A conversation on love with Cheryl Strayed (part two)
What keeps love alive? And what gets in its way?
If you missed the first part of my conversation with Cheryl Strayed you can read it here.
Here is part two …
Photo by Holly Andres
How can you tell the difference between a tough patch in a relationship, and a relationship that’s not working? I haven’t been through a really difficult patch in my marriage yet, but when things get tough, I don’t ever have a voice inside that contemplates leaving. It’s like, this is tough, I’m pissed off about x, how do we fix it? How can get close again? I haven’t been on the other side, so I’m interested to know if that’s the difference – that the doubt exists? How have tough points in your current marriage felt different to your first one?
Exactly what you said. There's this baseline feeling of, we're together and I want to be together, even when things are hard or my husband pisses me off or there’s a pattern that repeats itself. In every long-term relationship you fight about the same thing for decades. At a certain point, you're so mad you think, this is never going to change. But it never equals ‘I want this to end’.
What was confusing about my first relationship is I did love them. And yet, I had this core feeling that I wanted to leave. Those feelings were there right alongside each other: I love my husband, and I don't want to be in this relationship anymore. It was a thing that lived inside of me. Finally, I decided I couldn't ignore that voice anymore. I recognised it for what it was: my true voice, my core voice, saying, This is what I want. So when people ask my advice about it, I say it’s about learning how to trust that core voice within you. For most of us, sadly, that’s not something we can do very quickly or easily. Often we have to hear it for years before we answer it. But as I've gotten older, the time between hearing that voice and obeying it has shortened. It can be so hard to listen to it, because so many of us are raised in cultures, families, communities and religions where the whole point is to say, don't trust yourself, do this because it’s what you're supposed to do. And of course, as Sugar what I say is the opposite: trust that voice. Because you will be miserable if you don't.
In my second marriage I don't have that feeling. I just have the feeling, ‘I love you and we're in this together, even when times are tough.’ There’s always that essential feeling inside me of, I want to be here.
It's useful to speak about this because, on the flip side, I've been in relationships with people who I’m pretty sure loved me but didn't want to be in a relationship with me. In those cases love allows you to justify the relationship even if deep down you sense the other person doesn’t really want to be in it. I could say to friends, I know this is terrible but I also know he loves me. So I think it’s useful for us to say here that just because someone loves you, or you love them, that doesn’t mean a relationship is working. Love isn’t enough.
It isn't. It's freeing in a way - if the other person doesn't want to be with you - to say, there's nothing I can do to make them want to be in this relationship.
Somebody can be funny and sexy and kind and a great friend, but if you don't have that feeling of really wanting to be in partnership with them in that long, daily way that long-term monogamy requires… it's either there or it's not. People torture themselves for a long time trying to make themselves feel a way that they don't.
I requested to use this quote of yours in my book: “The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.” What is that risk for you?
This circles back to what I was saying earlier about the ways that mothering has been humbling. Because you have to let go of the received narratives or stories you've told yourself about the way it's going to feel, or the way that life will unfold. You constantly have to stay open to seeing and accepting the story as it is, rather than as you would have written it.
To stay awake in a romantic partnership is to be brave enough to reveal your evolving self, and also brave enough to continue to love and want to know your partner's evolving self. That's a vulnerable thing. I think we've all had that feeling in love - I know I certainly have with my husband - where in a happy moment you just want to say, let's never change this. We're safe here, inside the constant truth of our endless love. But we don't get to do that. That's not what life is. Life is a continuous and great unfolding — and so is love. Whether it be the love we have for our children or our parents or our dead parents or our partners. It's about saying, I'm going to risk growing and I'm going to risk letting you grow. Of course, the scary thing is that as we evolve and grow, maybe someday our partner won't be our person anymore, or we won't be their person, no matter what we said or promised years before. It could go in a different direction someday - and that's scary as hell. The safer thing is not believing things will never change, it’s saying, I trust that if I am willing to take those risks and look hard at the intimacy and love I have, that's the best way to keep what we deeply value.
How long have you been with your partner?
Eight and a half years… so not long really!
My husband and I have been together maybe 28 years? One of the most exciting things about loving somebody and being loved by them for such a long time is that now that we've travelled these 28 years together, I see we do change over time. There were times we were happier in one way, then in a different way. There were times that we've had to be practical partners raising kids, and other times where we said, ‘We've got to spark that romance again’. Not in the old way we used to, but in a new way. That's a beautiful and exciting thing about the risk I'm talking about: you're risking staying awake to what unfolds.
What is the most challenging thing about a long-term relationship?
I can only speak to my relationship, but keeping the energy we have alive - whether it be romantic or sexual - is challenging for a lot of people who love each other over many years. Even when we use that terminology - the spark - that's the beginning of a fire. It's what happens at the beginning of a relationship. And if you are going to be in long-term monogamy, sometimes for decades, the fire doesn't just keep burning based on that first spark; you have to find new ways to make it. And I'm not just talking about sex. I'm also talking about the kind of attention you give each other in a relationship when it's new and shiny and exciting.
One of the things that's beautiful about falling in love is that era where you stay up all night talking,because you want to hear everything about them, what they think and what their childhood was like. Of course, you can't do that every night of a 28-year relationship. But to have some quality of that continue is essential, and also challenging, because it does demand you pay attention to something that that has maybe shifted into automatic pilot drive.
Is part of that just having the conversation, acknowledging when attention has waned? I feel that I think. For example, in the period where my husband and I were often holding our baby up through the night, not as physically connected as we used to be, just saying out loud ‘I miss having sex, I miss these parts of our old relationship’ felt like a form of intimacy. It doesn’t replace what’s lost, but it feels like shouting across a bridge and saying, let’s wait for each other on the other side. It just took the threat out of the fact that we hadn’t had sex somehow.
That's a beautiful example of, honestly, the kind of love I have with my husband too. Where you say, ‘Right now we’re in this era of our relationship, and it doesn't mean that sex or romance is gone, it's just not what [we're] able to do right now.’ You replace it with some other kind of love, like being kind to each other. Saying, ‘No, you go take a nap, I'll do the dishes’ or whatever it is. Those ways you express tenderness and love for your partner, they replace and stand in for the other things that maybe made your relationship exciting or strong before. And that has to keep happening, because you can drown in the practical.
Like I said, during the pandemic my husband and I had demands on us as parents. Every day we would go on walks and talk, and we’d just talk about the kids. Then we decided, ‘Hey, this isn't good for us. Let's have some walks where we just talk to each other and say, what are you feeling? What are you excited about? What's going on in your work life? It’s about paying attention, not just to the life, but the partnership and the bond that you share. It’s about feeding it while you feed all the other stuff. I think paying attention is the highest form of love. Asking, what do you think? What do you feel? What are you curious about? Those things are what keeps love alive.
I wanted to talk to you about friendship, because it is such an important form of love to me, but truthfully, it is the thing that can slip. If I get really honest about my life, I feel I can either pour time into my writing or my friendships – and one of those always gets neglected. Because my family and my partner can’t be separated from my life, they’re just there every day. But the friendship and writing are things I love deeply, that I get to choose to prioritise more consciously, and I feel like in this moment I don’t have enough time to devote to both. But I wonder, you seem to have both those things and a family and a partner! Do you ever feel like one slips? And how do you figure out where your heart is in all of that?
It's really, really hard. Honestly, everything you're saying I identify with so deeply, because I’ve always been somebody who has had a lot of really wonderful friends. I think the internet only made that more true, because it's easier to stay connected to people who might otherwise have been lost into your past. So I'm connected to lots of people I genuinely love and treasure as friends. And yet it's true, it’s so hard to find time to nurture those friendships when I'm also mothering, having this busy career, in a marriage, trying to keep the family and the house and the dogs and the cats and everything running. I've really grappled with this, because I feel like a failure a lot.
I was at a party yesterday talking to my friend, Sarah, who I love. I said, ‘I don't see you enough and I feel terrible about it. I hope you know if you ever really need me, I'm right here.’ And she said, ‘I know, I'm the same.’
Part of being a friend is trusting in that love, even when you can't always spend a lot of time together, or when you forget to text somebody back. To just say, ‘I give you the benefit of the doubt. I'm here for you, if and when you need me’. I think the special love of friends is that you can assume goodwill between you, even if you have long times of silence or absence.
Also, there will be another era of our lives. There will be a time when my kids are out of the house, in the not too distant future, and I might have more time to pick up those friendships that I haven't lost, but maybe haven't nurtured as much, and then nurture them more.
I think there's this fantasy of a balanced life. And for me, life in balance, if I lived this perfect, unattainable life, would be more time with friends. But I also know that that that's not realistic right now. And so, part of finding balance with myself is accepting that. Knowing that friends are important to me and I am going to give what I can when I can. And that's got to be good enough.
And with your friends, you've done enough to keep those relationships going in this particular moment.
That’s right. It’s about keeping the thread connected. It can be a text saying ‘Happy birthday’, or ‘I'm thinking of you’. My friend Rachel does what she calls ‘drive by phone calls’ - every once in a while she’ll call and say, ‘I'm driving on my way here and just wanted to say hi, how are you?’ It can be months between those calls. But when they happen, we instantly reconnect, it feeds our friendship, and then onwards we go on. We might not talk for months, but I love her, and I know she loves me.
I think sprinkling water wherever you can over those bonds helps them to keep growing.
I read that you felt very connected alone on the PCT, and less lonely than you had been with people. Why do you think you had to be alone to find connection again?
In the months and years leading up to my hike I was disconnected from myself. I was in my grief, not wanting to accept my mom was dead, not knowing how to live with that level of pain. I made it worse by trying to cure that pain with self-destructive stuff – drugs, promiscuous sex - that was not good for me. Then I had to break my own heart by leaving my first marriage and somebody I loved. Even though that was what I needed to do, it still hurt me. All of that meant I had become almost estranged from my inner sense of myself as a good person in the world, connected to other good people. And that long, solitary walk brought me back to that.
Sometimes people can easily frame that hike in this false way: I start off a bad person, then the hike enlightens me and I become a good person. In fact, I was a person lost from myself at the beginning, then I took that hike and found myself. That strength, or that courage, or that sense of purpose that I found inside myself on that walk — it was already there. It wasn't something outside of me that I had to walk toward. It was something inside me, that I could only see once I got alone and realised what it meant to feel connected and part of the world. And you can't feel part of the world if you don't feel at home within yourself.
What do you wish you’d known about love?
That love is a limitless, abundant thing. There's no such thing as a scarcity of love — there's so much to go around. You can love so many people in so many different ways and none of that love ever depletes another love. Actually, living your life as if all the most important things are abundant, rather than scarce, is a serious and profound mental shift. If you can embrace abundance in as many ways as possible, you'll be happier for it.
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Things I love this week
Subscribe to Cheryl’s Dear Sugar substack to read more of her wisdom. Or buy a friend Tiny Beautiful Things for Valentine’s Day!
*Being honest about the messy sides of love
I’m THRILLED to be interviewing my friend Charlotte Fox Weber about the joys and complexities of friendship at Daunt Books in Hampstead on 8th February. Charlotte has so many wise, generous things to say on this topic (and also prioritises it so well in her own life). And we are going to go deep! You can buy tickets here.
Friend of the newsletter Nicola Slawson wrote this wonderful piece about deciding to have a baby with her gay best friend. It’s a beautiful reminder of the possibilities that open up when we decide to write our own love stories.
And remembering I was a kid once, too.
Your words cut through me /I want to improve me, be someone you can recognize
Look closer, look closer / Look closer, see what is really here /A sunlit morning, a quiet room / And thirty-four years
Here’s to looking closer this week.
Thank you for being here.
With love,
Natasha xxx
If you enjoy this newsletter, you might also enjoy my book Conversations on Love, which is out now in paperback.
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Please forgive any typos. I’m trying to write this in the way that I can in this moment, imperfectly, but with my whole heart!
I loved this. Thank you. Especially the reminder to trust the core voice within you, and that paying attention is the highest form of love. ❤️
Loved this. Especially the question about acknowledging what’s missing/what you miss about earlier incarnations of a relationship. So easy to focus on what’s not there, and not what else you might have replaced it with, as the relationship has deepened. Xx