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.
Citizenship to me is more than a piece of paper. Citizenship is also about character. I am an American. We're just waiting for our country to recognize it.
If any difference should be made by law between husband and wife, reason, justice and humanity, if their voices were heard, would dictate that it should be in her favor.
I think, don't you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn't bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father's death. No matter how much she was in love with him.
Many women are the lower-earning partner in a married couple, thanks in part to forces that relegate women to less remunerative professions and pay them less for the same work.
Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born.
I believe that women know if their husbands are unfaithful. They feel it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.