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The longing for a destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
If the chances behind an event are enormously remote, yet it occurs nevertheless, may one not be forgiven for invoking a fatalistic explanation?
From within love, we conceal the haphazard nature of our lives behind a purposive veil.
My mistake was to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a given person.
Do we not fall in love partly out of a momentary will to suspend seeing through people, even at the cost of blinding ourselves a little in the process?
If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone?
that I had decided to find perfection in everything she could utter.
What is so frightening is the extent to which we may idealize others when we have such trouble tolerating ourselves—because we have such trouble.
I knew the void that romantic intoxication could fill, I knew the exhilaration that comes from identifying someone, anyone, as admirable.
Love reinvents our needs with unique speed.
To speak of love after we had barely spent a morning together was to encounter charges of romantic delusion and semantic folly.
we can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite whom we have fallen in love with. The initial convulsion is necessarily founded on ignorance.
Desire had turned me into a relentless hunter for clues, a romantic paranoiac, reading meaning into everything.
The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once (we soon feel ungrateful) or those who never allow us to kiss them (we soon forget them), but those who know how to carefully administer varied doses of hope and despair.
It is one of the ironies of love that it is easiest confidently to seduce those we are least attracted to.
A silence with an unattractive person implies they are the boring one. A silence with an attractive one immediately renders it certain you are the tedious party.
We charm by coincidence rather than design.
Few things are as antithetical to sex as thought. Sex is instinctive, unreflective, and spontaneous, while thought is careful, uninvolved, and judgmental. To think during sex is to violate a fundamental law of intercourse.
I felt a disproportion between my daytime and nighttime knowledge of Chloe, between the intimacy that contact with her body implied and the largely unknown realms of the rest of her life. But the presence of such thoughts, flowing in conjunction with our physical breathlessness, seemed to run rudely counter to the laws of desire.
Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the opposite: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as “mushy.”
22. A long, gloomy tradition in Western thought argues that love is in its essence an unreciprocated, Marxist emotion and that desire can only thrive on the impossibility of mutuality. According to this view, love is simply a direction, not a place, and burns itself out with the attainment of its goal, the possession (in bed or otherwise) of the loved one.
Long before we’ve had a chance to become truly familiar with our loved one, we may be filled with the curious sense that we know them already.
Therefore, in the mature account of love, we should never fall at first glance. We should reserve our leap until we have completed a clear-eyed investigation of the depths and nature of the waters. Only after they have undertaken a thorough exchange of opinions on parenting, politics, art, science, and appropriate snacks for the kitchen should two people ever decide they are ready to love each other.
Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is gazing out of the window—a perfect love story interrupted only when the beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation about the excessive price of the onboard sandwiches with a neighbor or blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.
Mill ventured: The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. . . . The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized society against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.1
It may be a sign that two people have stopped loving one another (or at least stopped wishing to make the effort that constitutes 90 percent of love) when they are no longer able to spin differences into jokes.
The language of the eye stubbornly resists translation into the language of words.
Stendhal. “Beauty is the promise of happiness,”
There is a tyranny about perfection, a certain tedium even, something that asserts itself with all the dogmatism of a scientific formula.
alerted me to how far I might have been sliding into romantic pathology.
ove reveals its insanity by its refusal to acknowledge the inherent normality of the loved one.
Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess.
Doubt is easy when it is not a matter of survival: we are as skeptical as we can afford to be, and it is easiest to be skeptical about things that do not fundamentally sustain us. It is easy to doubt the existence of a table; it is hell to doubt the legitimacy of love.
They should prefer the risk of being wrong and in love to being in doubt and without love.
Medical history tells us of the case of a man living under the peculiar delusion that he was a fried egg. Quite how or when this idea had entered his head, no one knew, but he now refused to sit down anywhere for fear that he would “break himself ” and “spill the yolk.” His doctors tried sedatives and other drugs to appease his fears, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, one of them made the effort to enter the mind of the deluded patient and suggested that he should carry a piece of toast with him at all times, that he could place on any chair upon which he wished to sit, and thereby protect
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Delusions are not harmful in themselves; they only hurt when one is alone in believing in them, when one cannot create an environment in which they can be sustained.
We grew assured of ourselves in the other’s mind, rendering perpetual seduction (stemming from a fear of the opposite) obsolete.
Whatever the pleasures of discovering mutual loves, nothing compares with the intimacy of landing on mutual hates.
Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing; that we cannot properly speak until there is someone there who can understand what we are saying; that, in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
To love someone is to take a deep interest in them, and by such concern, to bring them to a richer sense of what they are doing and saying.
It takes the intimacy of a lover to point out facets of character that others simply don’t bother with.
Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
Most people do not openly force us into roles, they merely suggest that we adopt them through their reactions to us, and hence surreptitiously prevent us from moving beyond whatever mold they have assigned us.
Overcoming childhood could be understood as an attempt to correct the false stories of others.
Most people get us wrong, either out of neglect or prejudice.
being loved implies a gross bias—a pleasant distortion, but a dis...
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We long for a love in which we are never reduced or misunderstood.
we had been given enough room to expand in the ways our complexities demanded.
The stories we tell are always too simple.
in resolving our need to love, we do not always succeed in resolving our need to long.
