Sublime

The Secret of Staying in Love,

the fantasy of permanence may trump the fantasy of passion, but both are products of our imagination. We long for constancy, we may labor for it, but it is never guaranteed. When we love we always risk the possibility of loss—by criticism, rejection, separation, and ultimately death—regardless of how hard we try to defend against it. Introducing

passion in a relationship is commensurate with the amount of uncertainty you can tolerate.

Again, we must constantly remind ourselves: In a true partnership, both partners view it as their responsibility to ensure the other’s emotional well-being.

Over time, the argument for marriage has shifted. It’s no longer about external forces having power over us: religions, the state, the legal idea of legitimacy, the social idea of being respectable … What we are correctly now focused on is the psychological point of making it hard to throw in the towel. It turns out that we benefit greatly (though

It can be difficult for estranged or distressed couples to focus on what drew them together, but within every couple’s “creation myth” lies the key to understanding the unfolding story of their relationship.

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about