Love & Passion Quote by William Glasser

A clinical sentence dressed up as dating advice, Glasser’s line is really a diagnostic tool: remove sex, the most efficient glue in early relationships, and see what’s left holding the structure together. The intent is preventative. He’s warning against marriages built on chemistry, convenience, or social momentum, the kinds that feel inevitable right up until the day they feel like a trap.

The subtext is classic therapist realism: desire is volatile, bodies change, libido shifts, stress spikes, illness arrives, kids happen. If sex is the primary bridge between two people, time will eventually wash it out. Friendship, by contrast, is a daily practice: curiosity, respect, shared humor, tolerable conflict, the ability to be bored together without resenting it. Glasser smuggles a whole theory of long-term attachment into one hard test: would you still choose this person if the most flattering, least verbal part of the relationship disappeared?

Contextually, it fits Glasser’s broader emphasis on choice, responsibility, and relationships as the engine of mental health. It’s also a quiet rebuke to cultural scripts that treat marriage as a finish line for romance. He’s reframing it as a partnership with long stretches of ordinary time, where companionship does the real work. The line works because it’s both disarming and unforgiving: it forces you to evaluate character and compatibility without the narcotic of attraction, while still acknowledging that sex matters, just not enough to carry a life.