Emotional maturity means knowing that another person cannot fill up the hole in your heart

. That is your responsibility. You need to love and affirm yourself day - by - day, moment - by - moment. That is the spiritual challenge of your life and everybody' s life. Without your love for yourself, nothing works. No amount of love from your partner is enough. The search for love from other people is like the alcoholic' s search for happiness in a bottle. The more he drinks, the less satisfied he feels and the more he wants to drink.

We are all addicted to falling in love. But after we' ve "fallen" a few times and broken our emotional bones, we hopefully wise up a bit. We know that the high of falling in love is not going to last. We know that sooner or later we will have to get real with each other. That is the difference between romance and partnership. Romance is an attempt to keep the addiction going. It has a very short half- life. Partnership is the dance of two ordinary people learning to live together day by day. It is a very challenging school that we enroll in. It is sometimes a lot more work than play. And it certainly requires a lot more psychological adjustment than years of therapy! We don' t just graduate from this school in a year or two. It takes many years, perhaps even a lifetime, for us to master the curriculum.

Your partners are imperfect human beings, just like you. They were not the "wrong" partners any more than you were. Probably, they reflected your own level of realism and emotional maturity. That' s usually the way it works. So don't waste your time thinking you simply made some bad choices. The only bad choice you made was forgetting who has the full time job loving you. I know that you know who this is !

We keep remembering that they are not perfect, nor we are. Love is not a game of perfection. It is a game of overwhelming imperfection. The amazing thing is that love survives all of our mistaken attempts to control our partners and our relationships.

We can conclude from the passage that______.

A．we won't forget who has the full time loving us

B．love is addictive

C．love from your partner is not enough

D．love lies in the maturity of emotion which is essential to a partnership or relationship