human-ness

"I love you" means something very special and very concrete. It means that I surround you with the feeling that allows you-perhaps requires you-to be everything you really are as a human being at that moment. When my love is fullest, you are most fully you. You may be good, or bad, or both; tender or angry, or both; but you are you, which is the very most I could ever ask or expect. And so I experience you in all your beauty and all your ugliness. But you, not what I expect, or want, or what you feel you should be, or were fashioned to be, but really you.

Thomas Malone & Patrick Malone, Art of Intimacy