Real love is always chaotic. You lose control; you lose perspective. You lose the ability to protect yourself. The greater the love, the greater the chaos. It’s a given and that’s the secret.
Interpretation
Real love can be overwhelming and chaotic, affecting one's sense of control and safety.
This quote by Jonathan Carroll emphasizes the intense and often tumultuous nature of true love. It suggests that real love involves a deep emotional entanglement that can lead to losing control and perspective, indicating that the intensity of love is often accompanied by an equally intense sense of chaos and uncertainty. The mention of chaos as a 'given' reflects the idea that such experiences are an inherent part of loving deeply.
In practice
In a speech on relationships, to illustrate the often complicated nature of love.
Part of life is a quest to find that one essential person who will understand our story. But we choose wrongly so often. Over the ensuing years that person we thought understood us best ends up regarding us with pity, indifference, or active dislike. Those who truly care can be divided into two categories: those who understand us, and those who forgive our worst sins. Rarely do we find someone capable of both.
Dogs are minor angels, and I don't mean that facetiously. They love unconditionally , forgive immediately, are the truest of friends, willing to do anything that makes us happy
I have never heard anyone say This is it. I know right now is the high point of my life. It will never get any better. Only in retrospect do we recognize the best times and of course then it is too late.
When you love someone deeply, you know secrets they haven't told you yet. Or secrets they aren't even aware of themselves. ... She was also the person I wanted to share the trivia of my life with, because that too is part of the magic of concern: Whatever you live is important to them and they will help you through it.
It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched by it, despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we will be spared its cold hand on our heart.
Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.
The married should not forget that to speak of love begets love.
That she had somehow taken the initiative to learn my name should have struck me then, but it did not. Instead, as she stood on the street with the rain coming down and mascara running onto her cheeks, all I could think was that I'd never seen anyone more beautiful.
Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.
What is new is not bisexuality, but rather the widening of our awareness and acceptance of human capacities for sexual love.
Another argument, vaguer and even less persuasive, is that gay marriage somehow does harm to heterosexual marriage. I have yet to meet anyone who can explain to me what this means. In what way would allowing same-sex partners to marry diminish the marriages of heterosexual couples?
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