Eroticism is one of the few forms of play permitted to adults. It occurs in a world parallel to the habitual one; it frees us to adopt new personas; it has a tendency to generate enduring communities whose members are "apart together" even when its excesses have come to an end; and, finally, it is dispensable and therefore indispensable.

Half-jokingly but mostly seriously, Millie tells her mother that “the self is an illusion and completely false.” She is so thoroughly decluttered that she has done away with all her commitments and finally even her personhood. “I think about how I spend my time. Where my interests lie,” she reflects. “The questions come naturally, as if supplied by

As Barthes reminds us, there are two concepts in Greek for desire, one for the feeling of missing someone who’s left, and a second for the more curious sensation of missing someone beside me, someone who is with me but who remains less than fully accessible to me: “Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the

Desire is as good a guide to truth as anything else, but until eternity arrives, we will have to find somewhere to fit our appetites. One way to proceed is to shrink them—first by making concessions to smallness, then by framing contraction as wisdom or virtue.

As Marx writes in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, we are distinguished from animals insofar as our wants extend beyond our needs

“For me love is like this,” writes the narrator of Mating: You’re in one room or apartment which you think is fine, then you walk through a door and close it behind you and find yourself in the next apartment, which is even better, larger, more floorspace, a better view. You’re happy there and then you go into the next apartment and close the door

We are drawn toward a beautiful thing, as Weil says, “without knowing what to ask of it,” but wanting to ask something. Even when we have it, we continue to want it: “We do not desire anything else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something.

In these fictions, as in reality, it is usually the men who command the greater share of power—but in at least some of them, as in some lucky lives, romantic equality is so potent that it overcomes asymmetries in situation.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle comes closest to addressing the lover’s predicament when he observes that “friendships involve equality.… This becomes clear if there is a great interval in respect of virtue or vice or wealth or anything else between the parties; for then they are no longer friends, and do not even expect to be so.” Aristotle