In the misery and disorder of our lives, true love thus demands—like monasticism, but in a more humble and apparently more prosaic way—asceticism and sanctification. Moreover, it implies, with man as with woman, an “interiorized monasticism”… the healthy solitude that each must respect in the other in order to keep alive the sense of one’s otherness. At times, only distance allows one to perceive the unity; only an awareness that the more the other is known the more he is unknown creates the deepening and the renewal of love.
OLIVIER CLEMENT The Sacrament of Love
