“I remain convinced to this day that engaging in romantic relationships is preferable to abstaining from them. Within the arena of love, one can delve deeply into understanding both oneself and others. Love serves as a crucible for comprehending desires, envy, possessiveness, selfishness, magnanimity, and transcendence. It is a platform for competition, where one seeks to claim the other’s self while relinquishing one’s own. I have never regarded love as an act of indulgence. Throughout the course of a relationship, we inflict wounds and receive them in return, thereby arduously mapping out the indomitable boundaries of our own selves that cannot be ceded to another, as well as the insurmountable limits of the other’s self. I have always believed that love does not blind a person; on the contrary, it is a state of “extreme clarity when facing the other, so much so that it appears utterly frenzied to onlookers.”
