“What makes people difficult and dooms relationships is almost never the people involved. It’s what we are trying to do with them. Inviting someone to marry you is really not a very kind thing to do to someone you love, because it’s going to drag the beloved into a range of really rather unpleasant and challenging things: doing the accounts with you, meeting your family regularly, seeing you exhausted and bleary-eyed after work, keeping the living room tidy, bringing up a child. To really love someone - that is, to wish the best for someone - might more fairly mean foregrounding your best qualities with someone for a few ecstatic few summer months, then mutually and tenderly parting at the station or airport.”