If long acquaintance with a lover so often breeds boredom, breeds a sense of knowing a person too well, the problem may ironically be that we do not know them well enough. Whereas the initial novelty of the relationship could leave us in no doubt as to our ignorance, the subsequent reliable physical presence of the lover and the routines of communal life can delude us into thinking that we have achieved genuine, and dull familiarity; whereas it may be no more than a fake sense of familiarity which physical presence fosters, and which Noah would have felt for six hundred years in relation to
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