Love Quote by Mason Cooley

Cooley’s line has the cool sting of a proverb that pretends to be sympathetic. “Few” is the tell: he’s not romanticizing friendship as sturdier than love, he’s tallying the casualties. The sentence is built like a social weather report, and the culprit is “moodiness” - not betrayal, not ideology, just the petty atmospheric pressure changes of desire. Love affairs, in Cooley’s framing, don’t merely take time; they rewire temperament. They make people intermittently absent while physically present, newly convinced that their private turbulence deserves public accommodation.

The subtext is less “love is selfish” than “love is attention-hungry.” A friendship runs on continuity, shared reality, the ability to show up as roughly the same person. A love affair, especially in its more obsessive phases, is an experiment in selective gravity: everything else becomes lighter, optional, vaguely unreal. Friends are expected to wait out the withdrawal, to tolerate the new volatility, to accept cancellations delivered with the moral confidence of someone pursuing “something real.”

Cooley wrote aphorisms for a late-20th-century culture that was increasingly comfortable treating romantic fulfillment as a central project and friendship as supporting cast. The line lands because it refuses the sentimental hierarchy that says “true friends understand.” He’s suggesting that understanding has limits, and that romance’s emotional tides can quietly erode even loyal bonds. Not with one dramatic break, but with repeated small storms that make the friendship feel, to both parties, like bad timing.