“No one can be independent of other people completely”

“No one can be independent of other people completely” is the thought through which Marianne reframes dependence at a public New Year’s Eve reunion with Connell. It gives language to a change in her understanding of love: rather than treating reliance on another person as a surrender to be feared, she considers accepting mutual dependence as an ordinary condition of human life.

The New Year’s Eve scene

At midnight in the crowded Kelleher’s, Connell takes Marianne into his arms and kisses her while their former schoolmates watch. The kiss makes their relationship public in a way that feels charged by its history: Marianne wonders whether the others are surprised, morbidly curious, or simply observing the chemistry between two people who have repeatedly returned to one another. She recognizes that she too might have looked. The attention of the room gives the intimate moment a social dimension, but Connell’s declaration of love is directed to her.

Connell’s public gesture matters partly because it is unlike his usual behavior. Marianne reads it as deliberate: he is acting this way to please her. She feels herself to be in his power, yet also feels redeemed by his choice. The scene holds those sensations together rather than resolving them into a simple opposition between control and freedom. Against that emotional pressure, the thought about dependence emerges as a possible way to understand what she is experiencing.

Meaning and formulation

The sentence begins from a general claim about people, but its force is personal. Marianne considers giving up the attempt to be wholly independent and instead allowing herself to depend on others while also allowing them to depend on her. Dependence is thus reciprocal in the thought’s formulation: it is not only something one person imposes on another, but a relation in which both can be needed and relied upon.

That reciprocity complicates the scene’s language of power. Marianne imagines herself as completely under Connell’s control, but immediately places that feeling beside the ordinary fact that no one can be entirely self-sufficient. The sentence does not erase the difference between chosen intimacy and coercion; rather, it marks Marianne’s movement toward understanding reliance as something she can consent to. Her conclusion is grounded in the particular relationship before her, not in an abstract declaration that all forms of dependence are good.

Relationship to Connell and the ending

The thought follows Connell’s kiss and his words of love, and it accompanies a new certainty in Marianne: she no longer wonders whether he loves her. The sequence links his public affirmation to her changed willingness to depend on other people. His action does not merely reassure her in private; by choosing to acknowledge her openly among people who know their shared past, he gives her a basis for accepting the relationship without treating it as a shameful or precarious secret.

The sentence’s importance is therefore both intimate and structural. Across their relationship, closeness has existed alongside distance, uncertainty, and the difficulty of saying what each person needs. At this moment, Marianne does not frame love as proof of independence from others. She considers running in the opposite direction: accepting dependence and its mutual obligations. The thought closes on a changed assurance rather than a guarantee about the future: she knows Connell loves her, and no longer has to keep asking herself whether that is true.