All quotes from Jonah’s book
Our mental health is defined by how we cope.
When we have a secure base, we are better at dealing with our
feelings of insecurity.
When a relationship endures, it is not because the flame never burns
out. It is because the flame is always being relit.
Part of what you learn from an intimate relationship is that you are not nearly as easy to
live with as you imagined.
Although we think of love in the present tense, the endurance of the
feeling depends on the past, on all those scenes and stories we do not forget.
Intimacy is made possible by history, for the feeling of love is as
much a memory as it is an experience.
We carry our origins to our graves, but the meaning of our origins –
the lessons of our childhood – can always be revised.
How we describe the past of a relationship shapes its future.
Life is messy. It is full of contingency and randomness and
accidents.
To be in love is to forever lose the capacity not to care.
The reality of romance is that it’s not just about romantic things:
every relationship is also a test of stubbornness and endurance, a measure of
our willingness to stay committed even when we’d rather run away.
We learn how to love by being loved.
Love has no destination – it is a journey into itself, and on the
most difficult days the best we can do is marvel at our slow progress, at all
the ways we’ve been changed by a feeling.
From dust to dust, with just love in between.
Living beings only evolve when demand exceeds supply.
Every new love must require the sacrifice of an old one; attachment
is a zero-sum game.
The mystery of love is the mystery of our lives: we are bound by a
force we cannot fathom, driven by desires we cannot deny.
