A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.
Interpretation
A love affair unfolds like a narrative, with phases of excitement and challenges that ultimately may not resolve satisfactorily.
F. Scott Fitzgerald compares a love affair to a short story, highlighting the structure it tends to follow, which includes a captivating beginning, a potentially dragging middle filled with routine, and an often disappointing end marked by anticlimaxes instead of a conclusive resolution. This reflects the complexities of romantic relationships, suggesting that they may not always live up to the idealized stories we create in our minds.
In practice
During a discussion on the challenges of relationships, one might quote this to illustrate how romance can mirror the arc of a story.
Don't be so anxious about it,' she laughed. 'I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do; I never got the trick of it.' She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. 'So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.' He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. 'Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I'm not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don't move suddenly.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
But you can love more than just one person, can't you?
A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another - as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths.
Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead.--I shall feel it.
What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.
It is part of the nature of every definitive love that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity.
Love bears it out even to the edge of doom.
Where did love begin?What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary,dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you? In the fossil record of our existence, there is no trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth's crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts.
Oh, if it be to choose and call thee mine, love, thou art every day my Valentine!
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