Quotes About Connection

predictability is a mirage. Our need for constancy limits how much we are willing to know the person who's next to us. We are invested in having him or her conform to an image that is often a creation of our own imagination, based on our own set of needs.

Deprived of enigma, intimacy becomes cruel when it excludes any possibility of discovery. Where there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.

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

The permanence and stability that we seek in our intimate connections can stifle their sexual spark, leading to what Mitchell calls "expressions of exuberant defiance,"3 otherwise known as affairs. Adulterers

In our world of instant communication, we supplement our relationships with an assortment of technological devices in the hope that all these gizmos will strengthen our connections. This social frenzy masks a profound hunger for human contact.

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.

When do you feel most drawn to your partner?" One of the most common answers I hear is "When others are attracted to him or to her." The triangular gaze is highly erotic, which is why stories like Kyle and Lucy's are much less unusual than you may expect.

In my decades of working with couples, I've observed that those who are most successful in keeping the erotic spark alive are those who are comfortable with the mystery in their midst.

What is different is that modern life has deprived us of our traditional resources, and has created a situation in which we turn to one person for the protection and emotional connections that a multitude of social networks used to provide. Adult intimacy has become overburdened with expectations.

By talking about sexual alchemy, I want to clarify that affairs sometimes involve sex and sometimes not, but they are always erotic.

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

These stories make a critical point—many 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.

In truth, we never know our partner as well as we think we do.

A couple's emotional life together and their physical life together each have their ebbs and flows, their ups and downs, but these don't always correspond.

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.

And when we haven't been touched in years, we are more vulnerable to the kindness of strangers.

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 suggest that our ability to tolerate our separateness—and the fundamental insecurity it engenders—is a precondition for maintaining interest and desire in a relationship.

The adherents of talk intimacy (often, though not always, women) have a hard time recognizing these other languages for closeness

Emotional involvement is the third element that may play a role in infidelity. Most affairs register an emotional component, to one degree or another.

That's the point of acting: to bring about awareness of humanity, to conjure compassion, and to alleviate shame.