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“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real”
You can’t make someone into who you want them to be. Relationships, of all kinds, require a capacity to relate; and you can only relate if you know yourself deeply enough to let other people be free to be who they are. Persuading, manipulating, or working hard to get other people to understand you, see you, respond to your needs or have your way, is control and a one-person point of view. Love is not only a feeling but an ongoing commitment to care just as much for another person as for yourself, and to care just as much for yourself as another person. And as the words of Iris Murdoch suggest, one could apply this understanding of love to our relationship with our environment and to all living creatures—if you matter, so does everything else.