"Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few"
About this Quote
The line catches a paradox at the heart of human attachment: almost everyone encounters love, yet only a small number find it a source of sustained joy. To experience love is easy; chemistry, novelty, need, and narrative all conspire to ignite it. Enjoyment is harder. It asks for a steadiness that can coexist with intensity, for an acceptance of vulnerability without the suffocating clutch of possession, for reciprocity without accounting, and for a readiness to let love be real instead of an idealized performance.
George Jean Nathan, the acerbic early twentieth-century American drama critic and collaborator of H. L. Mencken, had a sharp eye for the gap between romantic rhetoric and lived behavior. Watching both stages and salons, he saw how people dramatize love, mistaking spectacle for substance. His skepticism toward marriage and social convention colors the aphorism: the institution often turns love into duty, status, or negotiation, and what might have been a pleasure becomes a project to manage. Such arrangements still permit the experience of love, but they crowd out the ease that would let it be enjoyed.
Cultural scripts also get in the way. Lovers are trained to chase certainties no relationship can guarantee, to idealize partners into roles they cannot play, or to equate intensity with health. Anxiety about loss, fear of dependence, and the quiet resentments that accumulate from unspoken expectations all erode delight. Enjoyment requires a different posture: curiosity rather than control, presence rather than prediction, the humility to accept the beloved as other, and the strength to remain oneself.
Nathan’s line is less a sneer than a challenge. Love is abundant, but its pleasures are skills as much as gifts. When desire, trust, and freedom align, love becomes not only something that happens to us but something we can savor. That alignment is rare; it need not be rarer than it has to be.
George Jean Nathan, the acerbic early twentieth-century American drama critic and collaborator of H. L. Mencken, had a sharp eye for the gap between romantic rhetoric and lived behavior. Watching both stages and salons, he saw how people dramatize love, mistaking spectacle for substance. His skepticism toward marriage and social convention colors the aphorism: the institution often turns love into duty, status, or negotiation, and what might have been a pleasure becomes a project to manage. Such arrangements still permit the experience of love, but they crowd out the ease that would let it be enjoyed.
Cultural scripts also get in the way. Lovers are trained to chase certainties no relationship can guarantee, to idealize partners into roles they cannot play, or to equate intensity with health. Anxiety about loss, fear of dependence, and the quiet resentments that accumulate from unspoken expectations all erode delight. Enjoyment requires a different posture: curiosity rather than control, presence rather than prediction, the humility to accept the beloved as other, and the strength to remain oneself.
Nathan’s line is less a sneer than a challenge. Love is abundant, but its pleasures are skills as much as gifts. When desire, trust, and freedom align, love becomes not only something that happens to us but something we can savor. That alignment is rare; it need not be rarer than it has to be.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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