..让我感动的是，我发现了我认为可能存在的东西。那东西 - 我发现的东西 - 非常简单。大多数人都知道这一切，并且从未真正怀疑过，因为他们的生活使他们瞥见了他们不确定的事情，当然是爱：对另一个人的爱的纯粹事实，找到一个使世界有意义的人 - 唯一的一个人 - 似乎是唯一的人。这就像发现您一生都在寻找并从未找到的地图一样 - 有意义的旅程的地图。
(..what moved me was that I had found something I didn't think could exist. And that thing - the thing that I found - was very simple. Most people know all about it and have never really doubted it because their lives have been such as to give them a glimpse of the thing that they were not sure about, which is love, of course: the sheer fact of feeling of love for another, of finding the one person - the only person, it seems - who makes the world make sense. It's like discovering the map that you've been looking for all your life and have never been able to find - the map that makes sense of the journey.)
在“永远的女孩”中，亚历山大·麦考尔·史密斯（Alexander McCall Smith）反映了爱的深刻影响，将其描述为一个基本的事实，许多人由于他们不确定的经历可能会忽略这一点。他建议，爱，对另一个人的深刻感觉，是一种强大的力量，可以在生活中清晰和目标。对于某些人来说，这种爱的发现感觉就像揭示了一张长期的地图，以照亮他们一直在旅行的道路。
这种爱情不仅是一个抽象的概念。这是一个有形的现实，可以改变人们对生活的理解。麦考尔·史密斯（McCall Smith）强调，尽管许多人可能遇到了爱情，但他们经常将其意义视为理所当然。认识这种爱的旅程可能是个人的，但最终导致对归属和联系的共同理解，使世界更加可理解。