PERSONAL: I HOPE TO FALL IN LOVE

I hope to fall in love with someone who always calls me back and never lets me fall asleep making me feel unwanted. I hope to fall in love with someone who holds my hand  I hope to fall in love with someone who tickles me and makes me smile on hard days and on easy ones. But beyond all that I hope to fall in love with someone who will never leave me behind and who will never take me for granted. Someone who will stand by me when I am right and stand by me when I am wrong. Someone who has seen me at your worst and loves me still. 

Some people are good at being in love. Some people are good at love. Two very different things, I think. Being in love is the romantic part—sex all the time, midday naps in the sheets, the jokes, the laughs, the fun, long conversations with no pauses, overwhelming separation anxiety … Just the best sides of both people, you know? But love begins when the excitement of being in love starts to fade: the stress of life sets in, the butterflies disappear, the sex becomes less frequent, the tears, the sadness, the arguments, the cattiness … The worst parts of both people. But if you still want that person by your side through all of those things … that’s when you know—that’s when you know you’re good at love

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person – without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.