A Little Life, a novel published in 2015 by writer Hana Yanagihara, focuses on the lives of four college friends, each of whom has achieved success in his field—law, art, architecture, and the last, as an actor in film. If you choose to read it you can learn more from the New Yorker’s review.
I found two quotes in the book that suggest that those of us who might mistakenly believe that our chosen, our one and only, our closest friend, our BFF, is the answer to everything. Our marriages and our friendships are not based entirely on faulty expectations, only that in modifying those expectations can we accept and appreciate the complications that define us as human.
“…he was old enough to know that within every relationship was something unfulfilled and disappointing something that had to be sought elsewhere.” P. 566
“SETH: But don’t you understand, Amy? You’re wrong.
Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person—sexual chemistry, let’s say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty—and you get to pick three of those things. Three—that’s it. Maybe four, if you’re very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It’s only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things. But this isn’t the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That’s real life. Don’t you see it’s a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you’ll wind up with nothing.” P. 567
Yeah, page 566 and 567. You have to read a lot to get to that point. The book is 721 pages long. I finished it days ago. I can’t stop thinking about it.