I'm always looking for meaningful one-night stands

In the consciousness that another mind reflects your thought, you find the keenest satisfaction. Here is the high office of a friend, and in these high experiences is the point of attachment.--

My grandfather had been the ugliest, darkest, foulest, most depraved figure of my childhood, more beast than human, and I had grown up to be him, locked in the basement with my secrets as the rest of the family reveled in the petty and ordinary upstairs. Down there, I saw my black, ancient, ineluctable core exposed, like a crab forced out of its shell--dirty, vulnerable, and obscene. For the first time in my life, I was truly alone.

If suffering like hers had any use, she reasoned, it was not to the sufferer. The only way that an individual's pain gained meaning was through its communication to others.

A male-female close-friendship hardly differs from a relationship; it takes "relating" to be friends. But sadly, not every relationship has friendship in it. It's just ironical that two people who are not good enough to be best friends are in love and want to spend the rest of their lives together.