"Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person, it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person....
But this is what young people are so often and disastrously wrong in doing: they fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, the scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment...: And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come....in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that hvae been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road.....
Whoever looks seriously will find that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and or both these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, there is no general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered."
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
