‘So, I’ll wait. When you‘ll wish it, just tell. I shall not assume that you love me anew, not even that you have to sleep with me, and we have not to stay together such a long time, just as you feel, and when you feel. But know that I’ll always long for your asking me.’

I’ll wait [Simone de Beauvoir]

[Returning to Paris from Chicago in 1950, Simone de Beauvoir writes a longing letter to her lover, author Nelson Algren. Their affair, fuelled by passion and sex – with him she says she experienced her first true orgasm – would ultimately prove no match for de Beauvoir’s solid, enduring love for Jean-Paul Sartre. Despite the attraction she felt for Algren, she would never leave Sartre for him.]