(via nectarinemint)
I think it’s great for two people to be together. That is a good number. I think, that to keep it alive though, you can’t spend every day together. It wears out the magic, Love means nothing to me if it’s not fortified with fierce, painful longing, brief explosive instances of furious passion and intimacy and then a sad parting for a time. In that way, you can give your life to it and still have a life of your own. I think some couples spend too much time together. They flatten out the potential for experience by constant closeness. Passion builds over time like steam. Let it rage until it’s exhausted and then leave it alone to let it build up again. Why can’t love be insane and distorted? How can it be vital if it has the same threshold as normal day-to-day experience?
Why can’t you write burning letters and let your nocturnal self smolder with desire for one who is not there? Why not let the days before you see her be excruciating and ferment in your mind so on the day you go to the airport to pick her up, you’re nearly sick with anticipation? And then when desire shows the first sign of contentment, throw it back it its cage and let it slowly build itself back into a state of starved fury. Then when you are together, it all matters. So that when you look into her eyes, you lose your balance, so that when she touches you, it feels like you have never been touched before. When she says your name, you think it was she who named you. When she has gone, you bury your face in the pillow to smell her hair and you lie awake at night remembering your face in her neck, her breathing and the amazing smell of her skin. Your eyes go wet because you want her so bad and miss her so much. Now that is worth the miles and the time. That matches the inferno of life. Otherwise you poison each other with your presence day after day as you drag each other through the inevitable mundane aspects of your lives. That is the slow death that I see slapped on faces everywhere I go. It’s part of the world’s sadness that’s more empty than cold, poorly lit rooms in cities of the American night.
"morgan and i went out to dinner at the cafe that we used to love and now we hate. we talked about how rough last year was. i think the thing you hear the most but never really truly believe about living with someone is that it takes a lot of work and a lot of fighting, adjusting and learning before it gets amazing and we agreed that the most important thing to learn and remember is you have to love the person you’re with the way they need to be loved and not the way you want to love them. if you remember that, everything is like pie.
i think when the time comes that i have kids, that will be the number one piece of advice i could ever give about relationships.
what’s yours?
When you stop
fretting over
your own scars,
and start
kissing
the scars
of another.
That’s
how you
know.
(via Psychology Today’s recent cover story, “Are You With the Right Mate?”)
In mature love, says Meinecke, “we do not look to our partner to provide our happiness, and we don’t blame them for our unhappiness. We take responsibility for the expectations that we carry, for our own negative emotional reactions, for our own insecurities, and for our own dark moods.”
Sometimes it’s better to remember how to be a best friend instead of a good lover.
A good lover is nice to have when it’s cold outside and the cold wind seeps through the cracks of old window panes and the ceiling fan that is on consistently becomes more noticeable as the air circulates and falls cold on the curve of your feet. A good lover is nice to have when you need someone to grip onto as a reminder that you can be loved, yes you can feel the warmth of another pressed firm against your body. A good lover is good to have when you need the bite of love to be softened a bit, the sour taste in your mouth washed down with a lick of sugar. A good lover is good to have when you need to know you are one of those with a lover. One of the luckier ones. One of the loved ones. One of them. A lover is good to have when you feel the explicable need to share yourself with someone. Someone who will take it willingly and hungrily. The taking is greater than the giving.
And other times, it’s important to remember to keep the laughter electric and the banter running thick with a loose tongue. Because the promise of torrid sex is nothing compared to knowing you’re something concrete. And the feeling that there is something more and that it can only get better as the time ticks on by.
I think I forgot that part. I think I forgot to be more than a lover and a girlfriend. And that’s when the lines blurred and things got fuzzy because I’m a curse word, I’m an exclamation point and I think with my heart and not my head. I was trying to cover all my bases, tuck in all the corners, keep the eyes in the back of my head eyes alert and awake.
And now the laughing is bright and I remember all the reasons why this works, why we work and why we wanted each other to stick around. I remember that he makes me laugh and that I can make him laugh too. I remember that I can be funny sometimes, and now I remember that we are more than just lovers. We are best friends. We are concrete around each other’s feet. And I now remember what makes it work.
You have to let go.
You only need someone to accept you completely."
