What does it mean to call someone the love of your life, when the phrase mostly gets said in the past tense? It sounds like a vow, yet people tend to reach for it in eulogies, in toasts after a divorce, in the closing minutes of a film. Margaret Qualley and Aaron Pierre have been promoting their new romantic drama, Love of Your Life, and in her sit-down with Extra's Mona Kosar Abdi, Qualley talked about exploring loss and what she called 'radical' love. She set those two subjects side by side, and the title weighs more once she does. A film that promises the one great romance turns out, by its star's account, to be tangled up with grief. The first answer to the question is the obvious one: the words name a person. The second takes longer to arrive. They also name a story you can only tell after the fact, once you know how things went.
Junket coverage does what junket coverage does. You get the chemistry question, the casting anecdote, a clip, a line about how special the set felt. Qualley's word choice slips past all of it. Calling love radical implies it runs against the way most of us arrange our lives, and the interview leaves open what exactly it runs against. Given how much of her conversation circled loss, the stronger reading is that the radical part is continuing to love once the person, or the version of them you fell for, is gone. Choosing one person absolutely is the easier, more poster-friendly reading, and the poster is where most of the conversation stops, letting the title do the thinking for everyone. The questions worth asking are practical ones about how love starts, how it lasts, and what becomes of it after loss.
Natasha Lunn's Conversations on Love asks those questions nearly word for word. Lunn is a journalist who, after years of feeling that love was always out of reach, set out to understand how relationships work and change over a lifetime. She talked with authors and experts and set their answers beside her own experience. Her three questions are plain to the point of bluntness: how do we find love, how do we sustain it, and how do we survive when we lose it? The last is the one a film called Love of Your Life appears to be circling, and the one most dating advice leaves for someone else to answer.
The book divides the problem among its guests. Dolly Alderton talks about vulnerability, the risky first step in finding anyone. Stephen Grosz takes on accepting change, a modest-sounding subject with real teeth, since plenty of relationships fray because one person kept loving a version of the other who no longer exists. Esther Perel addresses unrealistic expectations, and Lisa Taddeo speaks to the loneliness of loss, the same ground Qualley's interview kept returning to.
Lunn also stretches the definition of love well past couples. Candice Carty-Williams appears on friendship and Diana Evans on parenthood. Alain de Botton discusses the psychology of being alone, a topic that would get you politely steered away from the microphone at most weddings. Roxane Gay is there on redefining romance. Read together, these conversations build a steady case against the singular phrasing of the film's title. If friendship, children and solitude all belong to how a life holds love, then naming one person as the love of your life starts to look like an editing decision.
The format has costs. A collection of conversations with celebrated writers tends toward the quotable, each guest handing over a polished insight while nobody argues with anybody. The roster leans toward a recognizable literary and media circle, and if you want hard research, Emily Nagoski on the science of sex is the closest the book gets. The Sunday Times line on the cover, that the book 'might just change your life,' oversells it. An interview collection is a set of conversations, and its value sits in how far apart the answers land.
Lunn's own uncertainty holds those answers together. Her years of feeling shut out give the questions an edge of need, so the guests sound like people she went looking for, and the book never settles into a panel handing down verdicts.
So what does it mean to call someone the love of your life? Qualley's answer runs through loss, and the film will make its own case on screen. Lunn's book points toward a harder and kinder possibility: the words can cover more than one person, and sustaining love is a practice built over years. If the interview chatter has you turning that over, Conversations on Love is a good place to keep at it. Try a few of the conversations and argue with the ones that sound too tidy. The love of your life may turn out to be plural, and still only recognizable looking back.