Personality Adjustment for Conversation : Page 156

Whatever the secrets of friendship are, one of them happily is similarity of interests. People with such a common bond of problems and interests link themselves together in all sorts of clubs and associations. Most of them do little more essentially than offer a platform for conversation. The "joker," however, in this natural dispensation is, that while Providence has directed that most friendships obey the conditions for good conversation, love is erratic, unpredictable. It is blind, some ancients said. What they mean is that it does not happen on the basis of conversational compatibility. Two people, who if it were not for sex, could not talk interestedly to one another for ten minutes, are by some mysterious force drawn into a partnership that means daily conversation of hours-on-end for life. Thus two difficulties are born. One is that after love has become a habit, their union not having been based on any conversational compatibility, they begin to bore each other. Furthermore, since in the first flush of the sex attraction they had seemed to enjoy talking to each other, they make the mistake of imagining that their subsequent lack of a conversational bond springs from a decline of love.