It sometimes seemed to him that for love to work, it had to be fair, that he should tell only half the joke, and she the other half. Otherwise, it would not be love, but something completely else—pity or entertainment, or stand-up comedy.

Tao Lin
About This Quote

This quote was written by Joyce Carol Oates in an essay about her father, who was a lifelong loner. Her father, Alvin Oates, would only ever speak to one person at a time, and he would always decline to do favors for anyone else in the family. When he did talk to someone else, he would only tell half the joke or half of the story. This is not uncommon when people are dealing with emotional pain.

If you have just suffered a terrible loss or have been through something very difficult then you may not be able to process the information that someone has told you. Instead of processing this new information, you may just want to stop hearing it.

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