❝ It's painful, loving someone from afar.

Watching them - from the outside.

The once familiar elements of their life reduced to nothing more than occasional mentions in conversations and faces changing in photographs.....

They exist to you now as nothing more than living proof that something can still hurt you ... with no contact at all. ❞

- Ranata Suzuki

First of all, love is a joint experience between two people - but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different places. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. She feels in his soul that her love is a solitary thing. And he comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. She must house his love within herself as best she can; she must create for herself a whole new inward world - a world intense and strange, complete in herself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare her beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause her only pain.

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