love

"Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent --?), 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 what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing; they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment...: and what can happen then? 

...each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come.

...if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, -- then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us.

...and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other."

--Rainer Maria Rilke