Selphira looked at the three of them, each in turn.
"The idealized love they sell you in stories is safe precisely because it doesn't exist. The real obsessive kind is dangerous precisely because it does. That's why the better version is the one you define for yourselves, the one that doesn't need to match any particular template to be and doesn't need to be relevant to anything outside the people in it."
Mayo, in the chair, was noticeably quiet.
It was the particular quiet of someone who had started to say something "intelligently hidden in a joke" and had arrived, somewhere between the opening of her mouth and the closing of it, at the realization that there was nothing to add.
"I want you to understand that in the first place you don't need to find this so-called true love to have a healthy and lasting relationship, one that nourishes you and whoever you're with..."
