On love, limerence, and other-significant-others
Who we fall in love with is ultimately a reflection of what we value individually and how we view ourselves. There’s no escaping yourself in dating. No matter who you’re sitting across from, the one constant you come up against is your own insecurities, your own unresolved issues, your own doubts and fears.
materialists
Both partners taking accountability for having an outside support network (no attempt to make each other everything)
I can’t do better than Kurt Vonnegut on this subject:
I can’t do better than Kurt Vonnegut on this subject:
Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a... See more
Sasha Chapin • What I'm looking for in my marriage
But don’t you understand, Amy? You’re wrong. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person—sexual chemistry, let’s say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty—and you get to pick three of those things.
... See moreHanya Yanagihara • A Little Life: A Novel
Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all?
Esther Perel • Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence
Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as... See more
Aziz Ansari • Modern Romance
In the end, the boy discovers what we all must eventually, if we are to grow into the full bigness of the heart: that in every relationship of trust and tenderness, each is the guardian of the other’s particularity; that to love someone not for the comfort or compliance they can give you but for exactly who they are, the special and particular... See more
Maria Popova • How to Love Yourself and How to Love Another: A Playful and Poignant Vintage Illustrated Fable About Cherishing the Particular
I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.
Henrik Karlsson • The Paradox Is That When I Accept Myself Just as I Am, I Change
“True love is a peculiar kind of insight through which we see the wholeness which the person is—at the same time totally accepting the level on which he now expresses himself—without any delusion that the potential is a present reality. True love accepts the person who now is without qualifications, but with a sincere and unwavering commitment to
... See morebell hooks • All About Love: New Visions (Love Song to the Nation Book 1)
Often when you go into a relationship with someone you like, you have to justify why you like that person. You only see what you want to see and you deny there are things you don’t like about that person. You lie to yourself just to make yourself right. Then you make assumptions, and one of the assumptions is “My love will change this person.” But
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