Letter #7 Exploring relationships beyond possession, and the radical trust in letting each other be

Reflections, questions and some thoughts I have given coherence to recently

Jul 11, 2025

This letter is part of a project to document the unfolding of a friendship online, together with

. The letters are self-contained, and are full of good recommendations, thoughts and feelings. If you have missed my first letter to Alice, you can read it here.

Letter #7 11 July 2025

Dearest Alice,

How lovely it was to spend 24 hours together recently. Thank you for visiting my book club and for braving the early commuter trains to Coventry and back. I appreciated you making the effort and, as in our first meet-up, the timing felt perfect and I got so much out of our conversations. I have been thinking over the discussions we had and I have been penning this letter in my mind since.

First, let me say that I loved hearing about your trip to the folk film festival. I find your curiosity, open-mindedness, and willingness to take solo endeavours - even when the plot is largely unknown - compelling and inspiring! I have seen Watership Down; as a child I watched it many times. I can still remember the most chilling scenes and how it taught me about grief. As you know, I teach on two degree programmes on Childhood and Youth Studies, and one of the discussions I have with first years is about the use of media, literature, and the arts to evoke what might be considered ‘mature’ feelings in children. This film definitely was one of the entry points for me to sensorially connect with emotions I couldn’t process with adults. A key reason why I think art is transformative and why I shudder at the thought of AI creating it (but that’s another conversation).

Now, back to the conversations when we met. I suspect because I have experienced divorce, the breakdown of a committed relationship, I have emerged from that period of my life with a great curiosity about what love, desire, and any romantic commitment will mean for me in the future. Early on after the divorce, I invested time and energy in ‘unknowing’. I basically committed myself to a year where I let go of the things I felt were certain in my life. This included previously held ideas of love and romance. Interestingly, once I let go of fixed ideas, a space opened up for me spiritually, intellectually, and physically to see myself in ways that felt deeply authentic and kind. This was aided in part by a fruitful season of creativity, and being seen by others in ways I had not previously experienced, it was a season punctuated by a ‘gift’ as I came to call it. It gave me life and courage. In these months, I was truly blessed by the tender, sincere, and wise mentoring of my therapist, coach, and friends. The season was marked with moments of difficulty, as all seasons are, but turning towards the uneasy elements felt less intimidating. I am totally on this journey still, and I suspect I will be for some time to come. Our conversations in Coventry, along with a recent meet-up with a friend, reignited this line of thinking in me, particularly the question of what love looks like when understood as something expansive.

For me, expansive love is not limited to the romantic, which I now see as something capitalism - and the individualism it espouses - has morphed into something potentially crippling for anyone expecting their partner to fulfil all their needs.

Rilke and the Dance of Solitudes

Recently, I rewatched This Town, which pulled me into a beautiful vortex of poetic musings re: connection, human connection. Before watching This Town I had been thinking about the idea of mirroring in love and how in our romantic relationships (although I think this applies to friendships too) we can cultivate space to allow each other to grow into our fullest selves. I suspect much of what I have since begun to process, is complicated in the business of everyday life, especially when you consider work, children, financial pressures, the geographic unfolding of relationships, etc. Nevertheless, I have some formulated ideas I want to share with you.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s quote “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other” is the container that holds my current thinking. Unlike more romanticised notions of love that emphasise two becoming one or possession, Rilke’s idea suggests that true love arises not from merging into one identity, but from the recognition and preservation of each person’s inner world. Each of us has an essential aloneness, and the idea of “solitudes” speaks to that. These solitudes remain even in the closest of bonds, and rather than challenging these solitudes or seeing them as threatening, love, in Rilke’s view, honours them. Honouring another person in this way takes quite a lot of emotional maturity, I think. Mainly because it usurps the idea that love is about the other conforming to our expectations or filling our emotional and spiritual voids. Affirming the other’s existence and allowing space for each other’s growth - in a way that balances closeness without engulfment - is both a romantic and existential vision of love. It really does, I suspect, invite a deep trust that allowing for each other’s solitudes will not come with the threat of erasure, of the relationship, I mean.

Continuing on in these thoughts, I was also wondering (after having a conversation in book club a couple of months ago) about how approaching love in the way described above might be challenging. My conclusion is it becomes hard when we can only see the other person through the prism of ourselves. By this I mean interpreting the other person’s being only through the lens of the relationship. I have definitely done this is the past. Often when I have done this, it is because I was insecure in the relationship, was not entirely convinced of the other person’s love for me or I felt unseen. In hindsight, I think this my be a sign that something is off… maybe? In any case, how we respond to these feelings is probably what is important. I don’t want to rely on someone else’s view of me to feel whole. That is something I ought to do for myself.

To round off the longest letter I have written to you yet, I wanted to share a poem I wrote recently that draws all of these thoughts together :) (I will get back to sharing other inspirations I have had recently in my next letter - I do actually have loads of fun things to share!)