In 1897, Rainer Maria Rilke met Lou Andreas-Salomé. He wrote her letters that read like a man drowning. He changed the spelling of his own name because she preferred it. He followed her across Europe. He loved her with the total, suffocating devotion of someone who believed another person could complete him.

She left him. Of course she did. And what followed was not the recovery he imagined. He recovered by understanding what had actually broken. He had not loved Lou so much as needed her, and the need had crushed the love beneath it. Years later he wrote that the highest task of two people who love each other is to guard the solitude of the other. He, who had dissolved himself into a woman, now knew that love survives only between two people who remain whole.

He learned it the way everyone learns it. By losing.