But to abstain from friendship doesn’t mean that you are to live without human contact. Quite the contrary, human relationships of the kind may also sometimes take on a deeper surge, except that, although you share the speed of the movement for a time, you always have enough speed in hand to be able to run away from it. One no doubt thinks that such behaviour leaves unpleasant memories, that the unpleasantness consists in the fact that, after having meant something to you, the relation dwindles away into nothing. But this is a misunderstanding. Unpleasantness is a piquant ingredient in the contrariety of life. Besides, the same relationship can acquire significance again in another way. What one must watch out for is never to stick fast, and for that one must have one’s forgetting up one’s sleeve.

…

One must always be careful not to enter into any life-relation in which one can become several. For this reason friendship is already dangerous, even more so marriage. A married couple are indeed said to become one, but this is a very dark and mysterious saying. When you are several you have lost your freedom and cannot order travelling boots when you will, cannot roam aimlessly about. If you have a wife it is difficult; if you have a wife and may have children, it is troublesome; if you have a wife and do have children, it is impossible.

Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard