Whether it is clearly visible or not, every relationship has a higher purpose than itself alone, a meaning that goes beyond the conventions of love and romance, and attaches the two people in it to a destiny that has roots in the past and wings in the future. This purpose is to shape us individually into the highest and best versions of ourselves and to change, if only in some tiny way, the essential character of the reality we have entered here by being born.
— Daphne Rose Kingma, The Book of Love