"Relationships are meant to constrain," Schwartz told me, "but if you're always on the look out for better, such constraints are experienced with bitterness and resentment."

"She did not live life on the surface."

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.