To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one      human being to love another:
  that is perhaps      the most      difficult of all out tasks, the ultimate, the last      test and
 proof, the work for which all other       work      is but preparation. For this reason young
  people,      who are beginners in everything, cannot yet       know love:      they have to
 learn it. With their whole being, with      all their forces, gathered close about
  their lonely,      timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.      But learning
 time is always a long,      secluded time,      and so loving, for a long while ahead and
  far into      life, is solitude,       intensified and deepened loneness      for him who loves.
  Love        is at first not anything that means merging, giving        over and uniting with
  another       (for what would a union      be of something unclarified and unfinished,
  still      subordinate?),       it is a high inducement to the individual      to ripen, to become
  world, to become world      for himself      for another's sake. It is a great exacting claim
  upon      him, something that chooses      him out and calls him      to vast things. Only in
 this sense, as the task of      working at themselves       ("to hearken and to hammer        day
 and night"), might young people use the love        that is given them.         Merging and
 surrendering and every      kind of communion is not for them (who must save and  
 gather       for along, long time still), is the ultimate,      is perhaps that for which
 human lives as yet scarcely      suffice.
  Whoever        looks seriously at it finds that neither for death,        which is difficult,
 nor for difficult love       has any      explanation, any solution, any hint of way yet
 been      discerned; and for these two problems       that we carry      wrapped up and
 hand on without opening, it will not      be possible to discover any general      rule
 resting in      agreement. But in the same measure in which we begin      as individuals
  to put life to the test,       we shall,      being individuals, meet these great things at
 closer      range. The demands which the difficult work      of love      makes upon our
 development are more than life-size,      and as beginners we are not up to them.
  But if we      nevertheless hold out and take this love upon us as      burden and
 apprenticeship, instead of       losing ourselves      in all the light and frivolous play,
 behind which      people have hidden from the      most earnest earnestness      of their
 existence - then a little progress and alleviation      will       perhaps be perceptible
  to those who come long      after us; that would be much.
Rainer Maria Rilke
from Letters to a Young Poet