Many years later, a witness to Stevenson’s entrance through the window that crucial evening of 1876, described it in this way. Logic, by necessity, has nothing to do with energy needed for the initial pursuit. It may be that we must put aside the powers of self-preservation and negotiation that are necessary to preserve life on the surface in order to follow the hidden nonnegotiable conversation, which will reorder, and reimagine us, preparing us for the possible marriage to which our falling in love leads. Part of its very nature seems to be an unconscious drive toward vulnerability. It is in effect a form of unilateral disarmament. Passionate love seems by its very nature to be a loss of context it also seems to involve a necessary and helpless inability to save the one who is driven by it from what clearly lies ahead. Strangely, this self-determined wish to create one’s own world, real or not, seems to be absolutely necessary.

Despite all outside, best hopes, the one in pursuit of a passion has always been armored against all advice, good or bad. Its very annoying cousin “There are plenty more fish in the sea” is even less help to each generation new to the stomach-rending nature of true love’s even truer disappointment.

‘The course of true love never did run smooth’ has been repeated down the centuries to those who will not listen, exactly because it is so stubbornly true it is a phrase that has never really helped any of the afflicted it was meant for. “We are always given plenty of warnings about the path ahead.

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