(cdibble at umd dot edu)
The first duty of love is to listen.
Paul Tillich
Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Robert A. Heinlein
In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.
Margaret Anderson
A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart's. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing. Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back -- it does not matter which. Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms or books that are written in a foreign tongue. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live your way some distant day into the answers.
Rainer Maria Rilke
"Love is not shared pleasure. It is shared pain." (JB quoting athlete)
That's a good insight. ... I'm not questioning the value of shared enjoyment, but if we want a relationship to be closer and more genuine, we need to share with our partner that which is most scary for us to share with anybody.
... What does open us is sharing our vulnerabilities. Sometimes we see a couple who has done this difficult work over a lifetime. In the process, they have grown old together. We can sense the enormous comfort, the shared quality of ease between these people. It is beautiful, and very rare. Without this quality of openness and vulnerability, partners don't really know each other; they are one image living with another image.
Charlotte Joko Beck, Zen Roshi
_Nothing Special: Living Zen_
San Francisco: Harper, 1993, p 14.
(cdibble at umd dot edu)