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This sentence reminds me of

Rainer Maria Rilke’s letter to a young poet (Franz Xaver Kappus) from May 14th 1904 (the whole letter deserves to be read):

“To love is good too: since love is difficult. For one person to love another: perhaps that is the most difficult thing granted us, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely a preparation. That is why young people who are beginners in everything are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, their whole strength, gathered about their solitary, anxious, upwardly beating heart, they must learn to love. But the time to learn is always a long, secluded time, and so loving is, for a long time to come and far into life – solitude, a growing and deepening solitude for those who love. Love, to begin with, is not something that means merging, yielding, uniting with another (for what would a union of the unclarified, unfinished, incoherent be?), it is a sublime moment for individual maturation, to become something within oneself, to become a world, a world for oneself for another’s sake, it is a great and unrestrained claim on one, something that chooses the individual and summons one to vaster spaces. Only in that sense, as the task of labouring at oneself (‘hearkening and hammering day and night’) should the young employ the love that is granted them. (…)
This development will transform the experience of love, so full of error (at first very much against the will of those men who are left behind), and reshape it from the ground up, altering it to a relationship meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one directed from a man to a woman. And this more human love (which will be infinitely considerate and calm, and achieved with kindness and clarity in its binding and loosening) will resemble that which we now prepare, painfully and laboriously, a love that consists of two solitudes protecting and bordering on, and greeting each other.”