What does Baudelaire say: the lovers come face to face, eye to eye, and in an instant one blinks, and in that instant it is decided: who shall be love's victim, and who love's executioner.
I’m Very Into You, Correspondence 1995-1996 between Kathy Acker & McKenzie Wark
This quote showed up in my Facebook memories the other day, and I still find it very striking. In my experience, it holds true that in relationships, one person is always going to love (or even just like) the other more. I’ve been on both sides of this equation multiple times, and I have extreme anxiety every time I feel like I’m in the love’s victim position. There’s a sense of helplessness when you think you love or care about someone more than they care about you, especially if it feels like it could be by a wide gap. But human nature makes it pretty much impossible for those feelings even when they are mutual to be completely equal. There’s no dial that you can set to a certain love number or percentage and then set your partner/object of your affection’s dial to the same number. We’d probably all be bored if there was such a thing; there’s excitement in the push and pull of courtship, in being pursued and pursuing someone, and falling in love and having someone fall in love with you. There’s so much power in being love’s executioner too. I only wish people in those positions were more aware of that power and wielded their swords gently.