The other individual must give us not only gifts we may accept, but the possibility of our giving him hopes, idealizations, hidden beauties, attractions of which not even he is conscious. But the place where we deposit all this, which we produce, but produce for him, is the indistinct horizon of his personality, the interstitial realm, in which faith replaces knowledge. But it must be strongly emphasized that this is, by no means, only a matter of illusions and optimistic or amorous self-deceptions, but that portions even of the persons closest to us must be offered us in the form of indistinctness and unclarity, in order for their attractiveness to keep on the same high level.

Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simm…, loc. 7994