Love has the great potential to grow effortlessly with just absence alone. As French author Francois De La Rochefoucauld says, "Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones..."
To let us understand what pure love consists of, Charlotte Bronte poeticizes:
"I ask you to pass through life at my side - to be my second self, and best earthly companion."
To be a person’s “second self” is the highest expression of a healthy romantic union. It is not about merging into one entity or relying on each other to feel complete, a co-dependency often romanticized, but about maintaining our individuality and wholeness. At the same time, we connect so deeply and authentically with our partner that they naturally become an extension of ourselves—our second self.
To end with a quote by French writer Edmond de Goncourt to make even more sense of the ever so evasive love: "Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists...when we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete, like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: Incompleteness in absence."
This lends to the idea again of the second self, but this time, the lovers are books. Two separate books but part of a two-series volume which, when parted, feels a loss, not of oneself, but to an addition that made them even more remarkable than themselves alone. True love is incompleteness in their absence.
Ah, love!