“To remain within the boundaries of the self while transcending them in identification with the loved object is an exciting, moving and yet painful condition of love. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz (1974) has expressed this aspect of love with an almost overwhelming conciseness, stating that love is the point of intersection between desire and reality. Love, he says, reveals reality to desire and creats the transition from the erotic object to the beloved person. This revelation is almost always painful because the beloved person presents himself or herself simultaneously as a body which can be penetrated and a consciousness which is impenetrable. Love is the revelation of the other person’s freedom. The contradictory nature of love is that desire aspires to be fulfilled by the destruction of the desired object, and love discovers that this object is indestructible and cannot be substituted.”

— Love Relations: Normality and Pathology, O.F. Kernberg, M.D.