Being loved back by the person he loved to the point where he couldn’t cope anymore with the vulnerable reciprocity of giving and receiving, he ended the relationship to get it over with before he lost it, before it was snatched from him, either by fate or by somebody else. Nobody said anything sensible to him at the time because who would have been that somebody? So it was that brother attempted to evade his great fear of theoretically losing what he wanted more than anything and to make do with a substitute instead.
