"If one is desperate for love, I suggest looking at one's friends and family and see if love is all around. If not, get a new set of friends, a new family"
About this Quote
Jasmine Guy delivers this like a warm punchline: a self-help platitude with its safety rails removed. The first half offers the familiar consolation that love is already present if you widen your lens beyond romance. Then she swerves. "If not, get a new set of friends, a new family" is deliberately outrageous, the kind of line that makes you laugh and then catch yourself because it’s not entirely a joke.
The intent is pragmatic, not sentimental. Guy isn’t arguing for eternal loyalty to whoever happens to share your bloodline or your history; she’s arguing for emotional standards. The subtext is a quiet indictment of the cultural script that treats family as automatically nourishing and long-term friendships as automatically benign. By phrasing it in consumerist terms ("get a new set"), she borrows the language of replacement and upgrade to describe something people are trained to endure, not revise.
Context matters: as an actress who came up in an era when pop psychology, chosen family, and boundary-setting seeped into mainstream talk, Guy’s line reads like a distilled 90s-and-beyond survival ethic. It also resonates with queer and marginalized communities for whom "family" often means the people who show up, not the people on the genealogy chart.
The rhetorical trick is the escalation: she starts with reassurance and ends with permission. Not permission to discard people casually, but permission to stop calling neglect "love" just because it’s familiar.
The intent is pragmatic, not sentimental. Guy isn’t arguing for eternal loyalty to whoever happens to share your bloodline or your history; she’s arguing for emotional standards. The subtext is a quiet indictment of the cultural script that treats family as automatically nourishing and long-term friendships as automatically benign. By phrasing it in consumerist terms ("get a new set"), she borrows the language of replacement and upgrade to describe something people are trained to endure, not revise.
Context matters: as an actress who came up in an era when pop psychology, chosen family, and boundary-setting seeped into mainstream talk, Guy’s line reads like a distilled 90s-and-beyond survival ethic. It also resonates with queer and marginalized communities for whom "family" often means the people who show up, not the people on the genealogy chart.
The rhetorical trick is the escalation: she starts with reassurance and ends with permission. Not permission to discard people casually, but permission to stop calling neglect "love" just because it’s familiar.
Quote Details
| Topic | Friendship |
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