Quotes About Love

For these couples, fidelity is defined not by sexual exclusivity but by the strength of their commitment.

The caring, protective elements that foster love often block the unselfconsciousness that fuels erotic pleasure.

While love promises us relief from aloneness, it also heightens our dependence on one person. It is inherently vulnerable. We tend to assuage our anxieties through control. We feel safer if we can contract the distance between us, maximize the certainty, minimize the threats, and contain the unknown.

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 wanting. An expression of longing, desire requires ongoing elusiveness. It is less concerned with where it has already been than passionate about where it can still go. But too often, as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flame of desire. They forget that fire needs air.

Some relationships originate in feelings of warmth, tenderness, and nurturance, and the partners choose to remain in these calmer waters. They prefer a love that is built on patience more than on passion. To them, finding serenity in a lasting bond is what counts. There is no one way, and there is no right way.

Armed with an ideology of love that advocates togetherness, we are awkward about pursuing autonomy. This is especially true of the individuality of our desire.

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Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Today we have sex because we're in the mood, we feel like it—hopefully, with each other; preferably, at the same time; and ideally, with unflagging passion for decades on end.

Contained within the small circle of the wedding band are vastly contradictory ideals. We want our chosen one to offer stability, safety, predictability, and dependability—all the anchoring experiences. And we want that very same person to supply awe, mystery, adventure, and risk. Give me comfort and give me edge. Give me familiarity and give me novelty. Give me continuity and give me surprise. Lovers today seek to bring under one roof desires that have forever had separate dwellings.

When we imbue our partner with godly attributes and we expect him or her to uplift us from the mundane to the sublime, we create, as Johnson puts it, an "unholy muddle of two holy loves"4 that cannot help but disappoint.

No woman should ever give one man all the power to shatter her romantic ideals. There is a big difference between saying, "That one person let me down and I'm hurt," and saying, "I'll never love again." But these two women are not ready to make that distinction. They see the world as offering two options—hurt or be hurt. As Lailani puts it, "I should've stayed the bitch. Nobody hurts the bitch.

It's hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy. Maybe he can love her, but it's clearly much harder for him to desire her. There's no tension.

forbidden love stories are utopian by nature, especially in contrast with the mundane constraints of marriage and family.2 A prime characteristic of this liminal universe—and the key to its irresistible power—is that it is unattainable.

It's not our desires that are different today, but the fact that we feel we deserve—indeed, we are obligated—to pursue them. Our primary duty is now to ourselves—even if it comes at the expense of those we love. As Pamela Druckerman points out, "Our high expectations for personal happiness might even make us more likely to cheat. After all, aren't we entitled to an affair, if that's what it takes to be fulfilled?

Falling in love, as Francesco Alberoni writes, "rearranges all our priorities, throws the superfluous overboard, projects a glaring light onto what is superficial and instantly discards it.

Monogamy is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal, for it confirms our specialness. Infidelity says, You're not so special after all. It shatters the grand ambition of love.

The romantics refuse a life without passion; they

Adultery has always hurt. But for modern love's acolytes, it seems to hurt more than ever. In fact, the maelstrom of emotions that are unleashed in the wake of an affair is so overwhelming that many contemporary psychologists borrow from the field of trauma to explain the symptoms: obsessive rumination, hypervigilance, numbness and dissociation, inexplicable rages and uncontrollable panic.

Consequently, what Proust called "the demon that cannot be exorcised" has simply gone in search of a socially acceptable vocabulary.9 "Trauma," "intrusive thoughts," "flashbacks," "obsessiveness," "vigilance," and "attachment injury" are the modern vocabulary for betrayed love.

Instead, many of my patients describe swinging back and forth in a rapid succession of contradictory emotions. "I love you! I hate you! Hold me! Don't touch me! Take your shit and get out! Don't leave me! You scumbag! Do you still love me? Fuck you! Fuck me!" Such a blitz of reactions is to be expected and is likely to go on for some time.

At its best monogamy may be the wish to find someone to die with; at its worst it is a cure for the terrors of aliveness. They are easily confused. —Adam Phillips, Monogamy

Ralph found himself fantasizing every time they made love: his beloved Sharon kept getting replaced by a seventeen-year-old vixen in a darkened movie theater.

Affairs have a lot to teach us about relationships—what we expect, what we think we want, and what we feel entitled to. They offer a unique window into our personal and cultural attitudes about love, lust, and commitment.