Love Quote by Iris Murdoch

Murdoch’s line doesn’t treat love as a mystical force that arrives and departs on fate’s schedule; it treats it as a discipline of attention. “Falling out of love” isn’t framed as a dramatic rupture but as a slow administrative error: you misplace the file marked “their charm,” and the relationship quietly reorganizes itself around absence. The word “chiefly” is doing sly work here, admitting other causes while insisting the most common is banal and human - neglect, habituation, distraction.

“Charming” is also a carefully chosen provocation. It’s lighter than “goodness,” more social than “virtue,” less grand than “soulmate.” Murdoch, a moral philosopher as much as a novelist, understood how easily we confuse love with a story we tell about someone. Charm is where that story begins: the small graces, the private comedy, the particular way they move through the world. When you stop noticing those details, you don’t just stop enjoying them; you stop perceiving them. The subtext is unsettlingly practical: love dies when perception dulls.

Context matters because Murdoch’s fiction obsessively tests the gap between romantic fantasy and moral reality. She’s suspicious of self-centered love - the kind that uses another person as a screen for your desires. Forgetting someone’s charm can mean the relationship has become real enough to include resentment and routine. Or it can mean you’ve drifted back into narcissism, no longer making the imaginative effort to see them clearly. Either way, the quote lands like a warning: the end of love often looks less like betrayal than like inattention.