Elena Zamora Ruiz’s Reviews > Essays in Love > Status Update

True. Then: ”Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, snd through our union with the beloved, hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.”
While I can partly relate with the parts about locating an artificial illusion of perfection on the loved one, I believe from my experience that that idealization provokes a horrible comparison with the self, in which one (at least I) would feel a great guilt of not being good enough for the loved one and not deserving them. I believe we want to find ourselves, even the ugly sides, in the beloved so that we can convince ourselves that we too are capable of being loved and even worth loving.