A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.
Interpretation
This quote reflects how love constructs an image of a person from incomplete knowledge, filled in by our imagination.
Andrew Sean Greer's quote delves into the nature of love and how it is often built on fragmented understandings of a partner. The idea that we fill in the gaps of our loved one's personality with our imagination suggests that our perception is heavily influenced by our desires and emotions. This phenomenon is especially strong in the early stages of a relationship, where mystery and unknown aspects heighten romantic feelings. As we get to know someone more deeply, the illusion can fade, but the intense desire often resurfaces in memories or loss, showcasing the complexity of love and attachment.
In practice
This quote could be used in a wedding speech to highlight the magic of new love.
Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.
No one would have known, from how he held my hand, [that] over the years of heartache he had hatched a plot to change my life forever. He held his grip and would not let me go. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain.
Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory.
We are each the love of someone's life.
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.
How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?
Love is taking a few steps backward, maybe even more ... to give way to the happiness of the person you love.
Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
Obedience keeps the rules. Love knows when to break them.
Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.