At most, there are two ways that can launch us into an experience of real love.

The first is a journey that takes ruthless self-criticism as its base. It means that, however long this relationship lasts, I must regularly ask myself whether or not I am really attending to the other. Do I hear the other and, most of all, do I respond? Have I tried to determine what it is that the other needs from me right now and then, if necessary, negotiate the giving of it? Am I really trying to come out of myself for the sake of the other?

The second consciousness of love is that the world is not a world of one—me. Love makes space for the insights of others, for the opinions of others, for the very separate goals and hopes of others who are also struggling both to be themselves and to enable the one they love to do the same.

As Anna Strong writes, “To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.”

Love is not a mold that makes two people the same person. Love is the dream that enables both of us to be our own best person—together. Love knows no one can fill up in us what we lack in ourselves. But coming to live what we know about love for the sake of others, as well as for our self, is the one thing that can possibly stop the restless sleep that comes with loneliness.

—from Between the Dark and the Daylight by Joan Chittister