the tender trap

from a comment about an article that cited 3 warning signs that a guy is not a good guy to have a long term relationship with:

"I dont (sic) think that relationships can last unless you have both parties so wrapped up in one anothers (sic) lives that extricating themselves would be like ripping off a limb. Those relationships survive. The ones with not much invested as far as family friends and effort seem doomed to fail. I still feel that unless a man is open to falling totally in love with you right from the start your (sic) wasting your time trying to convince him. Hearts (sic) open or heart is closed. Cant (sic) make something out of nothing."

from the article "Is Sex Interesting?" by Wallace Shawn (Aug 2009, Harper's Magazine):

"Perhaps it is the power of sex that has taught us to love the meaningless and thereby turn it
into the meaningful. Amazingly, the love of what is arbitrary (which one could alternatively
describe as the love of reality) is something we human beings are capable of feeling, and perhaps
even what we call the love of the beautiful is simply a particular way of exercising this remarkable ability...Sex has always been known to be such a powerful force that fragile humanity can’t help but be terribly nervous in front of it, so powerful barriers have been devised to control it—taboos of all varieties, first of all, and then all the emotions subsumed under the concepts of jealousy and possessiveness, possessiveness being a sort of anticipatory form of jealousy. (A recent survey of married people in the United States found that when asked the question “What is very important for a successful marriage?” the quality mentioned most frequently—by 93 percent—was “faithfulness,” while “happy sexual relationship” came in
with only 70 percent. In other words, to 23 percent of the respondents, it seemed more important that they and their partner should not have sex with others than that they themselves should enjoy sex.)"

from "the once and future king", T.H. White:

"It is difficult to explain about Guenever, unless it is possible to love two people at the same time. Probably it is not possible to love two people in the same way, but there are different kinds of love...It had been a successful union, as "made" marriages generally are, and before Lancelot came on the scene the young girl had adored her famous husband...she had felt respect for him, with gratitude, kindness, love, and a sense of protection. She had felt more than this - you might say she had felt everything except the passion of romance."

"A woman can forget a lot of love in two years-or at any rate she can pack it away, and grow accustomed to it, and hardly remember it more than a businessman might remember an occasion when, by ill luck, he had failed to make an investment which would have made him a millionaire."

from an article about Neil deGrasse Tyson's book "the pluto files":

"...Disney's dog Pluto was sketched the same year the cosmic object was discovered. And Pluto was discovered by an American. So here you have a recipe for Americans falling in love with a planet that really is just a tiny ice ball...

So that was the famous Planet X. And eventually, Clyde Tombaugh in Arizona discovered a planet, which got named Pluto. Not by an American, though, because an American would never have named it after a highly advertised, highly marketed laxative of the same name that was popular then."