Quotes About Connection

Believe in the reader and they can connect the dots, if you succeed breathe life into the story

Sometimes, when we seek the gaze of another, it isn't our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become. We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves.

The smaller we feel in the world, the more we need to shine in the eyes of our partner.

because the erotic frisson is such that the kiss that you only imagine giving,can be as powerful and as enchanting as hours of actual lovemaking. As Marcel Proust said, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.

The body often contains emotional truths that words can too easily gloss over.

When you pick a partner, you pick a story. So what kind of story are you going to write? You are the editors of your life stories. Write well and edit often. And remember ... a life story is not a love story. You can love a lot more people than you can make a life with.

Love is an exercise in selective perception, even a delicious deception as well, though who cares about that in the beginning?

when two become one—connection can no longer happen. There is no one to connect with. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex.

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. —Gaston Bachelard

Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. —Anaïs Nin

All relationships live in the shadow of the third, for it is the other that solders our dyad. In his book Monogamy, Adam Phillips writes, "The couple is a resistance to the intrusion of the third, but in order for it to last it is indispensable to have enemies. That is why the monogamous can't live without them. When we are two, we are together. In order to form a couple, we need to be three.

What I can tell you," she says, "is that his kindness makes me feel safe, but when I think about who I want to sleep with, safe is not what I look for.

What I can see, and she has not yet grasped, is that the thing she's really afraid to lose is not him -it's the part of herself he's awakened. You think you had a relationship with truck man, I tell her. Actually, you had an intimate encounter with yourself mediated by him.

While much has been written about the aggressive manifestations of male sexuality, it is not sufficiently appreciated that the erotic realm also offers men a restorative experience for their more tender side. The body is our original mother tongue, and for a lot of men it remains the only language of closeness that hasn't been spoiled. Through sex, men can recapture the pure pleasure of connection without having to compress their hard-to-articulate needs into the prison of words.

The person I once was, but lost, is the person you once knew.

Sometimes they come sheepishly; sometimes they arrive desperate, dejected, enraged. They don't just miss sex, the act; they miss the feeling of connection, playfulness, and renewal that sex allows them. I invite you to join me in my conversations with these questers as we work toward opening up and coming a step closer to transcendence.

Neutralizing each other's complexity affords us a kind of manageable otherness.

Spontaneity is a fabulous idea, but in an ongoing relationship whatever is going to "just happen" already has. Now they have to make it happen.

We blame our partners for failing to make us whole.

When you love someone, how does it feel? And when you desire someone, how is it different? Does good intimacy always lead to good sex?

In our efforts to protect ourselves from intimate betrayal, we demand access, control, transparency. And we run the risk of unknowingly eradicating the very space between us that keeps desire alive. Fire needs air.

affairs are less about sex than about desire: the desire to feel desired, to feel special, to be seen and connected, to compel attention. All these carry an erotic frisson that makes us feel alive, renewed, recharged. It is more energy than act, more enchantment than intercourse.

By telling them not to touch I was mapping a space that would give her room to go after him. That, in turn, would give him the feeling of being desired.