I'm Natalie Lou and you're listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello hello.

How are you doing?

So last week, so that's May 2020 in case you happen to be listening in the future.

I briefly mentioned on my Instagram stories that I was absolutely loving the TV

adoption of the novel normal people by Irish novelist Sally Rooney. It is the story of the very complex relationship

between two teenagers who become friends, you might say, while at secondary school, and who then

go on to have a casual and secret relationship and then they end up at the same university and it basically tells the story of how they weave in and out of each other's lives.

And in the midst of the pain and turmoil that each of them are experiencing,

as well as the toll that the relationship takes on each of them, it's also interspersed with, you know,

their actual friendship and there's sometimes a level of tenderness there.

Anyway, I'm not giving away any massive plot lines here, but after I mentioned that I was loving watching the series, my inbox blew up.

and this went on for a few days actually where people were saying, I saw you mention

normal people a few days back and I just had to tell you where I was at with it and what it's

done I think is really pushed a lot of people's buttons around casual relationships, friends with benefits, secret

relationships, the nature of friendship when sex is involved and also like is it love is it not love and what I want to focus on today

because it was really at the heart of pretty much every conversation I had over

DM last week is what I actually think of casual relationships like why we run into problems with them.

I'm not actually going to get into normal people because honestly if you haven't read the book I highly recommend that you do or even if you're not going to read the book then yeah definitely watch the show it's on BBC I player here in England. I think it's Hulu in the US and I'm not sure how it's

airing in other countries but honestly look it up. Anyway over the last almost 15 years since I started baggage reclaim, I have seen an awful lot of people in pain over a casual relationship, whether it is secret or not and the reason is that as humans we do not like to be treated casually.

Nobody puts baby in the corner.

We do not like it.

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