I started writing this newsletter nearly six and a half years ago (!!), in September 2017. The aim, I wrote at the time, was to acknowledge the mysteries and impossibilities of love – uncertainty, change, all the shifting pieces of ourselves and others that we can never fully know. To see and feel all the scary things that love requires and still decide to go for it anyway.
Since then I’ve failed at a lot of the things we’re told might help grow subscriptions: like post regularly (last year I failed to share a single newsletter) or write consistently (some years I wrote two a month; in others, four a year). I’m sure I would have a far bigger subscriber list if I had done those things, but the newsletter’s trajectory has reflected my life. Sometimes it’s felt easy and joyous, full of energy and ambition. Other times it’s been effortful and inconsistent; a reminder of a lack of time (or perhaps my inability to use time better).
In those six and a half years I’ve made new friends, reconnected with old ones, married, written a book, learned to cook, had a daughter, lost my ambition, found it again, paused it, got braces, had a second daughter, and said goodbye to my childhood home, my childhood dog and possibly my pelvic floor (although I’m hoping to get that one back).
Through all this I’ve seen how often the process of writing CoL echoes love itself. When there is no time - or work or babies or just the endless admin of trying to be a person in the world pull my heart in different directions - I have to keep choosing it. I have to keep paying attention to it. I have to keep reminding myself: this matters to me, and because it does, I will keep dragging my body to this desk, even when that feels selfish, or when I feel shame about not sending it for months, or when I’m feeling insecure about the fact that I’ll never write as beautifully as Leslie Jamison. Love requires those things: choosing, paying attention, reminding yourself ‘this matters to me’ — and ignoring your ego knocking on the door of your mind while you try.
This is the honest, awkward place I am writing to you from today: a place where I know that this newsletter connects me back to a part of myself I sometimes forget but want to remember — and connects me to you.
That’s why, to celebrate Valentine’s Day, I’ve decided to bring back the old Conversations on Love Valentine’s special and ask writers to share lessons they have learnt about love. Wonderfully, so many of them said yes that I have had to split them into two parts (part two will be coming next Friday!). I hope you enjoy them as much as I did. And that they remind you that even when we feel we’ve neglected love, confused it with something else, said the wrong thing or failed to do it the ‘right’ way, that we can always find it in a new place, and choose to try again.
*trigger warning: one of these stories covers the theme of baby loss*
Roxy Dunn
When I broke up with my long-term partner a couple of years ago and found myself suddenly living alone again, at a stage when everyone else was coupled up around me, I found the prospect of the sheer amount of alone-time terrifying. I thought about ways to ease this, and asked two good friends who lived locally if I could schedule alternate weekly dinners with them as a recurring event in our calendars, and did the same with two of my cousins who happily agreed to me joining them for monthly Sunday lunches (a notoriously difficult day to spend alone). Knowing I had these slots of guaranteed company scheduled into my diary, even if things got busy and I didn't get around to making other plans, really helped keep me going during this incredibly sad and difficult period of my life. Of course, the emotional support of talking to friends and family about how I was feeling was hugely important, but the bit I discovered - and had perhaps underestimated - was the impact of simply being in their company and sharing meals with them. I've since tried to pay this lesson forward when a good friend of mine recently gave birth; I brought home cooked food to the hospital and made regular visits to her house in the months that followed to drop off useful items, tidy the kitchen, or take her baby out for an hour so she could sleep. My love lesson has been in the discovery of showing up for people, and having people show up for me, of giving someone a small sense of continuity when their world has erupted around them.
Pre-order As Young as This by Roxy Dunn, which will be published on 4th April
Joanna Harrison
Enjoying long-term love isn’t reaching a point where you know someone so well that you can finish each other’s sentences and live happily ever after in a smooth groove. On the contrary, it’s about keeping in mind that at every stage and phase there is something you don’t know about each other. The combination of our individual make-ups and the external backdrop of the world around us means that there is always something changing, and always something to find out about each other. In that sense, curiosity is the fuel that keeps long term love burning.
Five Arguments All Couples Need To Have, by Joanna Harrison, is out now
Rhik Samadder
One morning years ago, I entered a room and found my girlfriend with her eyes closed. It was the only way to find space in our too small flat. She had earphones in, and did not see me seeing her. Her expression was not peaceful. It was one of searching for peace. In that moment, the deepest arrow of love pierced me. We’d been having problems, arguments. Indeed, we broke up not long after this. But my compassion for her outlasted. She wasn’t an object in my world, sent to bring me strife. She was a sovereign soul in a separate body, suffering to bridge the gap with mine. I hadn’t always known her, then we had loved each other, and now felt the pain of our diverging paths. That is the cost of this audacious attempt to share our lives, and too small spaces. It may be a tragedy that things end, but also a miracle they happen at all.
If writing is on your list of dreams for 2024, Rhik is hosting a week-long writing retreat in Italy with journalist Sophie Heawood from August 31st to 7th Sept. It looks so beautiful! You can book your place here: The Writers’ Sanctuary
I Never Said I Loved You, by Rhik Samadder, is out now
Justin Myers
Some years ago – long enough for me to write about it so breezily – my partner became seriously ill. We hadn’t been together very long, still tallying up dealbreakers, working each other out. I’d always told myself I was affectionate, but not romantic. You’d assume scant hearts and flowers could be found in gloomy consultations or cramped waiting rooms, but that time introduced me to a practical, reliable kind of romance that suited me better than thunderbolts. Getting him to appointments, processing the onslaught of information, and all the day-to-day tasks that would otherwise go unremarked but were heightened by the drama of the situation. I learned that love and romance do not exist only at the bottom of a champagne bucket, or on bended knee atop the Eiffel Tower. They’re in the chai latte you queued 20 minutes for; in floodlit corridors on unreasonable seating; in the reassuring click of the door of the cab that’s whisking you home. Don’t search for romance, or try to fake it; it will find you when it’s ready.
Subscribe to Justin’s substack, The Truth About Everything*
Pre-order Justin’s book The Leading Man, which is out 9th May
Marisa Bate
I have learned that love is relentless. It is what drags your body out of bed night after night to soothe screams. It is offering up a bleeding and raw nipple. It is yet another walk around the same lonely park.
It is the decision to keep forgiving the same fight. To watch the waves rise between you but wait out the storm. To feel the walls of the world you’ve built together tremble but hold firm. It keeps your head above water, your hands warm, your cheeks wet with the mess of it all. On and on and on it goes, pushing you into another day.
Subscribe to Marisa’s substack Writing About Women
Wild Hope: retracing my mother’s footsteps in search of women’s freedom, by Marisa Bate, is out now
Leslie Jamison
In my memoir Splinters, there's a scene where I describe a moment in my marriage - an ordinary moment, the kind that every marriage witnesses over and over again - after I'd returned from taking my daughter to the botanic gardens, and I could see my husband was in a bad mood, and I stopped myself from asking why he'd had a bad day: I thought I already knew the answers. Which is maybe how love dies - thinking you already know the answers. One thing I've learned about love - through that day, and the days before, all the days that have followed - is that it's important to let another person surprise you, to keep asking questions and believing that you don't already know how they'll respond. To keep giving them room to tell you something they've never told you before. To hear the beginning of a familiar argument - or back and forth - and give it room to go somewhere different. Not to give up on that possibility.
Splinters: A Memoir by Leslie Jamison is out on 22nd February
Sheena Patel
I could write about how I am lonely and I buy myself flowers and candles to bring some romance into my life but I won’t. Instead I want to write about this. Every Saturday or every other Saturday which is not nearly enough, I attend a protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Beamed through my phone, I witness acts of defiant love from the Palestinian people, they post the love of their sunsets, of their cats and homes, for each other. I watched a boy sell red roses to people in one of the camps, a man says, red roses in a war. I watch them carry one another bleeding from the head, the chest, their skeletons exposed to the air. They have to do the most unimaginable things like amputate each other’s limbs with no anaesthetic as if we’re in a medieval time, paramedics driving ambulances towards explosions, the minarets when they were still standing, crying into the night: there is no one but god, to reassure one another. I watch them dig under the rubble searching furiously for signs of life when they themselves are hungry and cold. A girl carried into the light asks someone if she is dead. She is covered in ash. Almost skipping over the rubble as she is lifted away, a man replies, no habibti you are beautiful like the moon.
The easiest thing is to love people who are the same as you, borne of you, who you have chosen. What love really is, is when it is extended to someone who is apparently, not like you at all, where your child’s life means the same to me, as if it were mine. This is love’s true face.
I’m A Fan, by Sheena Patel, is out now
Amy Key
I once had a boss who told me I should be able to look at everyone in the team I managed and mentally line them up from 1 to 10 in order of their performance. It was hard not to visualise a firing squad. Sometimes in a moment of deep procrastination I will click the button that says, ‘Yes I will give some feedback’ and the screen will ask me to arrange statements I have no strong feelings about in order of preference. Is it more important to me that the meal was freshly prepared or that the meal was prepared using fresh ingredients? It feels like a trap! The psychometric tests, the books of the year lists, Spotify’s Unwrapped. When things that are important to me are repackaged and presented to me as data, I no longer recognise them.
Yet love – what we love and who we love – is something we are constantly asked to place in a hierarchy. The idea that my hierarchy might not match with another’s made me feel lacking, unloved. But in my gut, I believe that hierarchy is at odds with love, in all its forms. We are conditioned to desire being number one in someone’s affections, and with romantic love, we are conditioned to pursue ‘the one’ – a sun that everything and everyone can revolve around. If we aren’t ‘the one’ for someone else, we are assumed to have a vacant spot at the top of our love lists, we’re out of balance, our orbits askew. When I feel insecure or anxious about where I’m placed in someone I love’s hierarchy, I have to come back to my gut, which tells me I need to reject this notion of hierarchy altogether. What is far more important is that the love you receive and share truly resembles love. That you know, and are prepared to communicate, what you need to feel loved.
Subscribe to Amy’s substack So Glad I’m Me
Lotte Jeffs
My daughter is five and a half. She falls in love often and expresses her feelings with absolute passion and fervour. She becomes completely consumed, obsessed - it’s all she can think about, all she can talk about. And then as quickly as this love took hold of her, it dissipates and all within a matter of days, or at most a week or two.
Real people aren’t the focus of her adoration yet, instead she channels all this heady excitement, and overwhelming desire on to a litany of fictional TV characters (Vida the Vet, Ada Twist Scientist, Doc Mc Stuffins), Polly Pockets, Tamagotchi, Beanie Boos, and most recently a strawberry-scented lip balm palette in the shape of a ballerina cat.
When she gets something new that ticks all her boxes - small, cute, collectable - her eyes sparkle, she smiles and I can tell she’s deciding that she will bestow her love upon it. Nothing makes her happier than having a new obsession. I remember this feeling well. I remember being a young teenager and choosing to fancy someone in the year above, loving the idea of being in love with them. I remember lusting over bands, pop stars, celebrities. I remember how totally I gave myself to my first girlfriend. How the space between us was all that mattered. I think back to 2010 when I met my now wife Jenny and the electricity that tingled beneath my skin with that instant spark of connection. Then, the excitement of messaging and meeting up... The thought of Jenny lived in my mind the way my daughter keeps her lip balm on a special little cushion by her bed - so precious. I remember when we first started dating the comfort and deep, deep happiness of knowing I’d be seeing her later. And I recognise it when I pick my daughter up from school and she’s in the throes of a new romance, she can’t wait to get home to be reunited with her love.
I get it, I really do. I try to support her in these feelings, even when it gets ridiculous - she can’t decide whether or not to take the thing to school with her and risk losing it, or leave it in her room and risk missing it for example, and she ends up having a complete emotional meltdown.
But I’ve learnt that this love is real for her. Sure it’s an infatuation, it passes, it’s not the same as Big Love, the kind that lasts, that forgives, that overcomes. But it matters still.
My daughter has reminded me of how joyful it can be to love actively and passionately. I’m just looking forward to her growing up and realising that it’s even better to be loved in return, as right now, not even her heart-shaped Polly Pocket can do that.
This Love, by Lotte Jeffs is published by Dialogue Books and is out now
Farrah Storr
I've come to realise after 12 years of marriage that the relationship you had at 25 will not be the same one you have at 45. People change, relationships change. Pain and frustration doesn’t happen because of that; it happens when we try to keep people the same. Expecting your partner to have the same desires and ambitions and even, perhaps, the same propensity for affection, they did when you first met is like expecting a child to never grow up. But the joy is in the growing up. It's in watching them change - and allowing it to happen.
Subscribe to Farrah’s substack Things Worth Knowing with Farrah Storr
Agnes Davidson
In April last year I had my first baby, a chubby little girl called Fern. Due to some rare complications just before she was born she lost a lot of blood. Although the doctors did everything they could, the damage to her organs was too much. After spending just 2 days with her in hospital, we had to take off her life support machines and let her pass away.
Leaving the hospital and every day since, it has felt impossible to live without her. But the truth is the biggest thing she taught me is the importance of love. When she was in hospital we had to leave all her physical care to the doctors; watching other people care for her from the sidelines was so difficult. However, I quickly realised that as her parents the best thing we could do was love her, both in life and after she died.
Since her birth I've tried to remember that lesson, and live my life showing everyone love. This is easier said than done sometimes! But above all what I've learnt is that when the end comes love is truly all we have. So don't forget to give it — don’t forget to show it.
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Things I love this week
The work of these writers
I asked the writers above to share their lessons in love because the work they put out into the world has been in some way a source of joy or love for me. Their words and work are precious. If you enjoyed these stories, please support them by subscribing to their newsletters or buying their books so that they can continue to tell stories that we all get to enjoy.
I recently did a book club with ‘It’s HardBack Out Here’ a community that some twentysomething friends set up to feel a sense of community. I was so moved by the way they’ve sought out connection together and created something really special. I know some book publishers follow this email - if you want to find books a twentysomething audience I would really recommend working with them. (They sold 80 tickets in 24 hours!)
And finally…
Agnes (who shared the story about her daughter above) wrote to me after reading Conversations on Love. I wanted to dedicate this week’s newsletter to Fern, and to Agnes.
Thank you all for being here, despite the inconsistent journey. Happy Valentine’s Day. xxx
If you enjoy this newsletter, you might also enjoy my book Conversations on Love, which is out now in paperback.
My heart literally filled up with love as I read each and every author’s account!! Thank you so much for taking the effort to put this together and sharing this!!
To Fern and To Agnes ❤️
Loved reading every single one of these, as I did with CoL in general. Such a special book that fills me up every time I dip into it.