Quotes About Love

It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation. —Joseph Conrad, Some Reminiscences

Craig loved being loved by me more than he loved me.

Call me an idealist, but I believe that love and desire are not mutually exclusive; they just don't always take place a the same time. In fact, security and passion are two separate fundamental human needs that spring from different motives and tend to pull us in different directions.

Do you love the blouseman more than all of us?" "No," her mother replies. "But sometimes it's easier to be different with a different person.

In fact, dependence is an essential ingredient of connection. But it's a producer of terrific anxiety, because it implies that the one we love wields power over us. This is the power to love us, but also to abandon us.

Love and desire do not have to be mutually exclusive. Many couples find a way to integrate their contradictions without resorting to compartmentalization. But it starts with the understanding that we can never eliminate the dilemma. Reconciling the erotic and the domestic is not a problem to solve; it is a paradox to manage.

Women cheat for love, the common assumption goes, but men? They cheat for sex. And this assumption is all the more strongly reinforced when the sex in question is anonymous, transactional, or commercial.

It's not "just sex" that they share with many partners—it's also love, not to mention domestic life. Polyamorists tend to characterize their lifestyle as a serious endeavor, involving mindfulness, maturity, and a lot of talking—hence the common joke in poly circles, "Swingers have sex. Polys have conversations.

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 uncertainty sometimes requires nothing more than letting go of the illusion of certitude. In this shift of perception, we recognize the inherent mystery of our partner.

Steven Stosny observes that "if loss of power was the problem in intimate betrayal, then anger would be the solution. But the great pain in intimate betrayal has little to do with loss of power. Perceived loss of value is what causes your pain—you feel less lovable.

We explore their erotic templates, how their emotional history expresses itself in the physicality of sex. "Tell me how you were loved and I will know a lot about how you make love" is one of my guiding questions. Unearthing these issues helps to release the sexual blocks.

As Marcel Proust understood, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.

She is his selection, part time. You know the story too! Look, When it is over he places her, Like a phone, back on the hook. —Anne Sexton, "You All Know the Story of the Other Woman

Love arises from within ourselves as an imaginative act, a creative synthesis that aims to fulfill our deepest longings, our oldest dreams, that allows us both to renew and transform ourselves." Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.

A Window into the Human Heart Affairs have a lot to teach us about relationships. They open the door to a deeper examination of values, human nature, and the power of eros.

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.

No history has a more lasting effect on our adult loves than the one we write with our primary caregivers.

These are not simply naive, lonely, desperate women who'll take love in whatever form they can get it. In fact, they are pragmatic about their reasons for choosing to not only live with a secret but be a secret.

I have met plenty of men who were the lovers of married women (or married men, for that matter). But I have yet to meet a man who was single and gave his love to another man's wife for thirty years, hoping that she would leave and come and make a family with him.

Octavio Paz writes, "The moment of merging is a crack in time, a balm against the wounds inflicted by the minutes and hours of time. A moment totally eternal as it is ephemeral." It is a leap into a world beyond.

I thought I knew what love was, but I have never felt like this before" is a common refrain. People in this state talk to me about love, transcendence, awakening, destiny, divine intervention—something so pure that they could not pass it by, because "to deny those feelings would have been an act of self-betrayal.

He was going to think about her and think about her until she disappeared.

Happy isn't even a real idea, he said. It's just like love. A reasonably skeptical person doesn't even know what it means.

Watching love die: that's an ornery armor-piercing bullet. When taking the kids to school, the laundry, and the dishes rain down on the last remaining coals of your romance like piss on a morning campfire. When all you're left with is enough smoke to choke on. Then your heart is dead.