the key to love is understanding - by maja - velvet noise

A friend once told me he broke up with his girlfriend because he couldn’t have a meaningful conversation with her. At the time, I was genuinely bamboozled, because I’d never heard someone say it so plainly. Isn’t conversation obviously the most important thing? I remember wondering, what are you even connecting over, if not that? To me, that sounded lonelier than being single. To be in such close physical proximity to someone and still feel conceptually and conversationally alone seems a profound kind of isolation, as if the body is present, but the mind is elsewhere, unreached, unreaching. Maybe that’s why, for me, love has always meant talk. Real love, the kind I dream about, feels like an endless conversation, one that never really stops, just takes pauses to eat or sleep or kiss. If life goes well for me, I hope my dream relationship will just feel like one long, continuous conversation. I don’t mean that metaphorically, but literally — a never-ending dialogue of becoming. I want t

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• Julia