And even if you are, you'll still adapt and you'll be ok whether it's in seasons of struggle or one lifelong experience of the coldness of the universe through your perspective and individual choices, you could still provide yourself with comfort with meaning, with the warmth of invincible fortitude.

Our disenchantment may get expressed as racism or arrogance or just plain coldness.

Could they avoid managing fear through coldness or suspicion and anger, could they in short manage the anxieties of being adored, or if we can put it another way, could they not hold it against you if you like them a lot?

And that's just characterized for me by a numbness, a coldness, and

the bird in the coldness and does it for you now I've got one more than a mistake

with his coldness and his cruelty.

Where others would despair of intransigence or meanness, we see every chance of being able to change a partner – so long as we keep quiet and hope. It can take an awfully long time until we are in any position to realise that all told, the situation does appear a little strange and somewhat irrevocable. That it may not be entirely to our advantage to be told again and again that we are mad for wanting greater gentleness, or demanding for seeking a deeper connection, or crazy for wondering why a partner spends so much time on their phone or out drunk with friends. We could be compared to a giant fish, a tuna perhaps, whose had its fins cut off and lost any powers of navigation, so that it bobs helplessly on the current, hoping against hope that it will be taken somewhere nice, but unable to exert any influence on its course. The famous expression runs, when people show you who they are, believe them. But it's hard to be very clear-eyed about who is good and bad when you happen to grow up with a heavy disincentive to perceive certain awkward truths about your own parents, because you were five years old, trapped in a house with them, and love wasn't readily available from anyone else. Our entire perceptual mechanism may have been twisted as a result. Like an animal that can't perceive certain frequencies of light, our emotional eyes may have grown up unable to see difficult traits for what they are. Coldness now just looks like honourable absorption in more important tasks. Sarcasm is read as wit. Being belittled feels like care. We're always more likely to think of ourselves as bad for failing to elicit kindness from a fundamentally lovely person whom we'll continue to adore and admire, despite one or two signs of trouble, as opposed to conceiving that we might have fallen in with a jerk. We may be deep into our lives before we decide we might have had enough of suffering, and start to be curious about what kindness and presence might feel like. We may ever so slightly determine that though our partner may be using every ounce of their considerable logic and charm to secure the status quo, they might in the end just be taking us for a long ride. We don't have to be here. We are, astonishingly, not five anymore. If we're not happy, we can run.

and when the alarm goes off and I'm still able to like hold this coldness, I tell myself, let's see how long I can do today.

Sarcastic remarks, dismissive jokes, or sudden coldness leave you unsettled.

It tastes like ice cream without the coldness.