Cleaning out some files today, I ran across this quote.  I think it’s extremely accurate and nuanced, and worth some careful consideration–whether you’re a couple in recovery from sex addiction, a couple trying to fortify your relationship, or an individual working to improve your non-romantic interpersonal relationships.

“Love is the essential ingredient that makes it possible for us to remain present and to endure human life’s suffering and sober realities. Without love, it is difficult to value our lives; our natural response is detachment from life as a means of coping with its intrinsic physical and emotional pain. If we bring our love forward, after long-standing patterns of safe retreat, we will inevitably upset the comfortable homeostasis of our life situations, and create disturbance and crisis in our usual (and often destructive) ways of adapting to love’s absence. Thus, we must be respectful of the potentially overwhelming experience of opening to love’s energy when we have sustained unhealthy, yet functional, ways of surviving without it.”

From Kenneth R. Lakritz and Thomas Knoblauch’s Elders on Love, p. xvii