The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it's not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person—without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, and without reducing the other to a thing. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. And if they stay, it was their choice. Your happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given to someone, it is shared; in one common thing called ‘love.’ When someone tells you they love you, ‘I love you’ should mean nothing else than I trust you to come back as the tide chooses to do so to the shores each and every second.