Anyone worth knowing is inevitably also going to be exasperating:
“Do I want to be loved in spite of?” Donald Barthelme writes in his story “Rebecca” about a woman with green skin. “Do you? Does anyone? But aren’t we all, to some degree?”
We don’t give other people credit for the same interior complexity we take for granted in ourselves,
if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.