Briana West: “You want [love] to provide for you what you think you cannot give yourself: stability, security, hope, happiness. So long as you function on this belief, you place “love” as being something that is outside of you when the reality is that you cannot see, create, or experience on the outside what you are not already.”

I think that people come alive when they’re serious about what they love—when they choose to pay careful attention to what feeds and sustains them. I love this one Heather Havrilesky line about how crushes are often just misplaced ambition. Of course crushes are more than that—they’re about nostalgia and magic and futures we’ll never access—but I t... See more

“Sure. For the majority of people, what they love exists only in the imagination. The object of their love is not the man or woman of reality, but what he or she is like in their imagination. The person in reality is just a template used for the creation of this dream lover. Eventually, they find out the differences between their dream lover and th... See more

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a relationship with its own insane internal logic, where both people say and do things that make sense only within the contained narrative world they’ve created with each other. Sometimes I fear that my life consists of nothing as so much as a series of these worlds, bubbles where normal logic is suspended.