Reality check

"While the play and experience of intimacy often generates sparks of curiosity and passion, it also ensures that intimacy can only be intermittent at best. Intimate moments, in which we make contact across the great divide of our differences, are just that--moments--rather than a consistent, steady flow...At its best two people can appreciate and enjoy each other in midst of their differences. At its worst, however, it becomes the stuff of soap opera and tragedy."...

While we always want to approach and live our lives in a spirit of hope it is equally prudent to remember and remind ourselves from time to time that life is never predictable and things often don't work out the way we hope...but,I also suspect if we always received what we hoped for at a particular time if we wouldn't be just as equally disappointed "later" rather than sooner.

True Love

"True love doesn't embrace others in spite of their flaws, as if rising above them. Rather, it finds "the other lovable in spite of and together with their weaknesses, errors, and imperfections...Because of your beloved's weakness you shall not remove yourself from them or make your relationship more remote: on the contrary, the two of you shall hold together with greater solidarity in order to remove the weakness"...

Soren Kierkegaard Works of Love....This of course does not mean one accepts and thus enables abuse and assumes our beloved is self aware and acknowledges their weaknesses.