(no subject)
Edited slightly to make since
What happened was that life went on, and slowly, as the years passed, they drifted farther and farther apart; not because of any loss of feeling on either side, but just because they saw each other so seldom, and other people and other matters took up their thoughts. This was the way it happened; you lived and moved on, and the people closest to you did the same, and life drew you apart, somehow - jobs, partners, whatever - and after a while, when they were not there as a part of daily life, as a physical presence, a body in the room, a voice saying new things, then it was possible to love them only as a certain kind of memory. It became the case that you used to love them, and only remembered that love, rather than felt it as you had when they were part of the texture of daily life. Only with your partner could you really keep on loving them, because it was only your partner you stayed with. And even with them it was possible to drift apart, into different sets of habits, different thoughts. If that was so with the person you slept with, how much more so with friends who had moved on too, and now lived on the other side of the world. So eventually you lost them, and there was no help for that. Only if you had been partnered with them. And you could only be partners with one person.
-Kim Stanley Robinson
What happened was that life went on, and slowly, as the years passed, they drifted farther and farther apart; not because of any loss of feeling on either side, but just because they saw each other so seldom, and other people and other matters took up their thoughts. This was the way it happened; you lived and moved on, and the people closest to you did the same, and life drew you apart, somehow - jobs, partners, whatever - and after a while, when they were not there as a part of daily life, as a physical presence, a body in the room, a voice saying new things, then it was possible to love them only as a certain kind of memory. It became the case that you used to love them, and only remembered that love, rather than felt it as you had when they were part of the texture of daily life. Only with your partner could you really keep on loving them, because it was only your partner you stayed with. And even with them it was possible to drift apart, into different sets of habits, different thoughts. If that was so with the person you slept with, how much more so with friends who had moved on too, and now lived on the other side of the world. So eventually you lost them, and there was no help for that. Only if you had been partnered with them. And you could only be partners with one person.
-Kim Stanley Robinson