Clearly, love is not about making you happy. It is a form of initiation that may radically transform you, making you more of who you are but less of who you have been. If you don’t realize that you are walking on coals and running the gauntlet and surviving the wilderness in quest of a vision—all within the confines of a simple human relationship—you could be undone by it. Love gives you a sense of meaning, but it asks a price. It will make you into the person you are called to be, but only if you endure its pains and allow it to empty you as much as it fills you.

It’s tempting to become the hero and savior, but getting life in apparent order is not the same as giving the soul what it needs. It may need more chaos, deeper impasse, and increased darkness.

Love’s impossibility forces you to become a different person. You are forced to think and consider what love is all about. You believe you have to make hard choices, but, more important, in your deliberations you are educating yourself.

The ideal is not wholeness or integration, but marriage and love, not an overcoming of differences but creative coexistence and mutual influence.

We have to love our own complexities and contradictions, encouraging an interior marriage and eroticism of the soul.