And how often I notice our habit of falling in love with our opposites! Curiously, we seem completely unaware of this irrational behaviour: we regard it as normal, seeing no contradiction. Or is it more accurate to say that we perceive nothing wrong with irrational behaviour? Think about it for a moment: worshipping and devoting yourself to someone whose values are opposite to those you cherish! Falling in love with your enemy! The world calls it sharing: I call it compromise and weakness.
Yet there must be tension in a relationship to give love material to work with. There must be conflict in order for each participant to find their own identity and their own joy. That is, some suffering is necessary in love, as love involves playing one lover off against the other through pain. That is, for a couple to be compatible in love, there must be a degree of incompatibility. Thus, in love, the imperfect is held to be perfect.
Yes, love needs rough terrain. It needs the challenge of mountain climbs, and the thrill of downhill runs. Such activity, however, is not without cost: bones break when you fall.
It must also be said that love expects compromise and sacrifice from the loved one. Yet how foolish is a love in which one has to change who one is, to keep in favour with love.
The concept of love as sharing also deserves a second look, for it seems to me that between two beings so radically different as man and woman, no true reciprocal relation is possible. Man and woman have entirely different concepts of love, so there are two loves, and they are so unlike as to deserve different names. The love of woman is devotion. The love of man is to want devotion. Woman gives herself; man acquires more. I see little scope for sharing in such a relationship.