Depression is the flaw in love. There's no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss. And that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy.
Interpretation
Depression often accompanies love due to the fear of loss, but it can also deepen emotional connections.
In this quote, Andrew Solomon articulates the complex relationship between love and the potential for loss, suggesting that the fear of losing someone we love can lead to feelings of depression. However, this very awareness of loss can also enhance intimacy, as it encourages deeper emotional connections between people, making love a profound yet vulnerable experience.
In practice
In a discussion about emotional vulnerability in relationships, this quote can highlight the depth of love and the pain that can accompany it.
I don't accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones. And I believe that in the same way we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness.
While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.
I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.
Then I repeated these words to my spirits: 'Leave me be; give me peace; and let me do the work of my life. I will never forget you.' Something about that incantation was particularly appealing to me. 'I will never forget you'-- as though one had to address the pride of the spirits, as though one wanted them to feel good about being exorcised.
Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.
Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true.
He does not refuse sustenance to the one who speaks ill of Him. How then could He refuse sustenance to the one whose soul is over flowing with love for Him?
Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.
No. No games. He wanted her and didn't care who knew it. He definitely and absolutely wanted her, longed for her, wanted to do more things than there were names for with her.
There are only two energies at the core of the human experience: love and fear. Love grants freedom, fear takes it away. Love invites full expression, fear punishes it. Love invites you, always, to break the bonds of ignorance.
Love alone allows man to forget himself... it alone can still redeem even the darkest hours of the past since it alone finds the courage to believe in the mercy of the holy God.
She imagined herself both queen and slave, dominatrix and victim. In her imagination she was making love with men of all skin colors--white, black, yellow--with homosexuals and beggars. She was anyone's, and anyone could do anything to her. She had one, two, three orgasms, one after another. She imagined everything she had never imagined before, and she gave herself to all that was most base and most pure.
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