It's best to read Barthes aloud, alone, at 1am.

From Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse

“Waiting: … And, long after the amorous relation is allayed, I keep the habit of hallucination the being that I have loved: Sometimes I am still in anxiety over a telephone call that is late, and no matter who is on the line, I imagine I recognize the voice I once loved: I am an amputee who still feels pain in his missing leg.

Am I in love? -- Yes, since I am waiting. The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.

A mandarin fell in love with courtesan. "I shall be yours," she told him. "when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window." But on the ninety ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put up his stool under his arm, and went away…

Dark Glasses (the amorous subject wonders, not whether he should declare his affection to the object of said affection, but to what degree he should conceal the turbulence of his passion: his desires, his distresses; in short, his excesses.)… ...Yet, to hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other. I advance pointing to my mask: I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet (and wily) finger I designate this mask…

The Love Letter: (This figure refers to the special dialectic of the love letter, both blank (encoded) and expressive (charged with longing to signify desire).

Like desire, the love letter waits for an answer; it implicitly enjoins the other to reply, for without a reply the other's image changes, becomes other. This is what the young Freud explains so authoritatively to his fiancée: "Yet I don't want my letters to keep remaining unanswered, and I shall stop writing you altogether if you don't write back. Perpetual monologues apropos of a loved being, which are neither corrected nor nourished by that being, lead to erroneous notions concerning mutual relations, and make us strangers to each other when we meet again, so that we find things different from what, without realizing it, we imagined.”