Can Love Last? Quotes

“Love, by its very nature, is not secure; we keep wanting to make it so.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time (Norton Professional Books

“Love and marriage may go together like a horse and carriage, but it is crucial that the horse of passion quickly be tethered by the weight of the carriage of respectability to prevent runaways.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time (Norton Professional Books

“Natanijel Brendan nas upoznaje s pričom o dr. Odri Ričards, antropologu koja je tridesetih godina XX veka radila s plemenom Bemba iz Severne Rodezije. Dr. Ričards je, kaže on, grupi pripadnika tog plemena jednom ispričala englesku narodnu bajku o mladom princu koji se peo uz planine pokrivene ledom, prelazio provalije i borio se sa zmajevima da bi osvojio devojku koju je voleo. Slušaoci su očigledno bili zbunjeni, ali nisu ništa rekli. Najzad se oglasio jedan stari poglavica rečima koje su izražavale osećanja svih prisutnih. ,,Zašto nije uzeo drugu devojku?", jednostavno je upitao.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time

“Ljubav se stalno menja zato što se mi stalno menjamo. Stoga romantična ljubav, sama po sebi, donosi nestabilnost. Čini nas nezadovoljnim onim što imamo time što nas uvek usmerava ka nečemu što ne posedujemo u potpunosti, ili posedujemo u nedovoljnoj meri, ili pak u čije smo posedovanje suviše sigurni.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time

“In his theory of tragedy, Nietzsche captured the delicate balance, in the genuinely tragic, between the creation of forms and the dissolving of forms. Our individual lives, Nietzsche suggests, are transitory and in some sense illusory, ephemeral shapes that emerge from the energy that is the universe and that, in short order, are reabsorbed into the oneness. The enriching tragic in life can be missed in two ways. We can attribute ourselves and our productions an illusory permanence, like a deluded builder of sandcastles who believes his creation is eternal. Or, alternatively, we can be defeated by our transience, unable to build, paralyzed as we wait for the tide to come in. Nietzsche envisions the tragic man or woman, living life to the fullest, as one who builds sandcastles passionately, all the time aware of the coming tide. The ephemeral, illusory nature of all form does not detract from the surrender to the passion of the work; it enhances and enriches it.
The genuinely romantic reflects this subtle blend of qualities that Nietzsche discovered in the tragic. The lover builds the castles of romance as if they would last forever, knowing full well they are fragile, transitory structures. And the splitting Freud termed "psychical impotence" is an effort to reduce the risk by segregating permanence from adventure. Those boring, sturdy castles over there will last forever; these other fanciful castles are only one-night stands. But in that splitting, something very important is lost. For authentic romance is tragic in Nietzsche's sense. It ends in death; it is never simply stable; at its best it comes and goes, perpetually lost and rediscovered. "Love dies or else lovers die," notes Harold Bloom in his discussion of Romeo and Juliet, "those are the pragmatic possibilities." Romantic passion requires a surrender to a depth of feeling that should come with guarantees. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees. Life and love are inevitably difficult and risky, and to control the risk we all struggle to locate and protect sources for both safety and adventure, often in different relationships.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time

“Knowing oneself is a complicated business, because knowing one version of oneself can be a defense against knowing and being surprised by other versions of oneself.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time

“What was the underlying drama when a woman felt the “chemistry” was never right with the men she dated or when someone didn’t know if he was “really in love” with another person? How could these personal stalemates be opened up, energized in the process of therapy, allowing the person to arrive at a truly meaningful answer? Was it an expression of our freer sexual mores—our greater interest in diversity—that married or committed partners so often had affairs? Or was this explanation an easy and comfortable cover for difficulties in becoming more intimate with a partner? Is there only one “right one”? Can one who isn’t “right” become so? How much work should one put into a relationship? What constitutes productive work in a relationship—as opposed to a tedious kind of overanalyzing that avoids acknowledging the relationship is essentially not viable?”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time (Norton Professional Books

“Romantic commitments in love entail not a devotion to stasis but a dedication to process in the face of uncertainty. Genuine passion, in contrast to its degraded forms, is not split off from a longing for security and predictability, but is in a continual dialectical relationship with that longing. In order for romantic involvements to remain vital and robust over time, it is crucial that the commitment not be so rigid as to override spontaneity and that spontaneity not be so rigid as to preclude commitment.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time (Norton Professional Books

“But belief in the Victorian, Enlightenment-based ideal of an omnipotent, autonomous willpower, overseeing and in control of a mind transparent to itself, has generally faded. It reappears from time in slogans, political (as in Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No”) and commercial (as in Nike’s “Just do it!”). But the “just” in these slogans is a form of magical denial that the powerful physiological and psychological grip of drug addiction and deficits in athletic constitution and training can all be overcome by simple exertion of the will. The other end of the continuum, the opposite of the traditional belief in the omnipotent will, is the doctrine of passive victimization, in evidence in television spectacles in which perpetrators of heinous crimes exonerate themselves by revealing their own past victimization. Not only are we not in control, they seem to be saying, we are pawns of what was done to us in our distant personal pasts. Psychotherapy is often misused in the service of this sort of self-exoneration.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time (Norton Professional Books

“Nietzsche envisions the tragic man or woman, living life to the fullest, as one who builds sandcastles passionately, all the time aware of the coming tide. The ephemeral, illusory nature of all form does not detract from the surrender to the passion of the work; it enhances and enriches it.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time (Norton Professional Books

“The obvious solution in this traditional account is renunciation: the rationality of adult maturity must triumph over the illusions of infantile fantasy. The ill-fated lover is enjoined to grow up and rededicate himself to the drab, predictable familiarity of his ordinary life! But I have found it useful in these kinds of clinical situations to reverse the question and ask, rather: How is it that in his or her primary relationship this man or woman manages to feel so safe? With such patients, it is as if the available is assumed to be completely known, always accessible, wholly predictable. Safety is presumed. But in exploring in detail the textures of such established relationships, I have invariably discovered that the sense of safety is not a given but a construction, the familiarity not based on deep mutual knowledge but on collusive contrivance, the predictability not an actuality but an elaborate fantasy. So often, in long-standing relationships that break apart, one or both partners discover with a shock that the assumptions they made about the other’s experience, the very convictions that made the other both safe and dull, were inventions, often collusively agreed upon. The husband really was not so dependable; the wife was really not so devoted. They often discover that their dull “partner” has had all sorts of secrets, very private thoughts and feelings, and, perhaps, a clandestine relationship to express them in. “She is not the person I thought she was,” is the lament of the betrayed. Precisely.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time (Norton Professional Books