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

patient to speak from the heart. The process has been described as one person speaking, two people listening – the psychoanalyst listens for the unheard, the disregarded, the ignored fact, thought or feeling. Understanding the ‘thing beneath notice’ helps.

Every relationship – not just

state where we feel that we deserved a different outcome. Although we cannot avoid the first pain, with gratitude

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.

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

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.

Viktor Frankl wrote on the topic. He says there are three sources of meaning: love (for humans and for experiences, like a sunset), purposeful work (what you’re trying to do in and for the world), and the courage you find in the face of difficulty. It’s not just about sitting around loving each other; the way you respond to unavoidable suffering is

two types of suffering: the pain we feel from experiencing loss and the pain we can inflict upon ourselves if we get stuck in a self-pitying