"I think we moderns lack love," Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882-March 28,1941) diagnosed us in the first year of our deadliest war.
The paradox is that when we lack something long enough, we forget what it looks like, what it means, how to recognize it when it comes along. And so we love without knowing how to love, wounding ourselves and each other.
“To love makes one solitary,” she wrote in Mrs. Dalloway a generation before Sylvia Plath contemplated the loneliness of love — because “nothing is so strange when one is in love… as the complete indifference of other people.”
The great tragedy of human life is that we ask of love everything and gives us an almost; the great triumph is that we know this, know the price of the illumination, and we choose to love anyway.
Bill Wilson linked love to emotional sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), emphasizing giving love to others as a path to spiritual and personal growth, rather than demanding to be loved in return. He connected this to the healing process, where breaking unhealthy dependencies allows one to "love the best in others" and achieve balance in relationships with oneself, others, and a higher power, inspired by the principles of the St. Francis Prayer
Bill Wilson
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