Love Quote by Mortimer Adler

Adler loads the word "love" with a deliberately unfashionable demand: asymmetry. Not the rom-com version of reciprocity, not the market logic of "I’ll meet your needs if you meet mine", but an act that refuses the accounting ledger altogether. The phrasing is almost legalistic - "owed", "due", "fair exchange" - and that’s the tell. He’s borrowing the vocabulary of contracts to argue that love begins precisely where contract ends. By naming what love is not, he pushes the reader to notice how often we smuggle transaction into intimacy and then call the bargain "commitment."

The intent is polemical in the classical-philosophy sense: to rescue a concept from dilution. Adler is writing in a 20th-century moment when psychology, consumer culture, and self-help rhetoric increasingly described relationships in terms of fulfillment, compatibility, and mutual benefit. His subtext is a warning: once love is justified by utility or pleasure, it becomes interchangeable with any other arrangement that performs well. The relationship may still be satisfying, but it isn’t love in the strict sense he’s defending.

There’s also a moral gambit embedded here. "Giving what is not owed" reframes love as a chosen generosity rather than a response to merit. That can sound stern, even austere, but it’s strategically clarifying: if love depends on fair exchange, then it collapses the minute the balance sheet tilts - illness, aging, failure, boredom. Adler’s definition makes love sturdier by making it less negotiable, and in doing so it quietly indicts a culture that wants every devotion to come with a receipt.