this book, which was given to me as a gift, gracefully explores the possibility of combining independence and freedom as an individual with love and partnership. i have included an excerpt from this beloved book, gift from the sea by anne morrow lindbergh:

i must find a balance…a swinging of the pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return.

a good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. the partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern. there is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing, because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it.

when each partner loves so completely that he has forgotten to ask himself whether or not he is loved in return; when he only knows that he loves and is moving to its music – then, and then only, are two people able to dance perfectly in tune to the same rhythm.

when you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. it is an impossibility. it is even a lie to pretend to. and yet this is exactly what most of us demand. we have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. we insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, fluidity – in freedom, in the sense that dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. the only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. 

both partners are lost in a common sea of the universal which absorbs and yet frees, which separates and yet unites. is this not what the more mature relationship, the meeting of two solitudes, is meant to be?

i hold this to be the highest task

for a bond between two people:

that each protects the solitude of the other. ~rilke