He had been a boy once, I knew, who had made himself indispensable, who had learned early that being useful was the surest way to earn a place, and he had carried that lesson up out of childhood and into his marriage and his fatherhood without ever setting it down.

Somewhere deep down he had come to believe that this usefulness was the price of his place in our hearts, that the love flowed to him in exchange for the strength he gave out, and that when the strength failed the love would dry up with it.

It is a lonely and a frightening way to understand love, and it is also, I have come to believe, completely upside down.

We do not love the people who take care of us because they are useful to us.