How Appropriate

"The more we have in common with another as whole persons, however, the more easily will out totality be involved in every single relation to him . . .The whole happiness and depth of the relation to another person with whom, so to speak, we feel identical, lies in the fact that not a single contact, not a single word, not a single common activity or pain remains isolated by always clothes the whole soul which completely gives itself in it and is received in it. . . One might entertain the paradoxical suspicion that when individuals are destined to the closest mutual emotional relationship, the emergence of the intimate phase is guided by an instinctive pragmatism so that the eventual feeling attains its most passionate intensification and awareness of what is has achieved by means of an opposite prelude -- a step back beforee running, as it were." Simmel, "Forms of Social Interaction"