“If you live long enough and wide enough, you come to see that love is simply the breadth of the aperture through which you let in the reality of another and the quality of attention you pay what you see. It is, in this sense, not a phenomenon that happens unto you but a creative act. The poet Robert Graves knew this: “Love is not kindly nor yet grim, but does to you as you to him,” he wrote as a young man a lifetime before the old man came to define love as “a recognition of truth, a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that… makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other.”

Most of our heartbreak, most of our aching sense of failure at love, comes from the idea, central to our dominant cultural mythology, that this truth, this recognition, is a static reward to be attained — through effort, through bargaining, through self-negation — rather than the dynamic process it is, an end-point state of soul-merging rather than an infinite vector of growing understanding, of deepening mutual compassion, of simultaneous self-possession and unselfing.”

by Maria Popova