modern love
*modern dating
modern love
If this is a dream I would want to dream it all over again. I would want to go back to sleep right away. I wouldn’t believe real life could be any better than this is. I would say has this really been a dream? Because I wouldn’t believe I’d have the presence of mind to conjure all these conversations with my friends that go places that I don’t expe
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True love is correct attunement to somebody.
(Alain de Botton)
When you love someone, I think the question that you ask is: can I help them be okay? Can I make their life better without ruining my own? What can I do to be there? To me, the heart of love is the acknowledgement that we have little control over how other people live and yet our fate is bound up with theirs. S is not the only person I feel that wa... See more
no exit
I think I secretly prefer treating decisions like irreversible trapdoors. There's a deep relief in having no choice, an absolvement of responsibility. But the truth is that the things that define our lives - our habits, our identities, our relationships - are choices made daily, continually.
Isn't that what defines the romanticised ideal of love that lives in my head? That it's a choice? Every day, every word, every action? We forget that love is a choice because it feels more like gravity. Things fall; why shouldn’t we?
Nobody has to show up with roses, peel fruit, or sacrifice their precious time for another human being. Nobody has to suffer through the weird way you eat or the annoying jokes you make. Nobody has to wake up in the middle of the night, paralysed in fear for the heart they've given away. Yet we choose to anyway.
It's scary to realise that someone could do so for 10 years straight and simply wake up deciding not to make the same choice anymore. And people do. With friends, with lovers, with life itself.
Love is a hundred thousand little and big choices. That's what makes it special, that we can spend a lifetime with someone, across thousands of mornings and kisses and still look forward to the next one, across a thousand annoyances and struggles choose to wake up and do it again, every single time.
I long for a conversation partner who travels through an abundance of interesting material at breakneck speed, shouting over their shoulder at me, “Keep up!” Someone who assumes I am up for the challenge, someone who assumes the best of me.
Christina Joyce Hauser • The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays
Of course, part of the problem is that we usually only know we were falling in love after it’s happened. Retrospect wears the right amount of cologne and pours you a third glass of wine you sip by candlelight because Retrospect is seductive like that.
It could take days or weeks or months before Retrospect waves you over before punching you in the
... See moreA relationship, like a movie or book, doesn’t fail when it comes to an end.
a relationship that ended, not failed | Derek Sivers
My catchphrase on this topic is “Ease can be exciting.” I think that with the right person, you can get both the butterflies and the calm, even though we’re told they can’t coexist. That, to me, is magic: the presence of both thrill and stillness. Sometimes you have to do some math to get there.