However, it is true that because you are less anxious, you are no longer as reactive to your partner’s emotions, and, consequently, you feel more separate in that sense. But when you have courageous love for your partner, at another level you feel more connected and similar to them than when you were anxious. You understand what the nineteenth-century philosopher William James meant when he said at the turn of the century, “Every bit of us, at every moment, is part and parcel of a wider self.” You recognize that at the level of your Selves, you are not different because you are drops of the
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