If it’s true that you can never really know a person—that between you and another, regardless of familiarity, there stands an impassable gulf no thought or action can traverse—then it stands to reason that even the one individual you have decided to spend the rest of your life with is, in essence, a stranger. And vice versa. The gap between you and them ideally ought to be smaller than the one between you and, say, your Uber driver, but all the same, what your shared intimacy affords is only a shrinking of the gap over time, and not its total closure.

Sure, good sex can momentarily erase any mindfulness of that distance, and I suppose that certain battle-tested relationships progressively learn to work their way around it, so that continual negotiation of its existence further unites the parties in deeper ways than would concerted efforts to abolish the divide outright. Love, here, resembles more an enduring act of mutual concession than it does domination in toto; the conscious preservation of your partner’s inscrutability—meaning, that irrevocable other-ness which is part and parcel of their singularity in the world—ought to make of such mystique a real opportunity for meaningful, long-term intrigue, rather than it be villainized as some willfully obscured portion of the beloved that one must first capture, and then neatly assimilate as a fully known category, in order to legitimately stake out the terms of intimate companionship. […]