On love, limerence, and other-significant-others

This is why the right gaze, the right conversation, can change you down to the grain. Emotional heat loosens the architecture of the self, and in the presence of someone who sees you vividly, the molten structure reforms around their image of you. What remains afterwards is stronger, different, marked by the shape of their attention. Attention... See more

I used to believe in the adage, “If they wanted to, they would.” But now I think it’s more like, “If they’re open-hearted, and open-minded, and curious, and not too cautious, then, maybe, they might. Or they still might not.”

Love asks for heat. Left cold, we harden into our existing shape. But under the steady warmth of attention, we soften, loosen, and take on new form. The right gaze reorganises the self; you begin to recognise yourself more clearly in their eyes, and they in yours. Each becomes more singular by being seen, a longing to inhabit the silhouette cast by... See more

Most of us have never experienced the kind of love that transforms you and expands your interiority, so we don’t realise it’s out there. But it is and it exists. Once you’ve experienced it, you can’t go back to the mimicry, because it feels like a sorry excuse for the real thing.

It seems to me that love should not make all else disappear but should simply tint it with new nuances; I would like a love that accompanies me through life, not that absorbs all my life.

This may sound counterintuitive, but I deeply believe that the path to happiness in a relationship is not just about finding someone who you think is going to make you happy. Rather, the reverse is equally true: the path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to. If what

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And so the trick is, can you force yourself to be absolutely unsparingly realistic about what’s actually best for you?

Relational ambivalence is exhausting because it forces us to live in contradictions, unsure of which side to trust.