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.
Interpretation
Love can feel like a kind of madness that is difficult to endure alone, leading us to seek connection with others.
In this quote, Andrew Sean Greer explores the profound complexity of love and its impact on our emotional state. He suggests that love can drive us to a state of 'minor madness,' making it unbearable to experience alone. Despite our desire to turn to the person we love for relief, this often feels impossible, leading us instead to seek comfort from others who share our experiences of sorrow, even if they cannot fully understand our specific pain. This highlights the universal need for companionship and understanding in the face of emotional turmoil.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of emotional support in relationships, this quote beautifully captures the essence of seeking companionship.
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.
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.
Oh, you who are trying to learn the marvel of Love through the copy book of reason, I'm very much afraid that you will never really see the point.
... the woman who grows up with the idea that she is simply to be an amiable animal, to be caressed and coaxed, is invariably a bitterly disappointed woman. A game of chess will cure such a conceit forever. The woman that knows the most, thinks the most, feels the most, is the most. Intellectual affection is the only lasting love. Love that has a game of chess in it can checkmate any man and solve the problem of life.
Love said to me, there is nothing that is not me. Be silent.
You're able to love others, to give to others, and do for others by giving and doing for yourself first.
If you do not know how to take care of yourself, and the violence in you, then you will not be able to take care of others. You must have love and patience before you can truly listen to your partner or child. If you are irritated you cannot listen. You have to know how to breath mindfully, embrace your irritation and transform it. Offer ONLY understand and compassion to your partner or child - This is the true practice of love.
With the most infinite tenderness I have ever known in my life, he put his arms around me, gently, gently, and I embraced him around the neck, and we touched.
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