On love, limerence, and other-significant-others

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.

“It sounds like you typically look for a connection that starts at a 10/10. Maybe what you want is something that starts at a 7/10.” I didn’t like hearing this. But it makes a ton of sense. When you are love-drunk you are also drunk-drunk. You’re not really seeing the person, you’re seeing your own phosphorescence.

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.

I think all romance is an enduring curiosity for another person.

I think about the relationships I’ve outgrown—because of my personal or political evolution—and how living in cities has meant I could let go of those relationships and form new ones. Whitney makes me wonder if that was the easy way out. I don’t think relationships need to be held on to forever just because they exist. Plenty of us have rightly... See more

Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream… But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.

[…]

There is almost no path a human being... See more

When we make space for the unseen dynamics within relationship, we welcome relational nothingness. We acknowledge that we might not need to know what is the “problem” to ask, what is truly present here?