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

What do you wish you’d known about love? What would I say to my younger self? Keep your feet well planted. You know it’s not just about who you find, it’s also who you’re going to be. Love is not a state of enthusiasm. It’s a verb. It implies action, demonstration, ritual, practices, communication, expression.

There are plenty of moments when we are in solitude, connected to nature or purpose or meaning, and we don’t feel lonely. There are also plenty when we are with other people and are what Vivek calls ‘emotionally alone’, as I had felt in former relationships.

Susan pointed out a useful contradiction in love: if you lose a sense of yourself as an individual it can damage a relationship, but if you can’t accept that your needs and wants are not the only story, then it will be difficult to understand your partner’s perspective.

falling in love is letting another person have an impact on you. You’re not rigid and unchanging, she told me, you’re altered by each other, ‘like two stones rubbing together until suddenly they fit’. The important distinction? When you want to change to keep a partner interested, that’s ‘adaption’, which is bad because you’re bending your identity

Every relationship – not just

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.’

What advice would you give someone who hasn’t met a partner when they hoped to, and is feeling exhausted by trying to find love? When you’re in the throes of obsession, there’s a possibility that opens up every second you give up. And it’s not giving up on ever finding a partner, or having a baby, or whatever it is that you want. It’s giving up on

Do you think that our lives being more visible on social media has aggravated the problem of competition in friendship? It must do, because the anonymizing makes it less real. A physical encounter with somebody can smash through projections, because you realize that a person is actually generous, or thoughtful. Or you discover they have their own f

intimate ones – is an unconscious negotiation around that balance between ‘I’ and ‘we’. Sometimes both or one of you needs to say ‘I’. But if you’re only ever saying ‘I’, then you don’t have a relationship.

What do you wish you’d known about finding love?