But what I want to tell you is that I left my fiancé when it was almost too late. And I tell people the story of being cheated on because that story is simple. People know how it goes. But it’s harder to tell the story of how I convinced myself I didn’t need what was necessary to survive. How I convinced myself it was my lack of needs that made me worthy of love.

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.

∆ James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

“Not everybody knows how to be mate,” she laments, but says it’s not due to a lack of effort. “We try, you know but we’re not taught that. That’s something we don’t know how to do. It’s a whole culture built around it, but we don’t even know how to do it.”

We have to remember that love always, always transforms its object.