chirysalis’s Reviews > Conversations on Love > Status Update

i was dismayed to see Mr. AdB here but he is much more articulate and to-the-point here than in his own books

oh man i love this book

"After years of feeling passive in love, I understood then that we do have a choice, even if it’s difficult to see. Mine was this: to stay in the fantasies inside my head, or to climb out and live."

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mhm...

"Did I want to keep avoiding intimacy and lean back into the safety of a nostalgic crush that didn’t require me to do anything differently? No. I wanted to form real relationships that existed in the real world. To do so would require courage and self-understanding, maybe a little loneliness, and a lot of responsibility."

"... we often ‘aggrandize our own confusion or lack of insight’ when we have no evidence of real intimacy. We reach for words like ‘chemistry’ or ‘gut feeling’ because we have nothing tangible to base a feeling on – no examples of kindness or care or connection, just a magnetic draw."

"responsibility to yourself ‘means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”’"

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omg Jane Eyre mentioned!!!

"I learnt that the loneliest place of all is lying in bed at night next to someone who makes you feel small, with your back to theirs, still hoping they will turn over and put their arms around you."

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yuck

"I’d date someone new, idealize them, keep parts of myself hidden, and perform the role of a woman more palatable than I believed myself to be. This woman never asked for anything."

"Maybe such fixation is even a form of creativity – how a youthful imagination can take the scant details of an ordinary connection and build another world inside it. So I don’t regret my first romantic fantasy."

"I used to think it was love that I was longing for, but I was wrong. I was obsessed with the idea of love, not the truth of it. All those years and nights I spent asking, ‘When will I find love?’ I never paused to think about what precisely it was."