Can Love Last?

I just finished my second reading of Can Love Last:  The Fate of Romance Over Time, by Stephen Mitchell. It’s a little dense, and if you’re not into psychoanalytic theory and ways of thinking, you’ll find it baffling and uninteresting, I suspect, but I found it totally compelling, and really helpful.

I also just finished a glass of Scotch (Oban), and failed to eat a good lunch today, so I’m slightly light-headed.

But the last paragraph in the book really spoke to me, and I thought I’d share it with you.  Apologies if I’m/it’s slightly maudlin.  Blame the Oban:

But romance in relationships is not cultivated through a resolving of tensions, the discovery of a secret, a labored struggle to contrive novelty.  The cultivation of romance in relationships requires two people who are fascinated by the ways in which, individually and together, they generate forms of life they hope they can count on.  It entails a tolerance of the fragility of those hopes, woven together from realities and fantasies, and an appreciation of the ways in which, in the rich density of contemporary life, realities often become fantasy and fantasies often become reality.

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