vhss asked: how to love someone romantically in a post modern era? is it possible?

I wonder this myself sometimes. I think that love in postmodern society is deeply fractured and unsure of itself (we doubt both its meaning and value, and wonder if it can even be defined without evoking a whole range of contradictions, historical power relations, and superstitions that threaten to undo it), but it’s precisely this condition of uncertainty which can become, I think, the basis for a new type of intimacy, one predicated on vulnerability and shared questions rather than imposed truth-values. Perhaps that’s overly optimistic or simply naïve, but it is a thought that appeals to me nonetheless. I admit that, like most things to do with love and postmodernism, it very well could be total bullshit.

All too often, when we love somebody, we don’t accept him or her as what the person effectively is. We accept him or her insofar as this person fits the co-ordinates of our fantasy. We misidentify, wrongly identify him or her, which is why, when we discover that we were wrong, love can quickly turn into violence. There is nothing more dangerous, more lethal for the loved person than to be loved, as it were, for not what he or she is, but for fitting the ideal. In this case love is always mortifying love. —  Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

(Source: dondyarizona)

Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolescence ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you at the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror. —  Truman Capote  (via venula)

(via paislia)

It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods. —  Robert G. Ingersoll (via dangerouswitnesses)

(via movingsculptures-deactivated201)