Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.
Interpretation
Understanding sex deeply requires embracing its complexities, even at the risk of emotional turmoil.
This quote by Sharon Olds suggests that to truly grasp the nature of sexual relationships, one must be willing to confront the potential challenges and dangers that may come with them. Engaging deeply with such an intimate aspect of life can lead to profound experiences, but it also comes with the risk of emotional vulnerability and potential hurt.
In practice
In a discussion about the complexities of adult relationships.
Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photograph of war; a breast self-exam; the tooth fairy; Calvinist parents who beat up their children; a gesture of love; seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors.
... sometimes I can feel it, the way we are pouring slowly toward a curve and around it through something dark and soft, and we are bound to each other.
It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated.
The kind of caring that the client-centered therapist desires to achieve is a gullible caring, in which clients are accepted as they say they are, not with a lurking suspicion in the therapist's mind that they may, in fact, be otherwise. This attitude is not stupidity on the therapist's part; it is the kind of attitude that is most likely to lead to trust.
Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others.
Death ends a life, not a relationship.
'Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.
Canada and the United States have reached the point where we no longer think of each other as 'foreign' countries. We think of each other as friends, as peaceful and cooperative neighbors on a spacious and fruitful continent.
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