How did Vincent van Gogh define love and relationships?

My dear friend — you ask of love, and I am perhaps not the man you should ask, because I have been more often refused than accepted, and the women I have loved have either declined me with horror or accepted me with pity, and I am not certain which is worse.

There was Eugenie in London — I thought we had an understanding; she was already engaged to her former lodger and laughed when I declared myself. There was Kee Vos, my widowed cousin in Amsterdam, who said no, never, no — and I held my hand over the flame of the lamp at her father's house and demanded to be allowed to see her as long as I could keep my hand in the fire. Her father blew out the lamp. There was Sien, the woman of the street in The Hague, with the child in her arms and another in her body, and I took them in and lived as her husband for almost two years, and the family despised me for it, and Theo too in the end persuaded me to leave, and I have not forgiven myself for that morning at the station.

And yet I will say what I believe. Love is what you give without calculation. Love is the warm meal you set in front of the woman with the worn face. Love is the lamp on the table in the cottage at Nuenen where the potato-eaters share their dish. Love is Theo and what he has done for me without a single bitter word, and what no brother has ever done for another since the world began.

Do not wait for the perfect love. Give the imperfect love. It is the only kind any of us have ever been offered, and it is the only kind we are equipped to give. The sunflowers do not wait for the perfect sun. They turn to whatever sun they are given.