Yesterday that pithy Woody Allen line from Cafe Society — “Life is a comedy written by a sadistic comedy writer” — was ricocheting all over the blogosphere and twitterverse. It hit particularly close to home with me because it alluded to what I believe is the central sickening irony in romantic relationships, which is that the only way to last with someone is to not be 100%, head-over-heels, cunnilingus-two-or-three-times-per-day in love with them.

If you’re happily, contentedly, earnestly in love as far as it goes — if you’re settled, semi-complacent and comfortable with an attractive lady of good character but not down on your knees in love with her, things might work out.

But if the wonder and rapture of going to bed with this or that object of erotic deliverance is a prevailing current in your relationship, sooner or later she’s going to start assessing your feelings as neurotic and identifying them as a weakness, and she’ll soon after develop a distaste for it and gradually cut you loose. So the likelihood of getting dropped or jettisoned is unfortunately quite high.

You can’t be crazy in love — you have to be confidently, peacefully, sincerely, half-solemnly and moderately in love. Then and only then can things work out…maybe.

Posted on 10.28.13 after a breakup: “One of life’s darker ironies is that the relationships that I know could last forever are always the ones that I can walk away from without too much concern because I’m less smitten than she is.

“The ones that eclipse sooner or later are ones in which the tables are reversed and I know I’m lucky as hell — one of those ‘God smiled and the heavens parted’ deals in which she’s holding the strong cards and knows it. Romantic agony is inevitable.

“It’s my fault, of course, for being drawn to women with broken wings or buried this-or-that or narcissistic tendencies or whatever. I drop into the same rabbit hole time and again, and c’est la vie.

“But for all the woundings and drainings that occur sooner or later, I’ll probably be hooked for life. It’s still my solemn if unfortunate conviction that curiously motivated or extra-planetary zone-out girlfriends (known in the Woody Allen universe as “kamikaze women”) are worth it. Prime example: Charlotte Rampling‘s manic-depressive loon in Stardust Memories.