In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.
Interpretation
The quote critiques self-love as a modern trend and suggests that loving someone else is viewed as betrayal.
Russell Baker's quote reflects on contemporary attitudes towards self-love, positing that in a society that promotes selfishness and narcissism, acknowledging love for another person could be seen as a betrayal to self, or to a primary relationship. It emphasizes the tension between individualism and the commitments we make to others in loving relationships, hinting at the complexities of emotional fidelity in a self-centric culture.
In practice
This quote could be used in a relationship counseling session to discuss the importance of commitment.
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.
Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.
Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.
In elite, primarily white institutions, there are many blacks who have white wives. So much so that sometimes there is almost the assumption that I would be married to a white woman.
Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.
That fiend!" Mr. Darling would cry, and Nana's bark was the echo of it, but Mrs. Darling never upbraided Peter; there was something in the right-hand corner of her mouth that wanted her not to call Peter names.
I've met the most interesting people while flying or on a boat. These methods of travel seem to attract the kind of people I want to be with.
I never meant to be a sexual object for anyone but my husband. I never thought a picture of my body would be tacked up in menβs bathrooms. I hate men looking at me and thinking what they think. And I know what they think. They write and tell me.
Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. Marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That's why it's a sacrament; You give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you're giving, you're not giving to the other person; you're giving to the relationship.
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