Thursday, January 11, 2024

Dostoyevsky on Love

 Public Domain

"Love always passes, but incompatibility remains forever."

The Insulted and the Injured by Fyodor Dostoyevsky



Easy to see when you look back...especially with the partial objectivity granted by the passage of time. Love is not blind, it's blinding. So yes, I did date a born again Christian for years before that relationship crashed and burned. I was incapable of seeing that her death grip on an absurd version of spirituality would be the death of me. And that was just my first girlfriend. I'm not about to go through the whole list of my mistakes, but I think it's true that in every one of them my desire for a relationship--that safe haven against loneliness and that bulwark against the sheer terror of a seemingly meaningless universe--made me close my eyes to some very obvious incompatibility issues. 

I'm through with all of that now. I much prefer the honesty of isolation to the constant (and humiliating) need for compromise that is a part of any romantic relationship.

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