The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.
Interpretation
Love is delicate and often complicated, and expressing it can lead to vulnerability.
Christopher Hitchens reflects on the vulnerability inherent in expressing love, highlighting that the phrase 'I love you' can often feel awkward or misplaced. Despite this fragility, he suggests that expressing love can be more meaningful when it's sincere and straightforward rather than lofty and idealized.
In practice
During a wedding ceremony to express the importance of love.
In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.
[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.
Let me tell you something: for hundreds of thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been impossible to have, or those like us would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this smiley-face, ingratiating way — because it’s had to give so much more ground and because we know so much more. But you’ve got no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side.
I grabbed her ankle and kissed it, and when I looked up I saw her chin and her eyelashes as she threw back her head and laughed.
When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.
A real girl isn't perfect and a perfect girl isn't real.
To know the pain of too much tenderness
From moment then to moment their desire Gained strength, and wisdom fled before love's fire; Passion engulfed them, and these lovers lay Entwined together till the break of day.
I think the thing about love is that even though the things around us change, we as human beings, a lot of the ways we interact, and the ways we love each other is timeless. It requires trust, honesty, commitment, romance, and physical chemistry.
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