Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.
The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.
A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.
You are wrong if you think you cannot live without love. I cannot live without it. I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptoms, became a caricature. I mean that I cannot live well without it. I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode.