A friend of mine posed the thought that one cannot understand something without experiencing its opposite. We cannot know good without bad, happy without sad, sweet without bitter, warm without cold, etc. I immediately shot down the idea.
We can understand what sweet things are without knowing what bitterness is. Sweet things taste awesome and make us happy. We know what happiness is. It is a feeling of ecstatic joy. I said that the idea was ancient bunk.
About a week later, after having mulled it over in my head, I returned to the subject, with a fuller understanding and better words:
Things that are rare are special. It is inherent to the human psyche (I think). When you live in high altitudes, mountains are not special. That's just how the background looks. But when you see a beach and the ocean, it blows your mind. The same thing is true when the person living on the coast sees the mountains in real life.
If a person grows up in a life of privilege, eating the finest food and wearing the finest clothes, they certainly enjoy them because they are nice. But they cannot appreciate how much better they are than scraps and rags because they have never had to wear low quality clothes or eat poor people food.
So, a person whose first relationship is with a kind soul will still be able to appreciate the good relationship, but somebody who has had several horrible relationships before finding a nice person will appreciate it significantly more.
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