Love Quote by Morton Hunt

Hunt’s line slices through the usual moral panic about divorce and swaps in a more uncomfortable reading: Americans don’t end marriages because they’ve stopped believing in love, but because they believe in it too much to settle. It’s a diagnosis of a national romance script that treats marriage less like a social contract and more like a permanent emotional high. When that high fades, the story insists something has gone wrong - not just with the relationship, but with the self.

The craft here is in the reversal. Divorce statistics are typically deployed as evidence of cultural decay, selfishness, or laziness. Hunt flips the data into a kind of backhanded compliment: the same culture that markets love as destiny also produces people unwilling to endure lovelessness as a virtue. The subtext is pointed: modern American identity is built on choice, reinvention, and consumer-style upgrading. Marriage, once framed as duty and endurance, gets pulled into that marketplace of expectations, where “good enough” starts to look like failure.

Context matters. Hunt is writing out of a postwar-to-late-20th-century America where love-marriage becomes the norm, women’s economic options expand, no-fault divorce spreads, and therapy culture gives people a vocabulary for unmet needs. Under those conditions, leaving isn’t only escape; it’s self-authorization. His intent isn’t to romanticize divorce so much as to expose the cultural bargain: when love is the main justification for marriage, the disappearance of love becomes the main justification for ending it.