Erich Fromm. The art of love (№ 418367)

Talking about your own personal life, about your own hopes and anxieties, showing your childishness and childishness, finding common interests - all this is perceived as overcoming alienation. Even discovering your anger, your hatred, your inability to hold back – all of this is taken for intimacy. This may explain the perversion of attraction to each other, which in married couples is often experienced by people who seem close only when they are in bed or give an outlet for their mutual hatred and rage. But in all these cases, intimacy tends to come to naught over time. The result is a search for intimacy with a new person, with a new stranger. Again, the stranger turns into a loved one, again a tense and strong experience of falling in love. And again it gradually loses its power and ends with the desire for a new victory, a new love - with the illusion that the new love will be different from the previous ones. These illusions are greatly facilitated by the deceptive nature of sexual desire.