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.
Nobody in Europe will be abandoned. Nobody in Europe will be excluded. Europe only succeeds if we work together.
Sometimes when I'm with you, I remember things I lost when I was your age. Like I remember the sound of the rain and the smell of the wind.
Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering.
The relationship between a manufacturer and his advertising agency is almost as intimate as the relationship between a patient and his doctor. Make sure that you can life happily with your prospective client before you accept his account.
After an hour or two of being socially on, we introverts need to turn off and recharge ... This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression.
My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.
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