Daily Inspiration Quote by George Jean Nathan

Love gets mythologized as the hardest thing we do, but Nathan flips the script with a cool editor's cruelty: friendship, not romance, is the real high bar. The line is built like a provocation, almost a dare to the sentimental reader. "Infinitely" is doing the dirty work here. It's not a statistic; it's a sneer at the cultural habit of treating romantic love as the apex of human seriousness. Nathan suggests the opposite: love can run on appetite, projection, habit, even vanity. It can survive on speeches and symbols.

Friendship, by contrast, is an ongoing audit. It asks for steadiness without the intoxicants that excuse bad behavior in love. No sexual chemistry to paper over boredom, no socially sanctioned narrative arc (meet-cute, commitment, anniversary) to provide momentum. Friendship requires attention without the glamour, honesty without the rituals, and loyalty without ownership. It's chosen and re-chosen, often without any public reward.

The subtext is editorial in the best sense: a complaint about cheap feelings and expensive virtues. As a critic and tastemaker in an era that sold romance as cultural currency, Nathan is pricking the balloon of romantic exceptionalism. He's also hinting at a darker truth about love's permissiveness: we forgive lovers what we'd never tolerate from friends. If friendship is the relationship that demands character, love is the one that most readily makes excuses for its absence.