(and this is truly the challenge)

"And this is truly the challenge, for releasing the other into freedom, not demanding their reciprocation of your service and care is to place oneself in a posture of radical vulnerability. To love without seeking to possess is to live precariously. Such a mode of living cannot guarantee the outcome longed for. Of course, living by possession and domination cannot guarantee it either, though somehow we are easily seduced into thinking it can. But the truth is that all our strategies for control cannot secure our longings in any lasting way. These strategies and efforts are the heavy yoke of slavery and death. The vulnerable way of agape, of cruciform, kenotic love cannot promise the sort of fulfillment we often long for, just as the cross cannot guarantee the resurrection. However, such an ethic of self-dispossession is the only way for us to live in a manner that is open to receiving the divine gifts of communion that we have tasted in Christ."

http://www.inhabitatiodei.com/2008/07/07/bonhoeffer-and-the-theology-of-romantic-love/

Painfully, irreconcilably poignant. What would love look like, had we the capability to even conceive of putting the other first, above our own soiled desires?

There is beauty in the breakdown; and (but God) -