At bottom, no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone.
All companionship can consist only in the strengthening of two neighboring solitudes, whereas everything that one is wont to call giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to come closer to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling.
There is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another.
--- Rainer Maria Rilke, Of Love and Other Difficulties.