Pleasures of Love
Scrolling Facebook for hours is not mentally healthy by any stretch of the imagination. I try to do it very little. But every once in a while, some worthy tidbit of wisdom comes through my feed. And today, this is what I saw: "Paradoxically, it is friendship that often offers us the real route to the pleasures that Romanticism associates with love. That this sounds surprising is only a reflection of how underdeveloped our day-to-day vision of friendship has become. We associate it with a casual acquaintance we see only once in a while to exchange inconsequential and shallow banter. But real friendship is something altogether more profound and worthy of exultation. It is an arena in which two people can get a sense of each other’s vulnerabilities, appreciate each other’s follies without recrimination, reassure each other as to their value, and greet the sorrows and tragedies of existence with wit and warmth. Culturally and collectively, we have made a momentous mistake...