diary of a venus’s Reviews > Aspects of Love: Reflections on the art of loving > Status Update

We’ve spent an abysmally long time being angry and thoughtless. We seek only one legacy when we are gone: that those left behind should know that, despite all the odds, in spite of our frequently sour moods, deep down, we loved greedily, relentlessly and with every sinew. That was what our entire life was truly about; we just offer forgot to notice. We were all along only ever students and servants of love.

Regularly explore how you have disappointed one another. Let them sometimes hate you and you them. Don’t be frightened by anger moderately expressed. The enemy of love is stifled emotion not maturely explored authenticity. Listen very carefully when they tell you how they feel.

Allow yourselves both to admit from an early stage that you are mad: heavily distorted by your pasts, unable to understand yourselves, prone to irrational assumptions assume interest in your assessments of reality.

We should make an effort to view our wrongdoers as children. We forgive children so readily because we know and can see that their inner badness and difficulty are invariably the result of some form of pain, discomfort, hurt or wound.

True love doesn’t idealise. It involves having the courage to take in another’s full complexity and to remember the reasons why, despite some unadmirable dimensions, people continue to deserve our forgiveness and understanding.