love & romance

Can love be both selfless and reciprocal, or does the desire for return inherently corrupt its purity?

Kurt Vonnegut wrote that most marriages fail because they don’t have enough people in them:

“You should know that when a husband or wife fight, it may seem to be about money or sex or power. But what they’re really yelling to each other about is loneliness. What they’re really saying is, ‘you’re not enough people.’”

Projection thrives in the absence of detail, but connection does not.

Just to be clear

I don’t want to get out

without a broken heart.

I intend to leave this life

so shattered

there better be a thousand separate heavens

for all of my separate parts

And none of those parts are going to be wearing the romance from the overpriced vintage rack

That is to say I am not going to get a single speed bike if I can’t make it up the h... See more

When you are madly in love, the most radical thing you can do is nothing. You shouldn’t care anymore. You have dropped the pen. There is no better story. There is only this, and this is enough. Let the world go on spinning. You, on the other hand, have already arrived.

I want there to be more seconds between the seconds, I want to claw time open, I want to unzip each moment and nestle inside it like Thumbelina in her walnut shell.

When you’re madly in love, you have the revelation that everything that has ever come before that—every insomniac night, every journal entry, every subtle rehearsal of a life you didn’t yet know how to live—was an imitation.