"Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity. To be sure, he is unpacking his heart with words but at the same time he is encouraged to expect interest and sympathy, and he usually gets it. His interlocutor feels unable to impose his own standards on his confidant's behavior; for once he feels how another man feels. It is not always sorrow and squalor that is is passed on in this way but sometimes joy and pride. I remember a truck driver telling me once about his wife, how sexy and clever and loving she was, and how beautiful. He showed me a photograph of her and I blushed for guilt because I had expected something plastic and I saw a woman by trendy standards plain, fat and ill-clad. Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films to to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence. For, once we are not contemptuous of Camille or jealous or Juliet, we might even understand the regicide or the motherfucker. That is love."
Geramine Greer, The Female Eunuch, p. 150.
