The Necessary Loneliness of Love

Painting by Sally Trace

“Loving, too, is good — because love is hard. For one person to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult thing we are asked to do, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is mere preparation. 

“That is why young people, beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: they must learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces gathered round their lonely, frightened, upward-beating heart, they must learn how to love. The time of learning, though, is always long and isolated, and so love, for a long time and far into the life of one who loves, is —: solitude, a heightened and deepened state of being alone.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet