So once again the girl was not an actuality but a reflexion of motions within him and an incitement of them. The girl has enormous importance, and he will never be able to forget her, but her importance lies not in herself but in her relation to him. She is to him, so to speak, the border of his being, but such a relation is not erotic. From a religious point of view, one could say it as if God used this girl to capture him, and yet the girl herself is not an actuality but is like the lace-winged fly with which a hook is baited. I am completely convinced that he does not know the girl at all, although he has been attached to her and she probably has never been out of his thoughts since then. She is the girl—period. Whether, more concretely, she is this or that, the loveliness, the loveableness, the faithfullness, the sacrificial love for whose sake one risks everything and sets heaven and earth in motion—that never enters his head....He bit the chain that bound him, but the more his passion seethed, the more ecstatic his song, the more tender his talk, the tighter the chain. It was impossible for him to create a real relationship out of this misunderstanding; it would, in fact, leave her at the mercy of a perpetual fraud. To explain this confusing error to her, that she was merely the visible form, while his thoughts, his soul, sought something else that he attributed to her—this would hurt her so deeply that his pride rose up in mutiny against it. It is contemptible to delude and seduce a girl, but it is even more contemptible to forsake her in such a way that one does not even become a scoundrel but makes a brilliant retreat by palming her off with the explanation that she was not the ideal and by comforting her with the idea that she was one’s muse.-- Repetition, S.A. Kierkegaard
The above extract is the crux of Repetition. It tells of a young man who is in love, yet agonises over it. But why? Yes, initially he fell in love with the girl, but thereafter he realised that the girl is a trigger of sorts, that awakened the 'motions within him', or what Constantin called it later, 'poetic awakening'. You can say that he fell in love with Love itself, namely the embodiment of all the poetic qualities of erotic love: the thrill and palpitations, the devotion, the sacrificial.
No one is ever safe from being in the young man's shoes. In fact, Repetition itself was written autobiographically to some extent. Be wary, then, of falling in love with love; it will only bring you agony.
Falling in love with love is falling for make-believe
Falling in love with love is playing the fool
-- Falling in Love with Love; Lorentz Hart, Richard Rodgers; sung by Frank Sinatra
