Distance, I didn’t take it seriously. Thought it was something bad. It has not only a protective function. It is even necessary, and perhaps the elementary essence of love at all.

Perhaps love could be described as a practice of pleasant closeness and distance. And that love, when it becomes painful, loses this nurturing rhytmics; oscillates painfully and arrythmically.

Perhaps there is within us, or outside of us, something like an inherent logic of love, of attraction. A celestial clock-beat of togetherness. And when we leave this logic, it becomes hurtful.

But distance is not just baked into love as essence or necessity. It is also essential to us as persons. We can’t just be in a group. We must also always practice our separateness, our deviance. We must seek the outside of groups, our solitude, or whatever, to retroactively enrich the group.

And so, perhaps, there is always a need in us for an outside of relationships. Something like the baked-in infidelity, the baked-in desire, the baked-in flight. We want to run, we want to be alone, we want to give up all these responsibilities. That’s part of us, and it will never go away.