“Pure love for another person, and what people call romantic love, are two different things. Pure love doesn’t manipulate the relationship to one’s advantage, but romantic love is different. Romantic love contains other elements—the desire to be loved by the other person, for instance. If purely loving another was enough, you wouldn’t suffer because of unrequited love. As long as the other person was happy, there wouldn’t be any need to suffer because you weren’t being loved in return. What makes people suffer is the desire to be loved by another person. So I decided that romantic love and pure love for a person are not the same. And that by following this you could lessen the pain of unrequited love.”
— Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
Tagged: Relationship, Facts About Pure Love, Facts About Romantic Love, Unrequited Love, One Sided Love, Love Affair
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Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

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