“There is a moment in every relationship when you see the whole thing. The question is when does the moment come? Is it the first time you see the person and instinctively know that things between you are going to work out, or fail? Or is it a moment toward the end, however you get there, when you realize that there is something behind this persons eyes that you were never able to touch, no matter how hard you tried?”

“If things were eventually going to work out, did it matter how you got there? Didn’t it ultimately just matter that you got the ending you wanted?”

“But Eve - ow whoever comes after Eve - cant save him from eventually doing the hard work that comes after that. The work he has never wanted to do, that she spent the better part of her life trying to protect him from having to do. To jump beyond the impasses, the stuck places, to go deeper with someone. You can do the work to honor what you created, or you don't. But if you don't, you get to the same point with the next person, don't you? You get to the same point, the same questioning, until you push through it. Until you are brave enough to not expect anyone else to see in you what you can't see in yourself.”

“But Eve - or whoever comes after Eve - cant save him from eventually doing the hard work that comes after that. The work he has never wanted to do, that she spent the better part of her life trying to protect him from having to do. To jump beyond the impasses, the stuck places, to go deeper with someone. You can do the work to honor what you created, or you don't. But if you don't, you get to the same point with the next person, don't you? You get to the same point, the same questioning, until you push through it. Until you are brave enough to not expect anyone else to see in you what you can't see in yourself.”

“that real love comes over time, once that initial draw you're talking about takes on a different form. When you get to understand there is something more concrete between you. Something that is worth preserving...”

“Where do we go from here? I started off this crazy weekend by trying to make sense of these moments—these moments that you know you’re going to remember—but like anything else, nothing exists without its opposite. So maybe it makes a certain kind of sense that I ended up thinking about the moments you know you’ll forget. Or, more accurately, try to remember incorrectly. How do we all learn how to do that? Relive something again and again in our heads until it takes on a slightly different light, a less truthful tone, until the memory can’t injure us as directly, until it joins the ranks of the more manageable.”

“Josh had told me a long time ago that he had this theory that an entire relationship was based on what occurred over the course of the first five minutes you know each other. That everything that came after those first minutes was just details being filled in. Meaning: you already knew how deep the love was, how instinctually you felt about someone.What happened in their first five minutes?Time stopped.”