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Lena Dunham on sex, love and the joys of self-care

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Lena Dunham on sex, love and the joys of self-careCosmopolitan UK

It’s a cold winter morning when Lena Dunham arrives on set in silk pyjamas. Her face is bare apart from a shiny gold septum piercing and a warm, infectious smile. Arms thrown open wide, she greets each and every one of us, before professing her love for all things Cosmopolitan. She has a modest entourage – just two managers and her Mexican hairless pug, Ingrid, who dashes off to explore.

As she flicks excitedly through the clothes our fashion team has assembled, the confidence of someone who is at home in her body radiates across the room. But it was not always that way. Just two years ago, she was at war with it, checking herself into rehab for an addiction to prescription drugs while recovering from a hysterectomy (to relieve the symptoms of endometriosis), and dealing with fibromyalgia, a chronic condition causing pain and fatigue, as well as connective-tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. When the latter flares up, she uses a walking stick. She was also heartbroken, after her five-and-a-half-year relationship with Bleachers frontman Jack Antonoff fell apart in full view of the world’s media. He got their home in Brooklyn, she got custody of their two poodles Susan and Karen.

"It got really complicated," she says, as we sprawl on either side of a huge king-sized bed in the master bedroom of our shoot location in South London.

"I realised I wasn’t just taking medication for physical pain, I was taking medication for the emotional pain too. And then suddenly, especially this stuff, the benzos [benzodiazepines, a common type of anxiety medication], it changes your brain chemistry and suddenly you’re not yourself. You’re not present. You’re not functional. One day, I looked around and I was lying in a bed in my parents’ apartment under two blankets, in the same pyjamas I’d been in for three days, and I was like, ‘This isn’t me.’ It wasn’t that I was suicidal. I felt nothing. I didn’t want to live."

That darkness, and sense of hopelessness, is hard to imagine. The woman in front of me is a 33-year-old powerhouse, peaceful and content in herself and yet wide-eyed and energetic about everything from the salt beef at lunch to the crimson dress she reaches for instinctively on the rail. I put it to her that even one of those life events - a chronic illness, a relationship breakdown, a serious operation, addiction - would have been enough to floor most people. Why not her?

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"Work has always been my medicine," she says, suddenly serious. She spent 28 days in rehab, but once she was out, she threw herself into project after project - making an appearance in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, launching a new feminist podcast, The C-Word, and directing and executive-producing HBO and BBC finance drama Industry (for which she relocated to rural Wales). A 10-part high-school series she’s exec-producing, Generation, has been commissioned by HBO Max, and this spring she starts filming her first major movie, with a second in the pipeline. It sounds like a lot, but unlike the hamster wheel of her twenties, this time everything was passed through a self-care filter.

"Now I tell my staff, my manager, the people I work with, ‘I’m not going to take any calls today because I’m not feeling well.’ I’ve learned to really protect myself."

That hamster wheel included, of course, Girls – the seminal show about four friends living and loving in New York, which first aired on HBO in 2012. Dunham was just 25 when she created, co-directed and starred in the first series, winning two Golden Globes plus a legion of fans across the world.

Of that time, Dunham says that "my entire twenties was me jeopardising my health. I remember [during] the first season of Girls I would go out with guys and stay out until four in the morning, and then show up at work at 9am and slay it, but it was like, ‘What if I had a full night’s sleep and I didn’t feel the need to go out to the bar with every Tom, Dick and Harry who asked me because I was afraid I was unlovable?’ That’s one of the reasons medication was so easy and breezy for me, because I thought, ‘Oh, there’s a pill I can take?’

"So the thing is, now my nights out are sober, it’s such an amazing feeling to stay out until 2am and wake up the next morning clear-headed and joyous and know that if I’m really tired, or if I’m in a lot of pain, it’s because my illness is flaring up and I can pay attention to it. Self-care can mean getting under a duvet, but there’s a difference between giving yourself love and isolating yourself from the world. Now if I spend my day under a duvet it’s either because I’m having a bad illness flare or, as you would say here, I’m having a nice lie-in. I’m not shutting the world out.”

It’s not just her work-life that she’s shifted her emotional perspective on. Love, dating and sex are all different in the clearer light of her early thirties. Lena is now back on good terms with Antonoff, with the pair having worked hard at salvaging a friendship. Dunham attributes the split to their age when they got together.

"We fell in love when I was really young," she says. "I was 25. I look back and we had a great ride, we cared for each other, but you know what? We were both starting our careers and that was our true passion. The love you have for someone doesn’t disappear because you don’t have them; it’s just logistically it doesn’t work any more. I love him so much. He is a dear, dear friend of mine. Has it been easy every second? No, it’s not easy to divide life with someone. There are definitely moments where I was catty, rude or sassy, but he has been beautifully accepting of those and I’ve been able to be accepting of his anger too. What’s really nice is we don’t try to pretend that we don’t have this history together, but we’re also willing to move forward."

But two years ago, she was grappling with the stages of heartbreak that anyone who has been through it will recognise – devastation, anger, self-doubt, humiliation and rebound romances. Attempting to date away her pain, she moved from one short-lived relationship to the next, even briefly getting engaged to one boyfriend who proposed with the lace of a Timberland boot while they were snowed in at her parent’s apartment. Until one day she realised what she was actually looking for was the love she had lost for herself.

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"I’d just had a hysterectomy, I’d broken up with my boyfriend, I was in the process of breaking up with my business partner – I had no business buying a pair of shoes, [let alone] getting engaged. Then I just went, ‘You know what? I’ve been dating since I was 15 years old. I’m allowed to take a break. Sobriety for me means so much more than just not doing drugs, it also means that I abstain from negative relationships. It means I’ve taken a hiatus from dating, which has been amazing for me.

"I think it’s been 14 months now that I’ve just been totally single. I may have smooched a guy at a party once, but that’s not illegal. I hang out with my dogs, my cats. It’s created a lot of clarity because I think [for] so many of us, even though the world has become much more sex-positive, as young, ambitious, independent women our relationship to sex is fraught and complicated. On the one hand, we’re taught to demand what we want; on the other hand we’re scared we’ll never find anyone and have to settle.

"We’re contending with the prevalence of porn and having to be performative during sex, and once my body started to break down I just didn’t have that option any more and I started to feel really vulnerable. I realised that until I was in a dynamic with someone who made me feel super-safe, I didn’t want to do it. People right now will go, ‘Oh my god, you haven’t had sex in over a year,’ and I’m like, ‘No, actually it’s been the most healing thing.'"

Dunham’s reclaiming of her own body would – you assume – not be necessary. From the outside at least, she has been a body- and sex-positive icon since she first graced our TV screens eight years ago. But her body – like so many others that, according to some, don’t fit the mould of what is considered "obviously" beautiful – has at times become a battleground that people fight her on again and again.

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In an episode of Dunham’s Women Of The Hour podcast series, she detailed the range of insults she has been subjected to on social media – including “warthog”, “cooked pig”, “toe” and “fat ugly bitch”, as well as countless death threats. But the most hurtful moment for Dunham came after she landed her first cover of Vogue, the February 2014 issue.

"I was on a trip to England and I remember my Vogue cover had come out and [US website] Jezebel put out a $10,000 bounty for anyone who could get unretouched images. And people sent them in, and they were comparing the retouched and unretouched images. I remember thinking, ‘You want to basically prove this image of me that I’m so proud of isn’t real?’

"It’s interesting how numb you become to it. I remember when I was 22 looking in the mirror and thinking,‘I’m just gorgeous! Look at me! What a babe!’ And then my career happened, life happened, and instead of growing as it should, that feeling dwindled and I started to look in the mirror and see my pain on the inside rather than beauty on the outside.

"It’s funny, I’m probably the heaviest now that I’ve ever been in my entire life, and I’ve been through so much physically, but I look more like when I was 22 than at any other point because I can feel the peace inside me. Sometimes I’ll even find – and you’re not allowed to say this as a woman – that I’ll be sitting there staring in the mirror for two minutes because I like the way I look.I look at myself and think, 'Woah, I just got lost looking into my own eyes.'"

It is from that place of self-acceptance, and self-love that Dunham is now contemplating her next move, be it romantic, maternal or anything in between."If someone came up to me and they were sweet and asked me to dinner at a pub, or whatever you people do in England, I’d be like,‘Yeah, totally.’ Or if they brought Celebrity Love Island back, I would be so tempted. But, for me, the freeing thing about my hysterectomy is that I know that I’m going to become a mother in a non-traditional way, whether it’s through eggs that I’ve frozen or through adoption, and so I’m not stuck in that race.

"I don’t care if I’m in a relationship. Here’s the thing: if I meet someone who I think would be great to raise children with, that’s wonderful, but I’ve compromised on too many things in my life. I’m not going to compromise on that. The last two years have been the best time of my life. I feel like it’s pretty damn hard for someone to knock me down."

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