'Real love is the very opposite of idealisation. Rather, it has to do with knowledge, a deep, real, sensitive knowledge of the other people in your life and the care you give them. Love is a kind of knowing.
The real lover is neither Rossetti or Picasso. The real lover is the man who broke down on Women's Hour this morning. He spent three years looking after his dying wife, tending her each day, doing her teeth, washing her hair, putting a new necklace around her neck each morning, something she had done for herself before she got dementia.
'Why don't you put her in a home and get a life?' his friends would ask him.
'Because she is my life,' he told them.'
Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.222.
