love

A young couple is led to imagine that a relationship is a box full of goodies... and that they can sit down and eat out of this box all their lives, and it will never be empty.

But it is empty. There will never be anything in it unless the partners put it in there.

And if they do not want it to be empty, they must put in a lot more than they are in the habit of taking out. But the young romantic who imagined it ought to be full of goodies, institutes a law suit against God and against his partner as soon as he discovers the game. He feels swindled.

Yet he imagines the next box he buys will be full, even though the last one was empty.

W &B Beecher

I knew couples who had been married almost forever — tending each other’s illnesses, dealing with money troubles or the daughter’s suicide or the grandson’s drug addiction. And I was beginning to suspect that it made no difference whether they’d married the right person. You’re just with who you’re with. You’ve signed on with her, put in half a century with her, grown to know her as well as you know yourself, and she’s become the right person, or the only person. I wish someone had told me that earlier; I’d have hung on then.

Anne Tyle

There is no limit to our capacity to love. We can never be satisfied by loving just one person here and another there. Our need is to love completely, universally, without any reservations — in other words, to become love itself. It can take our breath away to glimpse the vastness of such love.

Eknath Easwaran