Love Quote by Mortimer Adler

Adler is trying to rescue marriage from the hormonal roulette wheel. In a culture that sells romance as a peak-and-crash narrative - passion flares, boredom settles, curtain - he insists on a less cinematic but sturdier plot: conjugal love as a form of friendship that can outlive the body’s loudest impulses. The phrasing is bluntly biological ("weakened, withered, and disappeared"), as if he’s sweeping desire off the table with three firm strokes, clearing space for what he thinks deserves the name love.

The subtext is mildly polemical. Adler isn’t denying sex; he’s demoting it from foundation to feature. By calling spousal love "friendship", he smuggles marriage into the moral category of chosen loyalty rather than involuntary appetite. Friendship implies sustained attention, shared projects, and the ability to see a person whole even when they’re no longer novel. It also suggests equality: not conquest, not possession, but companionship that survives changes in health, attractiveness, and opportunity.

Context matters: Adler’s 20th-century, classical-leaning philosophy treats human flourishing as something cultivated over time, not consumed in moments. Read against the century’s rising emphasis on self-fulfillment and erotic authenticity, the line becomes a quiet rebuttal: a marriage isn’t only validated by desire’s intensity but by what remains when intensity stops doing the work. It’s a conservative claim in the literal sense - conserving a relationship through time - and a radical one if you measure intimacy by longevity rather than heat.