"How do you conduct an intimate relationship where no one ever loses it? Where no one ever lashes out, where no one ever smacks anyone in the mouth?"

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When we speak of being vulnerable, it suggests being especially vulnerable to pain. People for whom personal dignity and self-sufficiency are everything, do all they can to shut it out. Noli mi tangere. They are well aware that any intimate relationship has pain in it, forces a special kind of awareness, is costly, and so they try to keep themselves unencumbered by shutting pain out as far as it is possible to do so.

— May Sarton