Conversations on Love: with Philippa Perry, Dolly Alderton, Roxane Gay, Stephen Grosz, Esther Perel, and many more

But if what you are really saying in an argument is ‘Do it my way’ and ‘No, do it my way’, then it can damage a relationship in the long term.

this is how you try to bear the burden of the mystery with grace: by finding humility where you once saw self-pity, and opportunity where you once saw absence. By saying, ‘Even if I don’t get what I want, I have a good life,’

‘love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.’ She’s right – we achieve love by overcoming our narcissism.

Alain convinced me that searching for love from a place of fear was not a good beginning to any love story. It meant motivations were often selfish – to avoid loneliness; to outsource happiness – and would lead in the wrong direction. As the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck wrote, ‘If being loved is your goal, you will fail to achieve it.’

Solitude, by contrast, is a state of peaceful aloneness … it is an opportunity for self-reflection and a chance to connect to ourselves without distraction or disturbance.’

yourself and each other; and it takes effort and a

And that things would work out or they wouldn’t, and even then, that would be fine too. This black and white model of ‘it’s got to be like this and then it will be perfect’ just doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter who you meet or when you meet them; there’s pain and joy on each side of the ledger. So don’t stick rigidly to one story about what your lif

Every relationship – not just

I wondered if the ugliest shade of unhappiness comes, not directly from what you lack, but from