Some day you will look at your friend, and he will seem to you to be a little out of drawing, or you won’t like his tone of colour, or something. You will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and seriously think that he has behaved very badly to you. The next time he calls, you will be perfectly cold and indifferent. It will be a great pity, for it will alter you. What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.

From “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde

This snippet of Oscar Wilde’s brilliant prose exposes a common fallacy in human relationship—the idea that we endow our beloved with a number of qualities that might only exist in our minds. In some way, we always fall in love with a ghost.  We might get lucky and discover new virtues that will strengthen our resolve to love this person. But more often than not, as we get to know this individual, the blindfold will come off our eyes and awake some second thoughts.  And as Oscar Wilde said, “the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”