think was more helpful my my friend gave me a really good advice she said if you don't know it's a no just just go on another day because it's crazy that you think that you can make that call from like a few hours and actually the way I think about it's like now oh I would hate to think somebody would make a call on who I was as a person from like a train journey or a plane ride and you know I always felt that pressure of like I care want to communicate a bit about like my values or a bit about like my political, you know,

I was so desperate to sort of prove who I was as a person on those things that sometimes then comes across like awfully. And so yeah, I think that that stuff he was talking about just emphasize that for me that, yeah, it's like really fun stories, all of those romantic things. And I think we can enjoy that, you know, I still love those stories and I still love those films. But you just have to be a little bit careful that that that. doesn't get in the way of you noticing like real love when it comes. I think that's such a brilliant point and it's like it almost feels it can be underwhelming and actually that can be this for me the only times I've ever had like love

and like actually deep chemistry is when it's been utterly utterly underwhelming at first and I've almost like instantaneously had the ick and been like absolutely not and then suddenly of myself like a few weeks later been like absolutely yes and then a few months later i'm like they broke my heart what the fuck i wasn't even interested but i think but you're right it kind of almost like sets us up to fail if we're constantly looking i think we inherit this i mean it's it's you know across popular culture it's in films it's the idea of like you know my mom has always said she saw my dad across the room and it was love at first sight and i was like no mom you thought he was fit then you met and you were like oh he's not that bad and i was like i still think you had

questionable judgment in some points I love my dad but I'm like but like you know but these narratives are really you know are so intoxicating you want that you want that an initial immediate spark and I'm I can't see it in my too extensive no Dr. Talas yes I was like fuck Emma you put this in um Dr Talas speaks really beautifully like romantic mysticism is that right in the book you know this is this was actually the one of the things I've learned wish I oh god I if I'd had that earlier then I would have like saved myself a lot of heartache but the thing so listen carefully this is this is gold dust me and my friends when we were

like this is this is it for us because we are so bad at this but um so what and actually i think when i was interviewing him i told him about my i'm going to marry this man within um you know a minute of speaking to him and he said when i said to my friend i was like i just feel it in my bones we'd always say that like feel it in my bones it's almost beyond my understanding and he said to me um often the reason we do that we put it down to like chemistry or gut feeling is basically because you have no evidence it's not like I spent a week with this person they were really kind to me and they were so funny and they were great with my friends and my family and like this has given me the evidence that they're a great

person and we should be together you haven't got anything so you you basically just hang it on some like mystical feeling and then the fact it kind of like feeds itself because the fact that you haven't got any evidence makes it more intense because then it you create as this gut thing so it's actually just like one false inference feeding another and it gets like more and more intense but if you kind of so now when my friend had been on date you know and she's I've got this feeling in my bones whatever what's the evidence what's the kind of you know like with the man that I met who I was going to matter do you know anything about him like what what actually is inspiring that feeling oh it's just something in me no doesn't there's nothing really

you it's just you making it up because you don't have any anything so that that was a real changer for me it's that i can see like yeah true though isn't it i know that's my sister like how he does have you seen me do that like it's just so amazing but why i don't know and you know it's not and it's not just the one of the so the relationship i write about well relationship is a loose loose term for it but my sort of like yeah my sort of first love if you can call it that when I was 13 and kind of first became a fatuated with this boy and then it went on for basically 17 years on and off the by the end of that what's scary is I still had nothing like it was all still in absences it was like we were never quite together but we missed paths and then we'd sort

have a snatched night here and there but when I again yeah and but even those there was nothing we never really actually had a conversation even that's what's crazy when I was speaking when I when I when I was thinking about the Frank Talis quote I was like even then like it's amazing how long you can feed off this sort of mysticism because you get it allows you the space to fill in the gaps with your own fantasy and in the lack of evidence you actually allow you can kind of build whatever narrative and you become the the best storyteller of your own fantasy. And yeah, and then you live in that

and it doesn't end so well. Speaking of which, I think part of the problem, which I think Alan the Botton alludes to, but actually quite a few of your interviews, alludes to, part of the problem with the way that we see, the way we kind of romanticize romantic love and popular culture, when we put it on this pedestal, is I think we almost put on too much of an onus on love

to fill this kind of void, to be this, everything for us. And in a way that's just putting too much pressure on dating and on kind of someone else to come in. And I think that narrative of like, a man will or a person will one day come and save me. And I think actually that can be a really a dangerous one. It's taken me until I've just turned 30 recently.

Similarly to you, I thought I was like, I'm gonna get someone gorgeous, gonna be fabulous. I turn single 30 in this, I turn 30 single and this is the genuine, I'm just saying to Sophie, someone here. This is the first time of my life after being dumped earlier this year, where I really stood back and been like, okay, you have to look at what you're, what's going wrong

and kind of what you're doing when you go into these relationships. And it's very much because I was looking for someone else to be the panacea to my worldly woes, to be the, just someone just snigger in the corner. It's very serious that I was looking for people to be the panacea to my worldly woes. Okay, no laughing.

But I really was looking for other people to kind of to give me the answers to show me how to live and lead life that I wanted. And then when I got dumped in December from someone who I really thought was going to show me how to do all the adventures to learn to wakeboard all this shit. Yeah, now we know the connection. And I got done and I was like, you have to do this on your own. You have to find that like you have to find a way of filling all these gaps that you perceive as gaps that only someone else can fill. And oh my God, the last six months have been fabulous. Did I mention I'm

learning to waitboard and I'm really good and I'm doing it alone and I go by myself, the Docklands near the DLR station and I put my helmet on and I get up there and I wakeboard. But so talk to us then. Let's move away from my wakeboarding and my kind of epiphany. But talk to us then about kind of, I think this really comes down to a sentiment that you come across, you touch on a lot in the book. It's really the importance of self-understanding over, and you just say it's over self-love, but really understanding what our needs are and what our kind of perception of our own gaps

are so that we're really looking to do that kind of healing before we're looking to someone else to kind of fill it in for us. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Yeah. And do you know, the self-understanding self-love thing was a big, another, like, big epiphany for me because I think, like, you do read a lot of those, like, you've got to love yourself before you find some blah, blah, blah. And I just feel like, that is another stick to like beat yourself with because I was

like, well, I'm never going to find anyone because I don't love myself every instant. And actually it's kind of crazy because in the same way we'll get onto with like sustaining love like with friends or with a partner or with your parents you don't expect to feel in love with them all the time like of course your mom drives you crazy and then you adore her and and your partner sent you know you hate them and then you love them and your friends irritate you when you go a holiday and then you have some space from them and you're desperate to see them again so why should it be with ourselves that we're expected to reach this state of like I'm always like my self-esteem is really high and I'm so confident I love myself like I think it's okay to

be like, oh, I regret acting like a dick that night and to then try and pick yourself up the next day. So I think that was for me, like this idea that, okay, I don't need to love myself. That's not like a prerequisite for having loving relationships. But I think it's interesting. You said before when you were like, we expect too much from love to kind of fill the gaps.

I think where I've got to now is that love, as in the word in a broader sense, of like different people and you know when I started this project I was like well I've got like friendship love family love like parental love a romantic love and then the more I spoke then there's sort of like love in purposeful work and like meaning I don't mean like loving your career but I mean finding something you do that gives your life meaning and like connection and that can be a form of love and actually finding love with strangers you know in those like moments where where you have like an interaction of kindness

and it feels like such a deep connection even though you don't even know each other. So I think before that I was very much like, I need to be happy on my own outside of a relationship. I need to kind of be independent and just strong and not really needing other people. And then where I got to was like, no, I think love can fill the gaps, just many different forms.

But I don't think you need to be this super person who doesn't need anyone. Like, it can be really lonely if you want a relationship and you don't have one, or you want a close group of friends and you don't, you've moved to a new area and you don't know people. And that was where I changed working on this. So I don't have to be happy alone.

I just need to recognize there's like lots of different ways to find love. And it's okay to kind of need that rather than being like, I can just be going on holiday on my own every week and be happy, so no, actually I would love to take a friend or I would love to go with my parents. Solar Romantic is really fun though. I'm now obsessed as going a holiday alone.

And now when people come with me, I'm like, well, we could do what you want to do or we could do it. What I want to do. Like, go off on my own. I've spoiled myself too much in my own company. And maybe, but I think you need both. Totally. And for me, I got into that kind of rut of like,

I have to be content on my own. Or more like if I wasn't, if I was kind of, you know, feeling just lonely for my friends, busy and I was just on a weekend I was like you know kind of buck up like why why are you being lonely and now I just be like it's okay to feel a bit lonely and I guess you just need to for me it's just like rethinking what the word love means absolutely depending on like a romantic relationship to fix all your issues is never going to end well waiting for someone to come

and save you and be the person that kind of shows you how to live the dream life but I think there's a difference between that and saying I really want love in my life I really want people in my life. I'm, you know, somebody who yeah, wants some alone time, but also wants to feel loved in lots of different ways. I did love Alan DeBotton in that first interview. He said it's all about how we frame things, didn't he? He was like, with regards to how we perceive, like how we experience loneliness versus solitude. Is that right? Yeah, he said, um, he was basically saying, because I was kind of saying, oh, I would feel very like lonely on a bank holiday when everyone was suddenly busy and then I'd just be like, well, I've got no plan. So I'd have to like

frenetically planned loads of things and he was like if you're you know on a Monday night if you're just happy watching TV and like having a great time reading a book it's not like the actual being alone that's the problem it's like the story you're telling that somehow being alone on a Friday night is a bigger deal than being alone on a Monday night it's the same thing you're just again it's like what I was saying before of like layering that story of shame or like the extra story you're putting on it like I'm alone on my Friday night so I must be I must have no friends or I must yeah I'm gonna die a kind of spinster be eaten by Alsatian Bridget Jones Diary yeah yeah where's a life and I'm like aggressively text everyone also to make plans oftentimes like

on a Friday that I'm like I don't want to do this so I'll be up personally like ask everyone what they're doing I'm like I just want to stay on my own so I won't turn up and then piss everyone off whereas on a Monday you'd be like I'm really glad I'd stay didn't I turn that thing down because I can like you know look after myself and have that so I love, in that answer, I think it's just, on you alluded to the importance of, I think, of expanding our notion of love in a really broad, multifarious way. And I think that's what I really took from the book.

And I think you speak about this a lot. And I really had to like sit with it. But just how in our search for romantic love, insofar as we prioritize romantic love, oftentimes above lots of other types of love, we can miss the important. and the beauty of the love that sits right before us. And throughout the book, a lot of the,

a few of the different interviewees mentioned sibling love. I know you mentioned your relationship with your brother. And Pornabelle, the journalist, mentioned her relationship with her sister. And I think, I can't remember if I've seen the, oh, I think it was you wrote. Siblings, maybe the only people will ever know who truly qualifies life partners because we've known them from the start. It really made me sit back and think about my relationship to my sister, who sat here, so like, you can blush.

But how, I kind of, I took her love for granted for so long, but the fact that I get to guarantee, like, people will come in my life and they will go, but she will, I will get to love her forever. And please, God, I won't piss you off enough that you don't love me anymore. But, and she's seen me through all the different stages and, like, loves me at every different one of those stages. And I kind of had, like, really had to stand back and be like, that's something that I've taken for granted. And not everyone gets. And not everyone gets, and I'm really privileged.

So maybe I don't have a partner in the romantic sense right now, but I have this incredible, eternal burning love that I get to be the most annoying person in the world, ask so much and be like, hey, this text I just sent, you mind just analyzing it and just reading line five to see whether it like over-emphasizes this? And she'll be like, yeah, yeah, sure, of course, no judgment. And that's really special.

And I think that having, and I think it does, it's almost like, I think someone else in the book says it's like, love really is a practice as opposed to it's something we take for granted. I think it's like in order to expand our notion of love, we really have to see love as a practice and have to work on it in a way. Does that...

And especially, I love the sibling relationship. And when I was looking at this, it's funny how we put different forms of love, kind of give them a hierarchy. And like, for instance, with motherhood, I think, you know, you can... People, obviously, it's not like this at all, but people can say that,

oh, you'll never experience this type of love until you have a kid. But for me, the intensity of sibling love is very similar, actually, to parental love. Because it's like, I guess I was there from like the beginning of my baby's life. And you see, like I was there, my brother's younger from the beginning of his life.

And I feel so like kind of people talk about like physical connection of like, you know, when the baby's inside. But I feel like so physically connected my brother of like we're part of the same. I just feel it's so, my love for him is so intense and like deep in a way that is almost not a choice. Like romantic love is different, you choose it, you support, but it's so, like he will make me laugh more than anyone else.

And there's a way that he knows me better than my husband better than anybody. And it's just this like deep special relationship. We don't talk, you know, so many articles about motherhood and you know how intense it is and how, I don't know, there's hardly anything about that, talk about sibling love in the same way. So I think you're right, but with those relationships,

particularly like family, I think they're the easiest ones to take for granted because they have always been there. And they just keep showing up even you're like, I'm a dick. I can be so, I save my worst tendencies for my poor family. And then they keep coming back. But, but, and they don't have to. They don't have, you know, I've spoken to lots of people who are estranged from their siblings and have really difficult relationships. So watch out because she might have had enough. It's never estranged me. I love you so much. So, and interestingly with siblings, the taking it for granted is not just like, you know, it's different, you don't have to, with friendship,

because you haven't got maybe like the fact that you'll always be going home for Christmas, it's a lot more freedom in it, but you have to like force the consistency a lot. Where I think with your siblings, you can be a bit freer because you sort of know that you're tied there and it's not like the relationship's gonna just disappear overnight.

Well, I've done a double whammy. I forced my best friend to spend Christmas Eve with my family. Oh, no doubt. else with my family. But, you know, killing two bars and ones don't. But it's scary with friendship. Like, you could have a bad couple of years

and then it might go, whereas with siblings you have got that safe. But I think the challenge there is like, you can kind of fall into like assuming you know who they are based on like the younger version of them. And like for me, I've had to like, you know, my brother's younger than me.

He's always kind of like my young brother. But like he's married now. He's like partner and they're like, like adults and you know I can't like baby him or I you know I had to like readjust how I see him as like a partner to her and you know when we were younger we had certain like patterns and I'm like well actually you're not interested in that anymore and you're different and I have to like make an effort to kind of make an effort to know who he is now whereas because if you feel like your siblings just always putting you back in that box of like you were the shy one when

you were younger it can feel don't know like it's it's quite easy to like not become as close so I think Yeah, it is a practice. But yeah, I love the, I love the sibling relationship. We love it too. Do we not? Nod and smile as you've been taught by me. Okay, just to round up this section, and we've touched this,

but I just want to kind of explicitly touch it one more time for my own benefit, and hopefully for someone else's here. I think that we've spoken about how it's okay to be like searching, for love and to recognize that it can feel humiliating but actually it's something that you can you know you you can nurture lots of different types of love and still say i want to find romantic love but how do you think that i think in order to search romantic love you have to allow yourself

to be really vulnerable and to be open to other people in a vulnerable way which can be really hard when you're dating on dating apps when you're single when you kind of have you kind of develop this skin this like thick skin anyone else heard about the thick skin of dating of being like you you don't you kind of have to have your guard up and you want to maintain that like my life is really good if i don't find someone i will be okay i've got these there's other types of love how do you think what's the kind of collected wisdom of people you've spoken to led you to believe is the key to balancing that joy in your life as it is currently and as you can create it alone alongside the vulnerability one needs to be able to be open to romantic love.

I ask this question a lot. I'm trying to think of like the best one. I think one of the best ones, again, it was Heather Havrilleski, Ask Polly. And she said, because I think like you, I was always trying to be like, okay, what's the best approach here? Like how can I kind of get into a mindset that's going to be. What's the game plan? What's a strategy?

And then I'll just, yeah, I'll just do that. And she said actually it's more about really tuning into how you're honestly feeling that moment. and like just tackling it differently each time. So she said like at some points you will have to say to yourself and like my friend used to say to me, I know you're going to meet someone. Like it's just not even a question.

She said, I know you're worried about it. I'm not. It's just done. Like it'll be fine. And there was some points that I just needed to believe that like, it's absolutely going to happen. There is just no room for like doubt. I'm so hopeful.

I'm going to like hope as hard as I just be so positive that it was going to happen that I could kind of take some fear out of it. And then there were the other times where you had to be like, okay, well, if it doesn't happen, like, what's the best version of my life going to look like? And when you kind of like fast forward to that, I was like, well, I have like amazing friends and I could maybe like do this in my work and I could, I don't know what my life, like what's the best version of your life that would look like without the thing that you want? I always think I'd be really rich. Yeah. I was like, you know, I'm so filthy rich. I buy so many cars. I buy so many

I'm like who on earth gave me this narrative but I love it yeah well why is the relationship gonna take all your money from you it's not but I just imagine me single and rich yeah but what I think like some point and it was kind of the same with like trying to conceive it's like sometimes it's helpful to be like I will absolutely get pregnant and sometimes it's really helpful to be like well maybe I won't and there are lots of different ways to live this life like if I don't have a kid what would we want to do how would we want to live and I think it's that rather than trying to find this like strategy that's going to always make you

happy it's recognizing that you sort of need to like I think she calls it like just adjust the picture and and and and sometimes like fast forwarding like and I do this all the time to like the worst case scenario then you're like it's not so bad and it's like there are just lots of other ways to see it there's a great quote I just I love this way she is it Shelly Hetty Sheila Sheila Sheena Hetty um you make your life meaning by applying meaning to it. It's not just inevitably meaningful as a result of the choices you've made.

And I think you noted as a reflection on this, the romantic relations or family I wanted would not make my life meaningful only I could. And I love that because it really captures the idea, like you write the story. And also that you can be in a relationship and have a happy or unhappy life. You can have a kid and have a happy or unhappy life.

Like, I think that I just got into that thing of thinking, if I get X, it will make me happy, And now I just understand, like, no, both sides will be good and bad. Have you actually just this morning, I was listening, you did an interview on the Alonement podcast with Francesca Spector, I believe. And I think one of you mentioned how, I think one of you had done a survey or something about when people felt like most lonely or something. Anyway, something came up where people said, I feel the loneliest when I'm lying in bed

my partner with my back to my partner wishing they'd turn around and hug me oh that was what i wrote that was what you know and i thought god that really because i think sometimes when you don't have the person in the bed you think oh if i had the person in the bed i'd feel so together and actually the aloneness that you can feel when you're in bed with somebody and you're not touching you're not communicating that i always said that that kind of gulf of silence that can sit beneath between you can be the most lonely experience and you know what when i wrote that was so weird because lots of people sort of highlight that and because my friend now were talking about when you you're like when a relationship's you know sort of already ending and you kind of know they don't

really love you and you're just sort of clinging on to it and you're in bed and you're just like I just want them to turn around like I'll just keep my back there and then maybe they'll turn around anyway and I felt so lonely in those moments but it just so many other people have been like I have that's the exactly how I felt and it's just I don't know it's the other the other part of it is like Alan says like what we need to do is just have more different love stories and more different stories about love because when you read those other versions then you're like well, I'm not that alone in this because other people are feeling that too. And I think, you know, with the, again, like advice on not, like, the vulnerability and not

feeling so lonely in that is I, again, like, felt like it was sort of like a game of musical chairs. Like everyone was like getting into a relationship and I had to do it by this point or it was kind of the, you know, there'd be nobody left or it would be the end. And now I'm at the stage where I'm seeing like my parents' friends widowed and then creating like really interesting new lives and with still with like a lot of time left and you realize that all of this is changing all the time and you can feel like in a moment that everyone is in a relationship and you're not if you want one but like there'll be a period you know

I always say to my friends oh we'll all be in the old people's home again like everyone you know together and like living in some sort of commune will end up and that will be like another great chapter well else with them I'm going to create the commune so if anyone wants in we are going to be creating and you are welcome to join. Okay, great. We are going to move. I could honestly talk about this section of the book for so long,

but we have to move on. But I did actually want us to end on this section on one, I think, quote you had here that was reflecting on your interview with Lem Sissy. This spell correct has put it to Lean Sissy, which I know is not correct, Lensi. We are all connected by desire to love and be loved. When we see the world in this way,

it makes us feel less alone. We realize that our private shame is universal, that our worst heartbreaks have been felt and survived before, and that as lean, as Lem has said, our experiences are bridges, not ravines, however painful they may be. Oh, I just, that hits. I was like, oh. And again, it's like some kind of, you know, even for me,

it was such a big deal when I was young of being like, how was I seeing somebody for sort of like two years and didn't even like ask if it was a relationship or not like that was just like such my biggest shame something even when I see my parents friends they were like well was this your boyfriend I was like oh kind of not really like it was just this huge deal yeah like and and it's like shush and if we don't mention it then we won't like acknowledge the fact this is a huge thing and and how like embarrassing like my lack of self-esteem meant I just didn't say to this person more what's actually going you know that I just felt so embarrassed about that and then when I was writing that section of the book

like just so many other people saying like this is exactly you know I had this of like sending someone sending a message saying are you out at three in the morning and then like not calling me for three weeks and me trying to like collect the crumbs of their affection yeah I love he wrote it's like are you out yes and you're like oh yeah right we're going to be so how do we sustain love very difficult so let's be begin by dismantling, as I love to do, the Disney depiction of love is kind of a happy ending. So I think often the way that we see, way that love is depicted in film and the Disney thing, is that love is the end.

You find the part that you fall in love and that's it. The story is all wrapped up. And that really is so counter to what we've discussed and that love is something that we have to practice, that we have to work on, that we have to put effort into. What does this depiction of the kind of happy ever after love get so wrong and how does it trip us up than when it comes to actually being in a relationship. Do you know what? People always talk about this in a negative way of like, no, just in terms of like, you know, love is really hard and your relationship will change and it won't be

this like glossy beginning year, but whatever. And I have come to think the complete opposite in that I did used to think like you fell in love and actually that was amazing but like there were other great stuff later on that you have this deep friendship and you have this history built together, but like the falling in love was done and that's kind of okay because you get other stuff. But now I think I fall in love with my partner

like in a more sort of deep romantic new way all the time. Like almost every other year it's like a new falling. And I had kind of read about love and like, okay well you'll settle for like companionship later down the line and that will be wonderful too. But now I'm like, I think it's bullshit. I think that the intensity of like, the intensity of falling in love with someone

who has, like, so for my husband who's seen me like cut open and bleeding and held me crying and see me vomiting and like all these like layers and layers to our relationship, falling in love with him in a new way now is so exciting and so, knew all the time. What precipitates in those little moments

where you find yourself kind of falling again? Because I had that at the next partner where I felt like I was really falling continually. What kind of things make you fall in those moments? I think it's just seeing new sides of them come out or like new sides of yourself that you didn't know. There's like a lot of stuff in this section about the mystery and long-term love

and how it's kind of this myth that like you can ever really get to know someone because you know, you're both changing all the time and there's like new, like even with myself, sometimes I'll react in a certain way to something. I was like, oh, I didn't know I felt like that about something. And so it often for me has been, you know, I would say like moments of grief

when you kind of weather that together feels like a somehow like new layer of intimacy that you get to. And for me, like on the other side of that, I just feel like so deeply connected in this new way. That's a kind of falling. You know, I would say now, like, seeing my husband, like, become a parent. I'm like, oh, there's all this new stuff in you coming out.

Like, that's been a fool. I'm like, oh, you're, like, the person I knew, but you're also someone new to, you know, this person I knew, but someone new to. And then sometimes it's just, like, tiny little moments where you're both, like, acting, like, so stupid. And you're like, well, we've been through all these serious things, but we can still just, like, be completely ridiculous. You write this brilliant scene in the book of where I think,

And I just, it's like, it's like, it's so much for myself doing it. You're in your kitchen, you're cooking onions, and you'll cry as well with the onions, and your husband, and your partner comes in and gives you goggles. Skeegle, yeah. Snorkel, yeah, yeah. And he's like, he's like, put teaspoon in your mouth. I was like, you kind of cutting these,

I just loved that. I mean, you just go with both, you just kind of fall about laughing. And I'm really picturing you with a teaspoon and the goggles and it just being this really beautiful kind of demonstration of love. And I think, because we talk about, like the work of love and it's so hard. But I think actually, like, the hard thing is just noticing and noticing those moments.

And weirdly, like, because I was writing the book, it made me much better at loving because in a way I'm, like, trying to collect these moments for the book. But now it's like, I've got those moments. Like, there's another moment I wrote on the beach when a holiday and there's, like, my partner's in the sea. And then I was, like, wave.

And then he just, like, waved. It was just so stupid. like that would have been like lost to memory but I was just and I think that we just need to get better at like collecting those little moments of love that sort of sustain us later on or when things are different I just think it's so it's so easy when you're in a tough patch or like arguing to just forget all the good stuff and it's like all the time I this is why I feel like memory is so important in love and I mean the kind of like answer that I have given in previous interviews is like one thing we do is like have this good things jar so like all throughout the year we'll put down like something about

like the ski goggles or you know just nice little things moments that you shared and put them in and don't tell the other person then on New Year's Day we'll get out and read them to each other and then like stick them in a book so remember them but I feel like a fraud because the good thing jar is completely empty at the moment because it's so busy

there's nothing in it but um after night go home put something like a good thing But that's just a stupid gimmick, but I think, like, this whole section really is about, like, with friendships as well, it's like, you just, it's so easy to just, like, gloss through it all, and I feel like all this stuff is, like, slipping past us all the time, and, like, and, like, I write about, again, with my mum, you know, just, like, some thing, even the other day, she's, like, calling me and talking about the neighbours and blah, blah, blah, blah, and I'm just, like, trying to, like, get to the tube, and I'm like, yeah, okay, mum, but I just know there's a time when I'll be, like, closing my eyes and being, like, what was that, thing about your friend at Pilates farting or something, you know, and I'll just be like craving her voice. And that's like, that's the biggest thing with love is that we just like all the time just letting this stuff slip until it's only lost or it's only like, you know, I was reading Eva Wiseman wrote this great column over the weekend and something had happened in her life and she said like, I wish we could go back to like the bickering and the biscuit eating

of yesterday. And that's it. You're in the sort of bickering and biscuit eating until something tragic happens or you might lose someone and then you're like I love them so deeply so this whole section for me is asking like can we get to that feeling of like knowing how deeply we love our friends and our families and our partners without having to wait for the tragedy or the loss. God I think that's so true I and I think actually love a good segue but that that leads so perfectly actually onto a story that I think has really stuck kind of front of mind with me, which is Abby Morgan, the director.

So I know she did a news letter recently with you. And I think you write in the book about how do we, how do we, you ask, sorry, how do we sustain love when the plan changes? As you say, when we don't, when things don't go as we thought they would, how the narrative does shift. And she is a prime example of someone for whom the narrative has totally shift. The plan has completely changed. Would you mind telling us a little bit about her story and what you learned from that?

So first of all, I'll say I think it's also hard to sustain notice of when the plan doesn't change. Like almost I think that's harder in some respects because that's when it's, like, that's when it's just either the analogy I use in the book is like when you're really close up to a painting, like you can't see it. Like I almost feel like that with my relationships. Yeah, it's what you've just said actually. It's in those moments of strife that actually we do relish and hold on to the things we have. but it's just unfortunate that sometimes we have to wait at that moment to then really be like, oh my God, but this was amazing and I loved this. And that's like, again, I was like embarrassed to write this because I was like,

well, I've just spent the first half of the book moaning about how I wanted a partner. And then the second part, I've got this partner, and I'm moaning about how I want a baby. But the reason I did that is to show like it's not just romantic love that we can obsess over. It's kind of what you don't have because I had spent my whole life wanting this romantic relationship. And then when I had it, when I kind of after miscarrying and I felt like, you know, I wasn't so sort of desperate before them. After that, I became this thing I was consumed with and sort of overlooking this, overlooking romance, which is like the thing that we, I had spent, you know, the decade before overlooking everything else for. So I think it's like very easy for absence or loss or tragedy to sort of, it kind of jolt us into that like more intense feeling. but it's very hard when you're just sort of like going about your day

and someone's left the dishes in the sink to like not just be pissed off at them and remember you love them. But the Abby Morgan thing, so her husband had had or wasn't husband at the time, she's since married, had a brain injury and didn't remember her. And so she had to kind of ask

what is love without that shared past? Like what does our relationship mean when you don't remember it? And actually she, because a lot of the stuff I wrote about is like love is that past that you'll build love is the life so again it was like another narrative yeah the shared language you have exactly so it was really interesting one for me so I was like well yeah what is it and again it came back to like that giving and that um she described it as like a hum like it was this sort of like constant hum between them and it it still existed it was still there even without the memory because she had

made that commitment and that she was just still like giving that to him and trying to see him again and again which is kind of what love is isn't it it's like just keeping trying to see people and they're showing up for anyone that hasn't read into abbey's story it's a really really beautiful and she written a book hasn't she yeah the memoir a memoir about because i think she had cancer just before she i mean she had this during during i mean talk about being kind of is it hit by two buses what's the analogy hit by many buses at once had terrible time basically but speaks about it really beautifully

and really kind of philosophically I think I think as you almost kind of have to and she's a director who directed the suffragette film I think so and the owl she wrote the out she's absolutely brilliant so definitely look into her story really does kind of wow it's an incredible one

and just a final let's just address sex before we move on and then I'm just conscious does everyone what do you think do you want a quick break before we go into the final section of this and then we'll do a quick Q&A or are you happy to just keep on going through I'm always conscious of people wanting to move around shout out keep on going on okay fabulous good you're just stuck in as me

suddenly gets to midnight you're like I think we do need a break there is a bathroom just there for anyone who does need it um so we talked about kind of the need to be practicing love and the different ways in which love changes and evolves in the context of a relationship and I think we've talked about romantic but also I think it's just as important to note that all the kind of the effort and the purposefulness that you have seen is I think equally applied to other relationships we've touched on throughout this evening and I think actually really liked quite a few of your interviewees spoke for the importance of the romance with friends and like the little acts of like I think as Candice Carty Williams talked about wooing her friends so she'd be very active in how she woos them and whether it's like buying someone a gift or sending someone there a book in the post without for no reason I really liked that and I think you have to remind you have to remind you yourself that those things are really beautiful and important to do and also um they had like this birthday itinerary they made for each other which i thought it's really nice so yeah i think so it was with one of her friends who didn't have a partner uh had recently broken up and so that the other

other friend would then be like right birthday comes around i know that the partner would previously have been the one to make the plans would make this very extensive birthday birthday itinerary and they kind of like did it for one another which i thought was a really yeah a beautiful act of love and kindness but let's talk about sex so in the book you explore how sex changes in the context of a long-term relationship, particularly when you're put under the particular pressure of trying for a baby. When suddenly the context, like sex, the purpose of sex changes, I suppose, in quite a big way, from being fabulous fucking for the fun of it, to we want to have a baby.

And obviously the kind of the sadness that can surround that when it doesn't kind of work in the way you want it to at that time. And I think it's something you write about so poignantly and powerfully. did your experience as you were trying for a baby and when you wrote about miscarriage as well having a huge impact on your relationship sex did that experience change your relationship to sex your partner and kind of in what ways

I think you know it's not just those things but like if I take like since we met so maybe it's like six seven years now it's just so interesting how sex has ebbed and flowed in so many ways that it has made me so relaxed about the fact that it can kind of go through patches like when we were trying to conceive and it was literally like you leave for work at 6 a.m we've got to get up and do this like before you go this is just awful 5 a.m shift just like there's so I couldn't think of anything else I'd least rather do right now

and and just like so functional but but the way I wrote about it's also like there was a new kind of intimacy and like we just find it so funny we'd be like how you know this is literally like stick in like let's try make it happen just but we were just there was like an intimacy and in that we'd be like

we both want this and it's kind of really painful to be like sex has gone from like it's playful thing to be like it can give us like everything we want or it can be this every month a thing that like doesn't and then it's like this kind of doorway to like another life

or another disappointment that's so much pressure to load on to this this physical thing. But we found a way to like laugh through that. And that was like another form of intimacy in a way. But even before that, I think I went through a period, must be my early 30s where like my sex drive was just dropped a bit. And I was almost convinced that I was in early menopause, like, or something. I was just like, why is it gone from this to this?

And then through the conceiving stuff, obviously we're having loads of sex and then but it's like not good but then the other thing that came with that is actually there was sometimes when like oh really can't be bothered to have sex where then I would go on and I mean I'm just I'll just talk very openly because that was but then I then I would go on and have like amazing orgasm be like have this like but I was like well I didn't even want to have it so that was interesting to me it's like that the kind of she's having well yeah but but it could be could be both things and it wasn't actually reflection of our relationship. It was like sometimes you'd have to start doing it before like

you even realized that you wanted it. And then obviously then I had a baby and then I'm just like won't go into too much detail but just completely broken here couldn't really have sex, very painful third degree tears, you know, not like conducive to a good sex life. And then now I'm in this, well before I got pregnant, then I had a period of like intense. amazing sex. So I think I've just come out of it. I felt like if you're really in love and you're connected, you'll have a great sex life. And now I am just much more relaxed about the fact that God, it's just changing all the time. And that doesn't necessarily, it's not really a reflection of like how connected we are. But what I will say, and I've interviewed a couples therapist about

the other day I was asking her kind of similar questions. And she was talking about like arguments that couples should have. And she said, weirdly, sex is the one argument that couples don't have because it can feel so loaded to sort of say, I don't, I'm not happy with the amount of sex we're having, I want more or I don't feel like it's that good at the moment.

You know, it's loaded with so many insecurities. And I would say the thing that we did is we just always talked about it. Like even if we weren't having sex, we're like, oh God, do you remember we had like really, we're going through a patch, we're not having much sex, are we? And like, oh no, I kind of missed that too. but like I'm sure it'll come back.

So it didn't become this, you know, even like post-birth when it was like really bad. We would sort of laugh about it or like just always talk about it. God, I really, oh God, I really admire that, firstly. But as you're speaking, I recently interviewed. I've interviewed Billy Quinlan. He runs Furley, the sexual wellness app, quite a few times for sex talks.

And I interviewed her just in the day at Wilderness. And she talks really beautifully about sex and our sexuality being this living, breathing thing, this part of ourselves that, is always there, even when we're not having sex. And I think just as you described that, it really made me think of that because I guess what you're describing is how our relationship to sex

is really fundamentally our relationship with ourselves and it is ever-changing and it is always evolving. And it kind of, in the same way that we have to practice love, I think we have to put in the practice for our sex. And I think I, you know, sex talks, kind of was born from my journey with sex and sexuality. And I said at the festival, and I really have been ruminating on it since,

that what doing so what sorting out my kind of sexual issues is given to me so I had sex therapy having had like very bad relationship to sex for years couldn't orgasm just felt like a non-sexual person sex wasn't something that I was interested in I kind of felt like scared of it I just didn't feel like my body worked when it came to sex and what kind of working through those issues I didn't even like really realize at cognitive level kind of how deep rooted they were what that's given me longer term is a feeling of being a sexual being. So even when I'm not having sex, and right now I'm going through a dry period. I have chronic thrush and no one is entering me right now. No one is even touching me. And, but it hasn't taken away that that I still feel sexual. I feel like a sexual being. I feel ownership of my sexuality in a way that I could not have a matter, like for the majority of my 20s, probably most of my life, I couldn't have imagined

of being like this. So when you describe how, yeah, that kind of the ebbs and flows and the kind of the changing nature of it as if it is this kind of a live thing that really resonates with me in a way that I guess I would never have expected. And you're kind of saying the same thing as the couples therapist when she said really when it gets bad for a couple is when they don't talk about it

and then it can vanish from the picture entirely because it's become such a kind of absence and it's the same with yourself if you kind of like not a tool wants to go there. Totally and it's kind of like I just don't address it. It feels abnormal. It feels like an indication of something that's like broken with me.

When actually you say, you know what, it's always going to be changing it. So it's amorphous thing that is continually ups and downs, but you address that and you hold it and you kind of give that space, then it no longer is the shameful thing. And also I do think, and I had to kind of really catch myself about this because I do think, like actually it was Daniel Jones, the modern love editor, who I was saying, how I interviewed before, who said this to me. So that's modern love, you know, the New York Times.

Yeah. He said he thinks that sometimes we can put emotional intimacy on a pedestal. above physical intimacy, especially now when we're like doing more online without meeting and blah blah, blah. And I think for me, like, it's definitely someone who like loves talking about relationships and thing, you know, I would be like, we need to emotionally connect

and I would sort of like put sex as a sort of like, yeah, it's something that's important, but like, I don't know, I just didn't put it on the same pedestal as like conversation connection. And then Mira Jacob, one of this authors I interviewed said to me, like, she said like, sex is the dream life of a marriage. in that sometimes with her partner things would show up in sex

before they were even aware of them themselves or before they'd even had the chance to talk about them and actually like sex is just another way of having a conversation with somebody and I think that that is so true and now I've seen sex in that way I start to just value it just as much as kind of emotional communication

and that won't always be the case but I think it's important to yeah not really, relegate it totally and I think that I'm about to say too much information and I was like too much information another thing um but I often think that my like when I'm masturbating my I can tell so I'm you know you always have kind of a low level layer of stress we live in London busy lives you're constantly kind of rattled in some capacity but I'll know when I'm really rattled in a way I haven't really realized when I can feel like my orgasm become really like just kind of like you know

like the air comes out of a balloon and I feel really disconnected from my body and sometimes I won't be kind of consciously aware of how kind of disconnected I've become I'm kind of just you know busy and life is normal but then I'll masturbate and I'll be like oh wow you're really out of sync you're really kind of disconnect in some way and then some you know for whatever reason I'll kind of think about what that is and trying to kind of work on that and then a few weeks later I'll masturbate and I'll be like oh my god that orgasm and I'm like something and I often think I think of my body as like a um a um a uh connected what's a connect like a connect board thing circuit board that's it and sometimes I

think when I have those like air out the balloon orgasms it's like the circuit's been broken and there's just something a little bit out of kilter and then when it's been reconnected weirdly though I did masturbate in the haunted house and in Italy and it was like I felt like I was being watched by like a million and one ghost and all these spiritual presence and maybe I'm into boyerism and hadn't realized it because I was I was like this is the best orgasm I ever had so maybe I just need to have someone some kind of other earthly spirit watching when I when I masturbate um but it's a good clue it is it is exactly and I just I have to ask this before we run to the final section yeah what is your bet your kind of um you interviewed eminette emily nogoski who is the author of

come as you are brilliant author I'm sure everyone has seen her book read it if you haven't look at it she's fabulous what was your primary takeaway from your interview with Emily because I can't not ask you so she's a sex therapist sexologist and is just wise beyond about sex one key takeaway okay I would say um thinking again about um being so like intensely attracted to people who are maybe like not that kind to you she she just spoke a lot about how um sometimes in some cases the sex with somebody is so great because we don't feel secure in the attachment. And so we're trying to like get them closer.

So we're like lusting after them and we want the sex because it's like we don't feel safe. And that sort of like uncertainty, anxious feeling, you can really confuse with lust. And I, that really made sense to me as in like, well, there's a kind of like amazing good sex I've had with relationships. Like I'm in now where it's because we really feel connected

and I feel really safe to like experiment and just be very open and just, I don't know, it feels like adventurous and fun. But there's the like also good sex I've had with people who like the relationship was terrible. I didn't know where I could stand. And I never, I'd be like, but why was it so, why was I always wanted to have sex and why was it so great?

And that really made sense to me that, well, actually sometimes that might be why a relationship goes through periods where you're not like that intersex because you actually feel like pretty secure and the attachment to that person. And so you're not like desperately trying to like get them back to you. And she, I think it was like a friend or a sister. And she used the example of like they've been a relationship for ages and ages. But whenever he was like a music teacher or so

had to go away for months and their kind of like sexual intensity would like really go up a gear in that period because the attachment was sort of threatened because they're away. And so when they came back, it got really intense again. And I think that understanding that would have been so useful to me, like just not confusing anxiety and uncertainty with lust. basically oh god yeah i mean i'm not going to go into the into the lustful sex i had earlier this year that was pure your sister's like purely lost oh my god she doesn't want to know since i've had the whole family the overshare in our family i'm like but mom he wanked on me and it made me feel really not that comfortable my mom's like oh darling mom

oh poor mom but you know what if i think there's one particular person it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't the wank on me that made her, it was his TikTok that really put her off and she was like she was like actually he's such a show off on TikTok. He's cooked his goose because he's such a show off on TikTok and I was like well what about the wanking on me? Well yes that's bad too anyway

great great tips on romance from our family so if you ever need to love some of some pets. Final section of your books how can we survive losing love and oh my god this section has had me in tears. I was actually reading a little bits at the end of the plane last night my way back from the haunted holiday

and kind of tearing up as I read and I thought what everyone around me thinks I'm already bananas so I had so many bags and just compounded it but I want us to begin on something when we touched it very briefly before when you arrived and it's something I've been thinking about a lot of like what how we grieve different types of relationships and what we feel kind of permitted

how we feel our grief is sorry how do we feel like permitted to grieve what kind of relationships give us the, the endings of, give us permission to grieve in certain kind of ways. And the reason I wanted to explore this topic is I think sometimes short relationships, so a couple months or a couple weeks even, can the ending can feel, can really hurt, can sting and have a kind of profound long-term ramification that feels disproportionate

to the longevity of that actual relationship. And I have a relationships like that where I felt the grief has been so huge, but I don't feel legitimate in that grief and I don't know how to verbalise it and I feel embarrassed about it and I think I feel embarrassed about talking to my friends about it because they're like, you've seen stuff like two, three months. It's not like a, it's not like the end of a 10-year relationship.

How do you think that we, what do you think can make the grief of something that that was short, seemingly kind of insignificant to others, so painful? And how do you think, how do we mourn the loss of this kind of future that I guess we never really had? Well, the reason I was saying, speaking about before because this is something that I was like when I was kind of thinking about

writing personal stories in the book I was like I'm a bit embarrassed about going on for another hundred pages about how I was desperate for a relationship or how like you know I miscarried like 11 weeks I was like women have lost children like can I really be honest about how gutting that was for me without being people being like it's not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of like fertility issues or you know all this way that I was sort of holding these things up to me that felt really painful and being like well they don't measure up to this bigger loss so am I even allowed you know do I have to pretend that it was actually like I got over that in a few months or whatever and then I was like well no actually this is kind of what this whole project is about of like taking the way you feel about love and the loss of love seriously as as individually it is felt to you and you know I like you like have been devastated when a three and a half month relationship ended and then I had a like two and a half year one that I was like kind of over the next week um so it just it doesn't I don't feel like there is a time scale hierarchy what you can put on love and you know things

there are like some people for whom ending of a relationship of like any level is such a traumatic thing because it's related to like their history of of things ending and and stuff they went through in their childhood that you would never understand. So I was saying to you, I wrote about the moment in a cafe where like I would sit down and like see somebody who I'd think, okay, I think we could have a relationship and then like build this up in my head

and then the girlfriend would walk in. Obviously that's not like a devastating grief but that kind of moment I would feel like really sad in those moments where I've like built up my expectation about something and got let down. And I think that we, I'm quite powerful, about the thing we like need to take each other's like little what kind of other people might perceive as little losses seriously rain right exactly that's

exciting but the drama suddenly this feels really cozy and like we're at slumber party and talking about that no I love I love you you characterize and you know I think it was actually the context of talking about miscarriage specifically about more and you describe it as more in the loss of a future that you didn't have and there come three parts of the sadness the loss itself the loneliness and experiencing and then the shame, the feeling like that you should have moved on. I think that's

as you've just said, I think that's what really resonated because I think it is that shame that it's like you shouldn't you shouldn't still be hung up on things that are comparatively small in the grand scheme of the horrors that people in the world experience but oh my God this is so exciting.

It is so exciting. Also I think it's like in a way those losses are more intense because of the loneliness because I think like all of all the people I spoke to about grief, the thing that came up again and again is like they were like you feel cut off from the world

and you feel like everyone else is living in this normal world and then you're in like your grief world and like no one can reach you there and so, you know, with things that are not like recognized to say, you know, a lot of conversation about miscarriage has moved on now

but like especially a few years ago you know I didn't really even know I'm sure that I have been like really insensitive to people who it felt they were in the midst of that deeply and just not even really understanding why or how that is a deeply felt grief. So I think it's not just that not comparing these things, but it's understanding like the fact that you do feel lonely

and that like intensifies the grief so much. And if you could kind of find people who recognized it, like actually that could alleviate some of the lessen some of the loneliness. I mean, just really that lessened my loneliness and some of the, like, grief I certainly feel on shorter relationships that haven't worked out that still feel like a little shard of glass in my heart and really hard to move on from. And the loss of the imagined future. It's the loss of the imagined future. You build the imagine future. You've got the home.

You've got the joint wakeboarding sessions. You've booked in. You've got all these like these mutual activities that you do together the cadence of the year planned down. Suddenly it's ripped from you. And it's so devastating. And I think if someone recognises. is that it can change the whole thing because I almost wanted to like

go around and tell everyone and be like that this is this wasn't just like a short thing for me it was like a thing I had seen and if somebody could have just have seen that then I think it would have helped so I yeah that's why I felt seen I felt seen in this

I did feel seen so thanks Natasha and then long term relationships how then do you grieve the future how do we grieve the future that we thought we already had when the person you think you're going to spend your whole life with leaves you and when the life that you've been busy building together

comes undone. I think there is a way of like allowing yourself to grieve that but being it's what is the Sheila Hetty quote as well of like for me it was recognizing

that yes like I guess I was thinking about it specifically on the whole holiday I was writing about when I was there thinking like my version of the loss of mad future was like we would have been here with the baby and I remember watching this couple play with their baby in the pool and just like oh feeling that of like we're not we don't have that that we're not here with our child and they are and just feeling like this holiday would have been something different and then kind of as the holiday was like unfolding we just had like so many silly fun times and there was a moment where we're just like lying a bed a bit drunk and and he was

and I was like felt like his heart like beating on my back and I was just and I just felt so like like I was saying like we kind of almost fell in love again deeper like through through that period and being like okay it's not the it's not the holiday with the kid but it's like extraordinary in all these different ways so I think you grieve that future by like allowing yourself to like look at the couple with you know whatever and feel sad

but also being like here is what I have and there are just so many different ways to live this life. And here is one of them and here is what I'm going to do with it. I think, and Sarah Hepola, Pabola, Habela. She had a great quote that I think also I really liked

and I think it's a sort of like benefit of hindsight type of wisdom that I do think is still true. She says, I hadn't understood how lucky you can be when somebody leaves you. It's a sign of youthful arrogance that we think we know what's right for us. The older I get, the more I realize

the things I wanted were not necessarily the things that would have given me what I needed at the time. And I think although at the moment of heartbreak or loss and then any capacity, it's really hard to be able to see that, at some point in the future, you do end up pretty much always looking back and be like, thank fuck. It would never have been good. Yeah, I do feel, I mean, I'm sure there are, like, situations you can say that's not true. but I can definitely say like I'm just so thankful for how many times I got dumped.

Oh my God, if I had my way, my first real like what I felt was heartbreak was I was infatuated with a boy in a band who took heroin and I just think like imagine my life what it would have looked like he was clean though and I do love cleanliness but other than that the environment he was in was like but not clean from the heroin.

No, it was not clean from heroin. I think he got off eventually but like yeah. It wouldn't have been but he was my dream. I loved the guy in heroin. But he didn't love me back and thank God he did not. How do we heal and not harden is what I want to round up on? Because I think one of, you write in the book,

one of the worst parts of heartbreak is waking up each day and having to remember. And I think in the face of ending, in the face of any sort of loss, we can feel as a result is easy to want to kind of give up. And a huge factor of that, I think that's really contributed to me in many of my ways and being kind of cynical and romance is that it hurts the end of romance

hurts so much and it feels easier to button up and to grow that thicker skin and to harden and to say I didn't need that anyway and I don't need it going forwards. And I think Bell Hooks actually talks about like kind of cynicism being born from bitterness of portrayal and I was like God, Bell, you're looking deep into my soul. So how... Or fear. Or fear. How do you mourn that loss in such a way that doesn't leave you feeling hardened and ultimately kind of bitter as a result?

I think it's about sharing your vulnerability in that with like whoever you can again and again. Because I think like there were definitely any periods where even with friends I wouldn't almost want to share that and it's like for me I know like I'm going through a period in life where I'm getting to that hardening point when I just stop like sharing my vulnerability and just find because that's like and then it's so hard to like retain intimacy and stay close to people and I think you just have to like force yourself to almost I don't know I just I always say like the worst thing I'm feeling to people I think maybe it's like from you

of dating when I was like did hold back and I was never really honest I never now I'm like here's ever like I just have to like lay out on the table because I feel like that is how you sustain love and how you stay close to what you want as much as like to other people and so I think it's about like revisiting your like the truth of your vulnerability like if it is cynicism what is like beneath that again it's like almost like detective work is like if I'm feeling this kind of like hardening up, you know, I even feel it now sometimes in my partner, if we're going through something and I'll find myself, I'll just say, like, I think I'm like holding back on this because I'm actually feeling like so scared about this. So I think it's like just always trying

to like dig, dig, dig beneath your first emotion to figure out what it is and then like finding a way to share it with somebody. I think that's so true underneath the many layers. We are going to wrap up. We have, sorry, I've gone slightly over, but it's just, we could stay here till midnight and I'd still have 10 million questions left to ask you. Actually, there was one quote I did want to bring up there that I think is both poignant and sadly true is that you, I think you wrote at one point, you lose the love. I think it was so much you enjoy, you lose the love and then you're left with the grief. One was the price of the other.

And I thought that really was a kind of poignant way that that kind of grief and love arc of two sides, the same coin because at one point, like the joys of love are always going to be bookended with the grief that comes in some way, whether it's through death at some point. or the thing ending and it's kind of I don't know if it's possible to be really okay with that or to like really comprehend what that means until it happens but I think it's important to just remember it and to acknowledge it and actually when I set out to write the book I think I was talking about finding love and sustaining love and I hadn't really thought about losing love but it was really like interviewing people and seeing like how deeply those two things are intertwined and actually not just bookended I think I saw

I thought it was like love and then grief but then it was like love grief but they're like the love kind of exists beyond that and and actually even there's a way that kind of you know of course we don't have to be okay with it but there's a way that like holding that loss in your mind can help you to love better

and I you know what I was saying before about like taking people for granted when they're close I now I think through just doing this project and into people I'm writing do have a sort of more immediate sense of loss and the author Anne Patrick described it as like we're all going around with our friends and our parents and our lovers or whatever and it's like we're walking on this glass corridor and a bridge sorry

and every now and again we look down and it's like that it's like you're loving all these people and you and then every now and again you might remember like it's not going to they're not going to be here forever like we're not and that is so hard to get your head around but I think it's also what has helped me be better at loving in the way that I'm like, let some of the shit go. Like some of the crap, it's like, I don't need to be so irritated about it. I can be irritated, but then I'll let it go quicker because I'm like, I don't want to waste any time with these people

just feeling resentment about shit that does not matter when I know that I'll be like longing for them when they're not here. And so I was like, never want to think about loss because I'm such a kind of romantic. And now I just sort of, I try not to like think about it too much, but I almost like hold it somewhere in my mind. mind in a way that it helps me to yeah just love people in a way that I know what matters oh I love that like everyone go home I love one collective some yeah me me right we are going to wrap up there

one final question what is one thing that you wish you'd known about love sooner posing your own question that you posed to everybody in the book. Yeah, I always answer it a different way all the time because it depends on how I'm feeling this week. But I think like I try and like all the answers feed into this one thing, which is that I am, and it comes up a lot, which is like milestones of like wanting to do things by certain ages.

And you know, the love story that I wanted, because my parents met when they were like 15 and they were this like childhood sweet-art couple. I wanted to like stay with my love that I met a 13, you know, maybe get me. married, like in my 20s, have a kid by 30. I just had this, like, love story that I had written in my head. And I never would have put in, like, two decades of basically terrible dates.

Like, getting dumped outside McDonald's in the rain, like, having a fight with my dad on, like, his dad's funeral, like, pissing myself in front of my husband as my stitches were coming. I just, all this stuff, miscarrying, like, all this stuff I would never would have put in and then now I stand here at this point and be like this love story is so much more I mean it sounds cheesy but I'll just say it's so much more beautiful than all the kind of like perfect meeting things by the milestone that I could have written and I was like I've got a great imagination I've got great fantasies I wrote this great love story and I was like I'm so glad that I didn't write this I'm so glad that I didn't meet the milestones and so I try and carry that forward now and

I'm like, I want my mum to live long enough to do this. And I'm just like, it's meaningful because of the hard bits too. And when you can kind of like loosen your grip on the control of that a little, it just ends up more beautiful, I think. God, what a note to end. I feel that was, I'm honestly, Natasha, what an utter joy. It was so wonderful going to read your book. But to get to then deep dive into it with you

has been such a privilege. So thank you so, so much. And thank you just for writing it. As I said, I really get annoyed by being like, I feel so seen in this because I think we don't need to be seen in everything, but I did feel seen. And it was, it was Goddown, Gloria. So thank you so much.

A huge round of applause. Thank you so much. so much for listening to this episode of the Sex Talks podcast. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Please rate, review and subscribe to the show so that others can find us too. See you next week.