Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!

Anything you hand to another person to hold for you can be dropped, not usually out of malice but because people change and have lives of their own. When your sense of being all right depends on how someone else behaves this week, you have made your mood a matter of their weather. Loving people is not the problem. Outsourcing the whole of your steadiness to them is.

Keep a few things that are yours regardless of how anyone treats you: work you care about, a habit, a place to walk. Then you can love people without auditing them. Closeness gets easier when it is not also your only ground.