"Love is a choice you make from moment to moment"
About this Quote
“Love is a choice you make from moment to moment” is less a valentine than a rebuke to the pop-culture script that love is something that happens to you. Barbara De Angelis, coming out of the self-help and relationship-advice tradition, is aiming straight at the romantic fatalism that treats chemistry as destiny and conflict as evidence the “spark” died. The line works because it swaps the language of enchantment for the language of agency. Choice is unsexy on purpose: it drags love out of the dreamy realm of feelings and into the gritty realm of behavior.
The subtext is quietly disciplinary. If love is a moment-by-moment choice, you don’t get to outsource your relationship to your mood, your childhood, or your partner’s imperfections. You’re being asked to show up when it’s boring, when you’re irritated, when your phone is more interesting than the person across the table. At the same time, it smuggles in a kind of hope: if love is chosen, it can be renewed. You’re not waiting to “fall back in”; you’re practicing.
Context matters here because this is a therapeutic-era formulation, shaped by a late-20th-century emphasis on personal responsibility and emotional skill-building. It’s empowering, but it also risks flattening structural realities: staying is not always virtuous, and not everyone has equal safety or freedom to “choose” love. Still, the sentence lands because it tells the truth about long-term intimacy: the feeling is real, but the maintenance is deliberate.
The subtext is quietly disciplinary. If love is a moment-by-moment choice, you don’t get to outsource your relationship to your mood, your childhood, or your partner’s imperfections. You’re being asked to show up when it’s boring, when you’re irritated, when your phone is more interesting than the person across the table. At the same time, it smuggles in a kind of hope: if love is chosen, it can be renewed. You’re not waiting to “fall back in”; you’re practicing.
Context matters here because this is a therapeutic-era formulation, shaped by a late-20th-century emphasis on personal responsibility and emotional skill-building. It’s empowering, but it also risks flattening structural realities: staying is not always virtuous, and not everyone has equal safety or freedom to “choose” love. Still, the sentence lands because it tells the truth about long-term intimacy: the feeling is real, but the maintenance is deliberate.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
|---|
More Quotes by Barbara
Add to List
