“I will never be in a man’s place, never will a man be in mine. Whatever identifications are possible, one will never exactly occupy the place of the other—they are irreducible one to the other.”
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it. Other affections have to be severely disciplined.
“But the ruse of the triangle is not a trivial mental maneuver. We
see in it the radical constitution of desire. For, where eros is lack,
its activation calls for three structural components—lover, beloved
and that which comes between them. They are three points
of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified
by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined they are
held apart.”
If, by grace or hard work or both, we manage to broaden the scope of our love so that we are able to give patient attention, to respond joyfully and generously, to the presence of a wide variety of others, this suggests not that we have abandoned a point of view, but that we have learned not to let our responses be totally dictated by what we believe to be our needs, and to accept, or even celebrate as a gift, what in another person is irrelevant to my imagined need or expectation.
Georges Bataille
Susan Bordo, Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of a Culture
Little Bristling Soul 