no cure for love

“ infatuation is central to the beginning of all relationships. It can be triggered by something as simple as the sight of an attractive stranger — someone at a work conference, or the person across the aisle on a flight to O’Hare. One might observe and arm themselves with just a few details — the way they hold eye contact when they speak, their sparse choice of jewelry, the curve of their neckline — and allow these to create a story of who the person is before we know anything concrete about them.

Infatuations aren’t delusions. That way they have of holding their head may truly indicate someone confident, wry, and sensitive; they really may have the humor and intelligence implied by their eyes and the tenderness suggested by their mouth. The error of the infatuation is more subtle: a failure to keep in mind the central truth of human nature:  that everyone  - not merely our current partners, in whose multiple failings we are such experts-  but everyone will have something substantially and maddeningly wrong with them when we spend more time around them, something so wrong as to make a mockery of those initially rapturous feelings.

The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. The best cure for love is to get to know them better."

La fatiga del amor – Alain de Botton

Lumen, 2017