So when they say things like "enjoy the moment, take it all in", how do you do it?
"I think it’s great for two people to be together. That is a good number. I think, that to keep it alive though, you can’t spend every day together. It wears out the magic, Love means nothing to me if it’s not fortified with fierce, painful longing, brief explosive instances of furious passion and intimacy and then a sad parting for a time. In that way, you can give your life to it and still have a life of your own. I think some couples spend too much time together. They flatten out the potential for experience by constant closeness. Passion builds over time like steam. Let it rage until it’s exhausted and then leave it alone to let it build up again. Why can’t love be insane and distorted? How can it be vital if it has the same threshold as normal day-to-day experience?

Why can’t you write burning letters and let your nocturnal self smolder with desire for one who is not there? Why not let the days before you see her be excruciating and ferment in your mind so on the day you go to the airport to pick her up, you’re nearly sick with anticipation? And then when desire shows the first sign of contentment, throw it back it its cage and let it slowly build itself back into a state of starved fury. Then when you are together, it all matters. So that when you look into her eyes, you lose your balance, so that when she touches you, it feels like you have never been touched before. When she says your name, you think it was she who named you. When she has gone, you bury your face in the pillow to smell her hair and you lie awake at night remembering your face in her neck, her breathing and the amazing smell of her skin. Your eyes go wet because you want her so bad and miss her so much. Now that is worth the miles and the time. That matches the inferno of life. Otherwise you poison each other with your presence day after day as you drag each other through the inevitable mundane aspects of your lives. That is the slow death that I see slapped on faces everywhere I go. It’s part of the world’s sadness that’s more empty than cold, poorly lit rooms in cities of the American night."
These are the kind of stories that convinced me that letter writing would never again to need to flip back her hair and talk about efficiency because she's an art form now - all the parts of her, the signing, the scripting, the mailing, the doodles in the margins. The mere fact that someone would even just sit down, pull out a piece of paper and think about someone the whole way through with an intention that is so much harder to unearth when the browsers are up and the phone is pinging and we've got six conversations rolling in at once; that is an art form, that does not fall down to the Goliath of "Get faster", no matter how many social networks we might have. We still clutch these letters close to our chest, to speak these words louder than loud, when we turn pages into palettes to say the things that we have needed to say, the words we have needed to write, to sisters and brothers and even to strangers, for far too long.
In the darkness, the light from the screen gently contoured his face - the dip before the nose bridge, the curve of his lips. It was the kind of sight that made her heart skip the tiniest of beats. His smile looked even more mesmerizing in profile.

In the darkness, suppression melted away and validation surfaced. The two huddled over a phone screen, the excitement tingling across her skin. It was inevitable; they needed to whisper, they needed to lean in. The carelessly close contact, a, b, c - they did it all.

It was the kind of night she could write a song of. As she sank deeper into the seat and perhaps the abyss of fatal attraction, she closed her eyes and chided herself. "Heart, let's not be weak."
I don't understand how some people can say things like "She/He's the love of my life" easily to just about anybody they get attached to. I actually hate them for making such a sweet, romantic declaration so.. cheap. Like yeah, I'm attracted to you and we just got attached, so you must be the love of my life. DUH. Three months later, we break up, I hook up with Mr. Right No 2 and bam, I have a new love of my life.

I don't think I can say these words easily, because they actually mean so much. Even at face value, it suggests that this person should be a single, constant someone. Then how can you just use it so frivolously (unintended pun) unless you're absolutely sure?