Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off.
Interpretation
Intimate relationships can lead to complex emotions, making it easier to sever ties when pain or shame is involved.
In this quote, Daniel Mendelsohn highlights the paradox of intimacy in relationships, suggesting that closeness not only fosters love but can also expose vulnerabilities like pain, envy, and shame. He implies that those who know us deeply, and have witnessed our struggles, can become the easiest to distance ourselves from during moments of emotional conflict, underscoring the fragility of deep connections.
In practice
Using this quote during a relationship workshop to discuss the complexities of emotional closeness.
The writers we absorb when we're young bind us to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes with iron. In time, the bonds fall away, but if you look very closely you can sometimes make out the pale white groove of a faded scar, or the telltale chalky red of old rust.
We don't have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that's what I want in life.
If there is no order in your relationship with your wife, with your husband, with your children, with your neighbour - whether that neighbour is near or very far away - forget about meditation.
If he was a good man, how could he leave me? So he must not be a good man. But if he isn't good, then why does it hurt so much to lose him?
This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
Listening is a very active awareness of the coming together of at least two lives. Listening, as far as I'm concerned, is certainly a prerequisite of love. One of the most essential ways of saying 'I love you' is being a receptive listener.
Mothers and daughters find in each other the source of great comfort but also of great pain. We talk to each other in better and worse ways than we talk to anyone else.
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