To Love Oneself is the Beginning of a Lifelong Romance
Prelude: What If?
What if you were about to meet your perfect lover?
What if you knew this lover better than anyone else in the world, and this lover knew you better than anyone else?
What if you liked the same food, loved the same movies, listened to the same music, rooted for the same teams, enjoyed the same friends, were fascinated by the same books, had the same spiritual beliefs, cared about the same causes, and shared the same goals?
What if you absolutely knew you two could live together comfortably?
What if this lover always had your best interests at heart?
What if you were brought before a large door and told that, behind the door, was the love of your life?
You straighten your hair, pop a Certs, take a deep breath, open the door . . .
. . . and find yourself face-to-face . . .
...with a mirror.
INTRODUCTION:
You Are Already Living with the Love of Your Life
This is a book about a myth and a taboo.
THE MYTH: In order to be complete and fulfilled, you must find one "significant other" to love. This significant other must consider you his or her significant other and love you back with equal devotion till death do you part.
THE TABOO: It is somehow unwholesome to love yourself.
In LOVE 101 I'll be challenging both the myth and the taboo. If you're not ready to have these challenged, it would be best if you stop reading now--this book will only upset you.
If, on the other hand, you have been gradually coming to the seemingly forbidden conclusion that before we can truly love another, or allow another to properly love us, we must first learn to love ourselves--then this book is for you.
The taboo that we shouldn't love ourselves is one of the silliest in modern culture. Who else is more qualified to love you than you? Who else knows what you want, precisely when you want it, and is always around to supply it?
Who do you go to bed with, sleep with, dream with, shower with, eat with, work with, play with, pray with, go to the movies with, and watch TV with?
Who else knows where it itches, and just how hard to scratch it?
Who are you reading this book with?
Who have you always lived with, and whom will you eventually die with?
And, who will be the only person to accompany you on that ultimate adventure (just think of death as a theme park with a high admission cost), while all your other loved ones are consoling each other by saying how happy you must be with God and how natural you look?
Spiritually, who is the only person who can join you in your relationship with God, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Moses, Mother Nature, The Force, Creative Intelligence, or whomever or whatever you consider to be the moving force of existence?
And, who has been there every time you've had sex?anything pleasurable we see, feel, hear, touch, or taste: without our senses nothing "out there"--from movies to pepperoni pizza--would be in the least enjoyable.
So, from the sacred to the profane (and all points in between), your ideal lover is you.
Then why is loving ourselves such a taboo? Why is the notion that we need another to love (who will love us back) such an enormous myth?
In a word, control.
The self-contained, emotionally autonomous, intellectually free individual is the greatest threat to the institutions that want to control us. Those of us who refuse to act like sheep--who question authority and want genuine answers, not just knee-jerk clichs--are a pain in the gluteus maximus (and regions nearby) to those who want to rule by power rather than by providing leadership.
We see attempts to manipulate almost everywhere--in politics, religion, advertising, entertainment.
When we are programmed to "fall" for the hunk or the honey of a certain aesthetic type, and to believe that these images of sex and beauty mean "true love," then these images can be used to sell us anything from cigarettes to movie tickets. And they are, they are.
Further, when the only "moral" outcome of a romantic relationship is a till-death-do-us-part, state-licensed, church-blessed marriage, we see the fundamental forces of conformity at work. If we're all the same, we are much easier to serve--also sell to, also control.
If we're all the same--and marriage is one of the best homogenizers around--then we only need one religion, one political party: the Family Values Party. In fact, why not combine religion and government in one?
That's been the history of the world--church and state hand-in-hand, slavish conformity, and those troublemakers (ungodly and unpatriotic) who fail to shape up . . . well, there have always been ways of dealing with them.
But this book is not a political diatribe. It's a book about personal freedom--the freedom to choose the life you want, even though the powers that be think you should not do so. They know best.
Except they don't. More than half the people in this country live outside the "traditional" mama-papa-children household. It hasn't worked.
Please understand that I am not against family, marriage, children, or even romance. I am merely against the idea that we should all be herded into that mode of relating when there are viable, satisfying alternatives (which we'll explore later in this book).
There will always be people who want to get married and raise children. More power to them. The trouble arises when people who want to do something else (write, pray, save the dolphins) get married and have children because they think they should, not because they want to.
This clutters up the marriage market with unqualified players--those who would rather be training for a decathlon just don't have the same commitment to child-rearing. So, they drop out of the marriage--emotionally or entirely--and the other partner, who still wants a marriage, wonders, "What happened?"
What happened is what happens every time we are all programmed to do the same thing--those who don't really want to be there muck it up for those who do.
If a group of people were all taken to an opera one night, a rock concert the second night, the latest Woody Allen movie the third night, and an Englebert Humperdink concert the fourth, chances are that on at least one of those nights, some of the audience would be, to paraphrase S.J. Pearlman, if not disgruntled, certainly not fully gruntled.
If, on the other hand, each individual in the group had a choice to go to any, all, or none of the four, then self-selection would lead to far more gruntled audiences at all the events.
This book is about you getting more gruntled in all your relationships--especially your relationship with yourself.
You'll note I've only talked about the failure of marriage. Imagine how much more unsuccessful romance is. There are two million divorces in the United States each year. Is it fair to estimate that for every divorce there are at least ten break-ups between nonmarried romantics? If so, there are, counting the newly divorced, twenty-two million broken hearts littering the emotional landscape. There are also twenty-two million (the ones who did the dumping) who are proclaiming "Free at last!"
And yet the majority of those millions, who now have already had first-hand experience that a romantic relationship doesn't necessarily lead to a lifelong happy marriage, will again be jumping into the next acceptable pair of eyes, or thighs, that come along. "The person was the problem," they tell themselves. "If only I find the right person." Maybe it's the type of relationship that's not working. Maybe.
What does it cost us to fall for this myth that we must find another to love, and must (in the same person) find someone to love us? It costs us the loving, laughing, emotionally stable, intellectually stimulating, and physically satisfying relationship with the person perfectly qualified to be our best friend in this lifetime--ourselves.
We trade the ongoing, here-and-now, potentially vibrant, fun-filled, nurturing relationship with ourselves for some future promise of Prince Charming or Cinderella riding in on a white charger or a refurbished pumpkin, transforming our lives with True Love. That's like not eating your home-cooked food because you have been convinced that any day now (real soon), a gourmet (not just any gourmet, mind you, but your own personal star-crossed gourmet) will appear---pots, pans, leeks, and all. Am I saying you should turn the gourmet away? Not at all. Being with others, sharing with others, supporting and being supported by others are among the most fulfilling activities we can enjoy. I'm simply saying that loving oneself while loving others makes all interactions more enjoyable. Some even say that loving oneself is a prerequisite to loving others. I won't take it quite that far, but I do know loving oneself is an important part of loving others (and allowing others to love you).
When we are already loving and loved by ourselves, our desire to love and be loved by others is just that--a desire. We no longer have the burning, aching need to love and be loved. Back in my desperately seeking-another-to-love-who-will-love-me-back days, I wrote a poem:
My needs destroy the paths through which those needs could be fulfilled.
I had on my wall in letters a foot tall, the needy proclamation taken from Peter Townsend's Tommy:
SEE ME
FEEL ME
TOUCH ME
HEAL ME
Talk about an intimidating message to present to the newly met. At seventeen, my muse gave me the answer. I was sitting in a coffee shop as the sun was coming up and wrote on a paper napkin (as all poets do from time to time):
I must conquer my loneliness alone.
I must be happy with myself or I have nothing to offer.
Two halves have little choice but to join, and yes, they do make a whole.
But two wholes, when they coincide . . . that is beauty.
That is love.
It took me some time--with any number of false starts, dead ends, and dashed hopesThe Lemon Cookbook.--to get the wisdom of this edict off the napkin and into my life.
LOVE 101 is what I learned along the way. You may have a different way with different learnings, but I pray that some of my musings you'll find useful, inspiring, or amusing.
I wrote this book for myself--a collection of what I have learned about self-loving so that if I fall into a pit of self-loathing (an inevitability--what lovers don't have quarrels?), I will have these reminders to help me de-pit myself.
I hope you'll read along in my "manual on loving me" and make as much of it your own as you care to.
Self-Love vs. Romantic Love
If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?
LILY TOMLIN
When I talk about loving yourself, what sort of love do I mean? Simply this:
Love is taking care of, with regular intervals of taking good care of, and occasional splurges of pampering.
In this book, I am merely suggesting that you take care of yourself, regularly take good care of yourself, and every so often indulge yourself in a little pampering.
This is quite a different definition of love than the one offered by the proponents of "falling in love." Their love is an emotional bungee-jump from the depths to the heights of romance. Being "in love" generally implies people have "lost themselves" in someone (or at least the illusion of what that other person comprises), are obsessed by the other person (and relishing the addiction), and are desperate for the other person to feel the same way about them.
This form of love I shall refer to as romantic love. Essential to romantic love but (thankfully) missing from self-love, is an overwhelming, all consuming lust. What sort of lust? What sort have you got?
Sexual lust? Oh, my, yes. Although it is hidden behind any number of high-sounding platitudes, the need to do the dirty deed--and do it magnificently (and often)--is central to those "in love." The need for intense physical union, each to each, that obliterates physical boundaries and hurls one to the heavens, is a high-sounding way of saying, "I've got the hots for you."
Someday we are going to be lovers. Maybe married. At the least, an affair. What's your name?
Love ain't nothing but sex misspelled.
HARLAN ELLISON
Then there is emotional lust. We want the loved one to be ours, just as we want to be fully possessed by the one we love. This emotional bonding should be so tight that not only is there no room for emotional need; there is no thought of emotional need. All needs are met, once and for all, in the mutual clutching, that is, embrace of the lovers.
The term "spiritual lust" may seem to be an oxymoron, but not in the world of romantic love. Here lovers meet, soul to soul, "and this union is a reunion with creation" (as the romantic poet in me once put it). Nothing less than God is to be found in the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual fusion of star-crossed lovers. Being in love is not just finding a mate; it is finding a soul mate. That spiritual "other half" (or "better half") that we have been deprived of since before birth has finally, at last, thank God, been given unto us and we can finally, at last, thank God, get on with the business of temporal bliss on earth and rehearse for the eternal bliss hereafter.
The belief that the beloved is God-given also goes a long way to remove any guilt interfering with the free, unfettered, and fabulous expression of the other lusts--especially sex.
Ordinary, everyday self-love, by comparison, is gentler, easier on the physiology. What it lacks in passion, it makes up for in practicality. Where it falls short in lust, it makes up for in like. What it fails to provide in false security ("I'll take care of you until the end of time!"), it makes up for in self-esteem, self-worth, and self-reliance. What it lacks in sexual yah-yahs, it makes up for in sensual umm-umms. In learning to love ourselves in this "taking care of" way, we also learn to love others--to take care of them, to occasionally take good care of them, and every so often (when we choose) to indulge them shamelessly.
Loving others, then, becomes part of loving ourselves if, when, and as we choose.
Not that romance can't be fun. It can. So can a roller coaster.
It's when we confuse the ride with real life or use it to make choices that have nothing to do with roller coasters that we get into trouble. As Stephen Sondheim put it, "the net descends."
Let's say we love the roller coaster and all the endorphins and adrenalin it produces. That doesn't mean that we should ever consider living on the roller coaster, or try to combine a roller-coaster life with career seeking, tranquility, or child rearing.
No, roller coaster rides are roller coaster rides and are compatible with loud music, screaming, losing your lunch (or at least the near occasion of losing your lunch), wind-blown hair, and not much else. If you desire and pursue the roller coaster above all else, then all else (especially those activities requiring tranquility, reflection, stability, nurturing, and quiet enjoyment) will not prevail.
Unless you want to run off with the carnival, letting a roller coaster (or, worse, Tunnel of Love) ride determine the rest of your life is, obviously, impractical.
And yet, that's just what we try to do with romantic love and the rest of our lives.
The Myth of Romantic Love: Living off the Fat of Infatuation
Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
Romantic love is, quite literally, a drug high. The intensely good feeling of "falling in love" is triggered by the same physiological reactions caused by free-fall in sky diving or winning a fortune in the lottery. Free-fall, fortune winning, and falling in love release into the bloodstream epinephrine, commonly known as adrenaline (the body's natural hey-hey-hey! chemical) and endorphins (the body's whoopee! chemical). These chemicals are just as pleasurable as any drugs (licit or illicit) you care to name--and just as addictive.
It's an addiction, however, our society not only tolerates, but encourages. According to cultural norms, addiction to heroin, cocaine, or alcohol is bad. Addiction to the thrill of falling in love is good. In fact, not being addicted to love is bad. Further, being "in love" is reason enough to do almost anything--from murder to abandoning one's career.
It is hard to name anything that gets more free positive publicity than romantic love. Every movie, commercial, TV show (sitcom, drama, or movie-of-the-week), popular song, billboard, and nine out of ten bestsellers sing the praises of romantic love.
It is painful to watch how tortured the plots become in order to work in the "love interest," as it's known in Hollywood. How is it that Indiana Jones always seems to find at least one gorgeous, intelligent, but otherwise romantically available woman in the midst of the jungle, desert, Incan ruins, Egyptian pyramids, or Peking opium den? Why? Well, as George Lucas once advised Steven Spielberg, "If the man and woman walk off into the sunset hand-in-hand in the last reel, it adds $10 million to the box office."
Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for the truth. One's only task is to realize oneself.
R. D. LAING
Romantic love is used so often because it sells so well, and the media always have something to sell. As they are using romantic love to sell what they want to sell (higher ratings, soap, Fenamint, books, tickets), they are also selling the notion of romantic love itself. This means romance sells better, which means it's used more often to sell, so it gets sold even more often, and so on. It's a very successful marketing tool.
From the consumer's point of view, however, there is only one small problem with romantic love: it's almost always doomed to failure.
Why Romantic Love Is Almost Always Doomed
The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn't even want the beastly thing. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving towards self-sufficiency.
QUENTIN CRISP
Few enterprises fail as often and as traumatically as romantic love, yet are still considered by many not just a solution, but the solution.
Solution to what? You name it: love waltzes in and dances your problems away. From solving the fundamental "problem" of existence to renewed health to financial rejuvenation to a cure for loneliness, Prince Charming or Cinderella cureth all.
At the outset, perhaps this is true. The problem, however, with this all-purpose problem solver is that it is based almost entirely on illusion.
We are programmed with the illusion of romantic love from an early age. The same culture that programs us to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Free Lunch also programs us to believe in One Significant Other Out There Without Whom We Can't Be Whole, Much Less Happy. Minnie and Mickey, Olive Oyl and Popeye, Barbie and Ken, Lady and the Tramp--and they all lived happily ever after.
Right.
Mercifully, by the time we reach puberty and the advent of all those raging hormones that form the biochemical basis of romantic love, we have been disillusioned (probably traumatically) about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and (for some) Free Lunch. Alas, as the early teenage years progress and our throbbing hormones create desires for other people's bodies which easily surpass even the most meaningful childhood visitation to Toys R Us, the illusion of romantic love is not dispelled. In fact, the spell is cast deeper, stronger, in Technicolor, 3-D, Dolby ProLogic, Sensearoundsound, and feelaroundbound.
In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.
MARGARET ANDERSON
We are taught (by songs, movies, TV shows) that the natural physical attractions of the early teenage years are all part of the romantic ideal. It is "the dawn of love," "love at first sight," or "if you call it horny your parents will ground you, but if you say you're in love your parents will say it's a crush and whisper `Oh, how cute!'"
We are told the attraction--which is biochemical and electrical, but feels downright magnetic--is just the start of Something Big. "You mean it gets better than this?" Oh, yes, the more deeply you fall in love, the more spectacular it becomes. "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing."
To quote another song (you can discourse on romantic love's philosophy by quoting almost any song), "Fools Rush in Where Wise Men Fear to Tread." If this is true (and it probably is, if you consider that even the wise can become foolish when hormones and cultural programming combine to lower the IQ roughly one hundred points, as it does when one is about to fall in love), the wise are distressingly silent when it comes to teaching us about a certain biological imperative common to all mammals.
Rather than saying, for example, "Yes, this is a perfectly natural, healthy reaction, but it is not practical to act on it every time you feel it any more than it is practical to eat every morsel of food you see. Sexual attraction is just energy; if the time is not right to express it sexually, for whatever reason, then the energy can be used to create something else that is productive, satisfying, and fun."
No, the wise seem to have had their wisdom co-opted by the Grand Illusion. Some of the wise tales sound more like old wives' tales. "This feeling you have will deepen into desire, ripen into passion, grow into fulfillment, and flower into love." That even the wise want to escape the birds and the bees and instead discuss flowers is indicative of just how far from reality those who sell us the notion of romantic love must go.
The message that "love" will solve all of our problems is repeated incessantly in contemporary culture-- like a philosophical tom tom. It would be closer to the truth to say that love is a contagious and virulent disease which leaves a victim in a state of near imbecility, paralysis, profound melancholia, and sometimes culminates in death.
QUENTIN CRISP
As animals, we have more in common with birds and bees than we do with flowers. Most birds pair up for a season. They build a nest, mate, lay eggs, sit on eggs, feed the young for a few weeks, kick the kids out of the nest, and fly south for a well-deserved winter vacation--alone. In the spring, they fly north and begin it all again, usually with a new partner. With the exception of a few species including some lesbian sea gulls off the coast of California, to birds "till death do us part" means that they are living amongst a larger-than-usual population of pussy cats.
And of bees, well, allow Phyllis Lindstrom, of The Mary Tyler Moore Show to explain: Did you know the male bee is nothing but the slave of the queen? And once the male bee has, how should I say, serviced the queen, the male dies. All in all, not a bad system.
By the time we've reached dating age, the emotionally seductive concepts of "someone to watch over me," "in the morning, in the evening, ain't we got fun?" and "they all lived happily ever after" form an almost irresistible package, which has us by the end of the fifteen-year romance infomercial picking up our phones, dialing the number, and proclaiming, "I want it! I want it! I want it now!"
As with most illusions, reality inevitably intervenes, causing hurt, anger, and the exceptional success of broken-hearted love ballads. Unlike other disappointments, however, reality intervening in romantic love fails to bring disillusion. We still believe in romantic love; we just think we didn't measure up or they didn't measure up. Next time, we believe--next person, next weekend, next year, next lifetime it will be better, it will happen--true love, true love. To believe that the illusion is real, but that the loved one or our ability to love is inadequate, is of course all part of the illusion.
I'm not saying romantic love can't lead to solid, healthy, flexible, mutually nourishing relationships--sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. But it's not a sure thing. Fifty-four percent of the marriages in this country end in divorce, and that's just the marriages. As we explored, if we add to that the number of people who fall in love "forever and ever" and break up before getting married, it's clear that what we are doing to achieve "happily ever after" ain't working.
When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Jack Parr, who was raised vegetarian, said that, as a child, every time he passed a butcher's window he thought there had been a terrible accident. It is not hard to come to the same conclusion as one surveys the landscape of romantic love, littered as it always seems to be with wounded, broken, and bleeding hearts.
Those who say the solution is to return to "traditional family values," have obviously spent very little time studying tradition, family, or history. In fact, "the good old days" (whenever you want to peg the good old days to be) were terrible for almost everyone. To return to "the good old days" would require women to be treated as chattel; a significantly shortened lifespan; six-day, fourteen-hour-a-day work weeks; fifty percent of all children dying before the age of eight; increased disease, pestilence, suffering, and no VCRs.
Since we can't go back to an idyllic past that never existed in the first place, what can we do? We do what we usually do when we discover what we believed in, hoped for, longed for, and fully expected to happen (someday) is simply not true; a myth. Poof. We become the sadder, but wiser, rabbit. This prevents us from becoming the miserable and stupid rabbit who keeps banking on a payoff that is a long shot at best.
The fundamental problem with romantic love is that it is based on sexual attraction, which is, at its most reliable, fickle. Once desire dries up--in a week, a month, or a year--it's hasta la vista, baby. More scientifically stated, when the physical and aesthetic characteristics of the love object no longer trigger spontaneous emissions of pleasurable chemicals into the bloodstream, the amount of time spent with, and attention paid to, the former object of desire decreases in direct ratio to the decrease of pleasurable hormonal secretions. Put most simply--when lust hits the dust, it's a bust.
Personally, I like sex and I don't care what a man thinks of me as long as I get what I want from him-- which is usually sex.
VALERIE PERRINE
"Oh, but I didn't love him for his body," some protest at my seemingly narrow analysis. "I loved him for his mind (character, ideals, kindness)." That may be so, dear heart, but you can bet the reason your partner--the mindful, idealistic, kindly character--showed you his remarkable mind, character, ideals, and kindness is, most likely, that he found your body not too shabby.behaviors (both uplifting and otherwise) in which anyone can take part--whether male or female, gay or straight, bi or sell.
When two people have a mutual nonsexual attraction, seldom, if ever, do they refer to it as "falling in love" or to their being together as a "relationship." It's called a friendship, partnership, or acquaintanceship. Although the two may grow to love one another, they do not fall into anything (unless there is money or some other lust-inducing enticement) and they don't go blindly leaping off emotional cliffs, yelling,
"Saint Valentine protect me! Here I go
o
o
o
o
o
oh-oh . . . "
SPLAT.
From time to time great minds have risked censure, public ridicule, and the loss of research grants to speak the truth about romantic love. Here are the best I could find. (O, to have had this list when I was seventeen!)
A mighty pain to love it is, And `tis a pain that pain to miss; But of all pains, the greatest pain It is to love, but love in vain.
--Abraham Cowley (1656)
Time, which strengthens friendship, weakens love.
--Jean de La Bruyre (1688)
Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.
--Joseph Addison (1713)
If love is judged by most of its effects, it resembles hate more than friendship.
--La Rochefoucauld
Love is ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.
--Jonathan Swift
It is impossible to love and to be wise.
--Francis Bacon
Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.
--Miguel de Unamuno
Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
--Flaubert
Love is a disease which fills you with a desire to be desired.
--Toulouse-Lautrec
Never the time and the place And the loved one all together!
--Robert Browning
Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.
--Oliver Goldsmith
When one is in love one begins by deceiving oneself, one ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls romance.
--Oscar Wilde
For though I know he loves me Tonight my heart is sad His kiss was not so wonderful As all the dreams I had.
--Sara Teasdale
One is very crazy when in love.
--Freud
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
--George Bernard Shaw The worst of having a romance is that it leaves one so unromantic.
--Oscar Wilde
When first we met we did not guess That Love would prove so hard a master.
--Robert Bridges
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia--to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
--H. L. Mencken
My silks and fine array, My smiles and languished air, By love are driv'n away; And mournful lean Despair Brings me yew to deck my grave: Such end true lovers have.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Lovers who have nothing to do but love each other are not really to be envied; love and nothing else very soon is nothing else.
--Walter Lippmann
Great loves too must be endured.
--Coco Chanel
If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
--Ernest Hemingway
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, A medley of extemporanea; And love is a thing that can never go wrong; And I am Marie of Roumania.
--Dorothy Parker
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
--H. L. Mencken
And the lovers lie abed with all their griefs in their arms.
--Dylan Thomas
There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations and yet which fails so regularly as love.
--Erich Fromm
Love is a universal migraine A bright stain on the vision Blotting out reason.
--Robert Graves
One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend.
--Quentin Crisp
Every young girl . . . tries to smother her first love in possessiveness. Oh what tears and rejection await the girl who imbues her first delicate match with fantasies of permanence, expecting that he at this gelatinous stage will fit with her in a finished puzzle for all the days.
--Gail Sheehy
Great passions don't exist--they are liar's fantasies. What do exist are little loves that may last for a short or longer while.
--Anna Magnani
There is one thing I would break up over, and that is if she caught me with another woman. I won't stand for that.
--Steve Martin
I can see from your utter misery, from your eagerness to misunderstand each other, and from your thoroughly bad temper, that this is the real thing.
--Peter Ustinov
You love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And I should die there smothered.
D. H. LAWRENCE
People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions; the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.
--Julian Barnes
She was a lovely girl. Our courtship was fast and furious--I was fast and she was furious.
--Max Kauffmann
My boyfriend and I broke up. He wanted to get married, and I didn't want him to.
--Rita Rudner
Told her I had always lived alone And I probably always would, And all I wanted was my freedom, And she told me that she understood. But I let her do some of my laundry And she slipped a few meals in between, The next thing I remember she was all moved in And I was buying her a washing machine.
--Jackson Browne
Kissing is a means of getting two people so close together that they can't see anything wrong with each other.
--Ren Yasenek
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible God.
--Jorge Luis Borges
Love is simple to understand if you haven't got a mind soft and full of holes. It's a crutch, that's all and there isn't any one of us that doesn't need a crutch.
--Norman Mailer
Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.
--Jean Cocteau
The happiest moments in any affair take place after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover and before the maddening personality of either party has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity.
--Quentin Crisp
To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.
--Nancy Mitford
Love is the drug which makes sexuality palatable in popular mythology.
--Germaine Greer
If you can stay in love for more than two years, you're on something.
--Fran Lebowitz