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apogee
she recognizes the process whereby he converts difficulty into numbness and self-disgust.
We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled or as ‘normal’, as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile and multiple – all of this our lover can understand and accept us for.
intonation.
exegesis
taciturn
We may struggle to know which period of our lives we are really in, with whom we are truly dealing and what sort of behaviour the person before us is rightfully owed. We can be a little tricky to be around.
When our minds are involved in transference, we lose the ability to give people and things the benefit of the doubt; we swiftly and anxiously move towards the worst conclusions that the past once mandated.
An ability not to care too much is a critical aspect of unruffled and successful pedagogy.
Love was the excitement of coming face to face with virtuous characteristics.
Melancholy isn’t, of course, a disorder that needs to be cured. It’s a species of intelligent grief which arises when we come face to face with the certainty that disappointment is written into the script from the start.
‘We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.’
We are so impressed by honesty that we forget the virtues of politeness; a desire not always to confront people we care about with the full, hurtful aspects of our nature.
Up to 70 per cent of patients seeking couples’ therapy will exhibit either the anxious or the avoidant mode of behaviour. Very frequently, couples will contain one avoidant partner and one anxious one, with each set of responses aggravating the other in a spiral of declining trust.
that love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.
Only at those rare moments when the stars are out and nothing further will be needed from us until dawn can we loosen our hold on our ego for the sake of a more honest and less parochial perspective.
