love? <--- whole article
"The romance, which began three years ago, could have resulted in an engagement and maybe even marriage. Instead, it was the latest in a series of fraught relationships, all of which seemed destined to end in failure.
Mr. Bowe, a perpetual bachelor, had been in love twice before — in high school and as a graduate student — but it had been so long and this new feeling was so profound that it shook him to the core. Rather than making him happy, he said, it confused him.
“This facet of experience most people center their lives around came as this alien, funny, unanticipated shock to me,” he said last week, pounding garlic and spices with a mortar and pestle in the kitchen of his West Village studio apartment. He was certain that he was in love, he said, but felt confounded by how to deal with a relationship that “came with so many complications, and a lot of fear, and a lot of pressure.”