The Sorrows of Love

We will be ready for relationships when we accept that our chances of contentment depend on our willingness to go back to a school we were never, sadly, taught that we needed.

In order to love, we must learn to grasp the role of our past in our selection of partners, to forgive failure rather than merely admire strength, to determine the other’s distinctive manner of needing love, to cope with laborious, pedantic domestic issues, to acknowledge the difficulties of admitting to our needs, and to accept the nature and drawbacks of our sexuality.

Yet in truth, a high degree of loneliness is an inexorable part of being a sensitive, intelligent human.

e are sorrowful not because we have landed with the wrong person but because we have (sadly) been forced to grow up.

But memory is a hugely unreliable and therefore reckless instrument – which isn’t a minor point, for our powers of recall have a huge impact on how we assess our lives in the present.

We believe we seek happiness in love, but actually what we often seek is familiarity – which may complicate any plans we might have for happiness.

The only people we can think of as amazing are those we don’t yet know very well. However, accepting that everyone is maddening is no reason to give up on relationships; it is simply a sign that we are finally getting to know human nature

Every human can be guaranteed to frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us – and we will do the same to them.

The primary error behind our passionate early feelings is that we overlook a central fact about people: everyone has something substantially wrong with them once their characters are fully known.

We fall prey to a belief in our own normality because, when we are single, it can be hard to see where our crazy sides are located. When alone, at moments of fury, we don’t shout, as there’s no one there to listen – and therefore we overlook the true, worrying strength of our capacity for anger.