Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off.
Interpretation
Intimate relationships can lead to complex emotions, making it easier to sever ties when pain or shame is involved.
In this quote, Daniel Mendelsohn highlights the paradox of intimacy in relationships, suggesting that closeness not only fosters love but can also expose vulnerabilities like pain, envy, and shame. He implies that those who know us deeply, and have witnessed our struggles, can become the easiest to distance ourselves from during moments of emotional conflict, underscoring the fragility of deep connections.
In practice
Using this quote during a relationship workshop to discuss the complexities of emotional closeness.
The writers we absorb when we're young bind us to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes with iron. In time, the bonds fall away, but if you look very closely you can sometimes make out the pale white groove of a faded scar, or the telltale chalky red of old rust.
When Ukrainians and Israelis speak to each other, each side respects the other.
Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.
We might have to broaden our scope of how we think about where women are vulnerable, because different things make different women vulnerable.
While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.
The Puritan ethic of marriage was first to look not for a partner whom you do love passionately at this moment but rather for one whom you can love steadily as your best friend for life, then to proceed with God’s help to do just that.
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