From ‘Contact’ by Carl Sagan
“She was comfortable describing to him her reveries, snatches of memories, childhood embarrassments…. She began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the one year old, the five year old, the twelve year old, and the twenty year old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship. With her previous partners, it seemed, at most one of these selves was able to find a compatible opposite number; the other personas were grumpy hangers-on.”
Fourteen Twenty 