When we turn to the lovers themselves, we enter a different universe. Self-conscious civilizedness, nippy verbal precisions, continual deference or self-assertion based on hierarchies of control—the whole Veronese social code—must yield to the love code, according to which society exists only as a form of spatial extension into which the beloved can be removed and thus lost. The first account we have of the new rules by which lovers live can be found in Benvolio's account of how Romeo has shunned all his friends in favor of solitary walks before dawn among the sycamores, and in Montague's response:

The lover locks himself inside himself, constitutes his private world, completely exclusive of nature and society alike: he even generates his own private weather, by exhaling clouds of sighs and weeping rivers of tears. Self-involved and melancholy, the lover is a pitiable thing indeed. This is the first tenet of the love code: that the lover dwells on his own planet, a state of emotional self-preoccupation remote from most of human life. Desire, always increasing since its outlets are blocked, carves out and occupies an enormous space inside the desirer, a whole cosmos of insufficiency, absence.

A second tenet becomes clear soon afterward, as Romeo confesses that his beloved ignores him: