A Lover's Discours

“Now, absence can exist only as a consequence of the other: it is the other who leaves, it is I who remain. The other is in a condition of perpetual departure, of journeying; the other is, by vocation, migrant, fugitive; I -- who love, by converse vocation, am sedentary, motionless, at hand, in expectation, nailed to the spot, in suspense- like a package in some forgotten corner of a railway stati

on. Amorous absence functions in a single direction, expressed by the one who stays, never by the one who leaves: an always present I is constituted only by confronting with an always absent you. [...] Historically, the discourse of absence is carried on by the woman [...] It follows that in any man who utters the other’s absence something feminine is declared: the man who waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously feminized”

-Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse